WORK
L'Immatériel
Gorz's final major work (2003), addressing the knowledge economy, cognitive capitalism, and the enclosure of collective intelligence by corporate platforms — remarkably prescient of the AI platform era.
Published four years before Gorz's death, L'Immatériel: Connaissance, valeur et capital is the most direct engagement of Gorz's career with the technologies and economic structures that would become central to the AI age. The book extends his earlier analysis of autonomous versus heteronomous labor into the domain of knowledge work, arguing that cognitive capitalism systematically converts abundant resources into artificial scarcity through the enclosure of knowledge. The distinction between intelligence — embodied, relational, affective — and knowledge — formal, codifiable, transferable — anticipates the capabilities and limitations of large language models with a precision that reads, twenty years later, as uncanny prophecy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central thesis is that a society built around knowledge rather than intelligence would be an impoverished society, because it would systematically undervalue the capacities that make human life meaningful in favor of the capacities that make human labor productive. Intelligence incorporates the full range of human cognitive and emotional capacities that develop through lived experience and