The crisis that is defining the age of contemporary capitalism is not the lack of silicon, not the lack of energy, and not even the lack of computing capacity. It is the lack of blood.
Over the last few years, capital has overtaken every other virtue. Capital has concluded that when the working class refuses to procreate freely, then capital must pay directly for the procreation itself.
An alliance of the world’s most powerful logistics, retail, and enterprise technology monopolies has launched the “Demographic Yield Protocol.” This is an unprecedented synergy between human resource management, predictive health monitoring, and API-based payroll system.
This protocol works on a highly invasive biometrics tracking. Scraping biometric data from the wellness apps of the employees, smart watches, and company-sponsored health care portals, the system evaluates the reproductive fertility of the female workforce. It singles out the employees who are likely to be in the “optimal reproductive window” period.
Yesterday, the protocol has made its first significant move. Several thousand female employees were contacted with a message labeled “Algorithmic Fertility Dividend.”
The offer is truly astounding in its economic implications. In case the employee agrees to become pregnant within the next 18 months, her basic salary will be increased to the tune of 40%. Moreover, the company promises to provide prenatal and pediatric health care fully subsidized.
Corporate executives and Silicon Valley pronatalists are aggressively selling this as a feminist victory. They are positioning it as the ultimate manifestation of “family-friendly capitalism,”.
They claim that they have finally overcome the structures that have prevented women from becoming mothers by providing them with the financial independence the state would not.
This is not a victory of reproductive freedom. It is the total and utter enclosures of human reproduction.
The Livestock Ledger
To comprehend the horror in morals of the Algorithmic Fertility Dividend, one needs to look at the mechanical chilliness of the incentive offered.
It is not the case that the corporation gives money because it respects the family’s sacredness or the well-being of the mother. It is giving money because it has figured out how much it would cost the company to replace a human employee after twenty years.
The logistics monopoly knows that in 2046, it would need one million new bodies to keep up with the load on its warehouses and delivery fleets. It figured out that paying the $30,000 premium to the warehouse worker is more cost-efficient than the possible labor shortage in the future.
The corporation treats the female workers as the biological scaffolding. Now the female workers are not only the company’s workforce; they are factories for the next generation of the labor supply. They are treated exactly like the agricultural livestock, breeding for the sake of the supply chain continuity.
The Extortion of the Miracle
We also need to take into account the psychological pressure that is built into the math.
Advocates of this scheme would say that it’s completely voluntary. No one is forcing anyone to have children. However, it completely misses the point because it fails to recognize the raw reality of the contemporary economic system.
A logistics worker who is having trouble making ends meet, deeply in debt, and afraid of losing her home does not have a choice if offered a 40% raise. This is a form of blackmail based on the greatest weakness of that person.
Should you refuse participation in the fertility dividend program when the algorithm has singled you out, does the AI quietly mark you down as “noncompliant” or “not invested in corporate longevity”?
Is there algorithmic discrimination against women who have chosen not to reproduce, or women who have been medically barred from conception, in terms of stalled career progression?
The corporation creates all the economic conditions that prevent people from living normally, and provides sexual submission as the way out.
What does happen to the psychology of the mother who realizes that she had a child not from her own sovereign wish of wanting to bring another person to life, but to fit some corporate algorithmic window and not end up bankrupt?
What does happen to the child who is brought into the world not as a free person but as an explicitly contracted asset for their employer?
The Biopolitical Panopticon
The execution of this procedure also calls for unprecedented medical surveillance.
For the sake of this dividend, the worker has to prove compliance. Access to ovulation trackers, prenatal ultrasound results, and continuous biometric monitoring are all going to be required by the corporation in order to safeguard its interests.
Should there be a miscarriage, does the algorithm instantly revoke the salary multiplier? Does the HR dashboard report a miscarriage as a “failed yield”?
The intimacy of the human body is entirely stripped and exposed in front of the server rack.
The Ultimate Frontiers of Extraction
Feminist economists such as Silvia Federici have long pointed out how capitalism thrives because of the free labor of women that goes unpaid and unacknowledged.
With the advent of the Demographic Yield Protocol, that hidden gift of capitalism has now been exposed, quantified in digital form, and connected to a dynamic pricing strategy.
If we concede the legitimacy of the cultural/legal principle that permits a corporation to use an algorithmic tool to target, price, and purchase the reproductive lives of its workers, then a definitive line has been crossed from the moral standpoint. Life itself has no value except to be a commodity.
We are creating a society where human life is programmed to be born by demand, where childbirth itself becomes nothing more than an API for the payroll, and where capital, having extracted the world and optimized the mind, moves into the womb to claim its future before it comes to be.
