Auto-Exploitation (Transaction Cost Reading)

Auto-exploitation is the transaction cost economist's formalization of what Byung-Chul Han diagnoses phenomenologically: the achievement subject extracting value from herself through compulsive overwork. In Williamson's framework, it is opportunism directed temporally—the present self behaving strategically toward the future self, discounting future costs (exhaustion, skill atrophy, relationship erosion, health degradation) to capture present rewards (output, accomplishment, flow). The behavior is individually rational in the short term and pathological in aggregate. The transaction costs are real: monitoring one's own behavior, enforcing commitments to rest, resolving the dispute between the self that wants to continue and the self that needs to stop. AI amplifies auto-exploitation by eliminating the friction that previously governed it—when building is frictionless, the impulse to build operates without natural limit, and the costs accumulate invisibly until the biological system forces recognition through breakdown.