If the “new spirit of capitalism” analyzed by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello had to be embodied in any one location, an obvious candidate would be the bright, modern buildings reserved for creatives at Silicon Valley’s tech giants. Google’s HQ sells us the dream with its yoga sessions, free restaurants, and twenty-four-hour gyms. It showcases the innocent and open world that the company aims to bring to fruition.

This type of workspace is a masterly illustration of the reorganization of subjectivities initiated by the “neoliberal epithumogenesis” identified by Frédéric Lordon:

The desire to find employment should no longer be merely a mediated desire for the goods that wages circuitously permit buying, but an intrinsic desire for the activity for its own sake . . . desires for happy labor, or, to borrow directly from its own vocabulary, desires for “fulfilment” and “self-realization” in and through work.