#6 Utopia of Play: rethinking debt

(Post 6 in the series: Utopias of Play)

In the last post we covered the ways in which structural violence moves across the fault lines of our existing hierarchies, affecting people in varying degrees and different ways.

i want to go into the mechanism that allows this to happen, the actual architecture that keeps us all locked in this cage.

Debt.

The mortgage that demands stable employment. The student loans that force us into corporate jobs. The credit cards that let us perform middle-class stability whilst drowning.

If the factory colonised your time, and the plantation colonised your body, then debt colonises your future. It's the tool that ensures you keep showing up to a bullshit job you know is meaningless. You keep grinding in these corporate games that you know are rigged and are performing rituals you are totally aware serve no purpose because the bills are due next month. And then the month after that. And the month after that. Forever.

Stolen futures

Something unique to being young now versus being young in previous generations is you start adult life already owned.

The medieval apprentice we talked about in episode three, where they worked for years but they were saving wages building towards independence. The endpoint was clear: master your craft, establish your household, take on your own apprentices and achieve autonomy. Economic independence marked adulthood.

The Japanese iemoto students spending years following a master's craft, the progression with purpose and its temporal logic made sense. You endured subordination because it was genuinely temporary. There was a finish line.

Today you finish university and your apprenticeship and you are £50,000 pounds in debt. You don't save wages you just accumulated deficit. Before you even started you're in the red.

The trajectory now is one of perpetual deficit. The modern worker is initiated into "adult" life not by achieving independence, but by accepting profound, immediate dependency. This system guarantees permanent adolescence because it denies the single condition necessary for maturity: autonomy. An adult is one who has the freedom to say no, to choose their commitments, and to bear the consequences of their actions. A person tethered to a three-decade debt cycle has no freedom; their future is mortgaged, and their occupational path - no matter how meaningless - is compulsory.

To make matters perverse, you also cannot afford to live alone. The numbers don't work on a single income; rent, mortgages, bills, the cost of simply existing all requires at least two incomes now. And so you are forced to seek out a nuclear partnership - as if the system grudgingly admits you need other people but only in the most constrained way possible. Not an actual community. Not a network of mutual support where resources and care are shared amongst many. Just two people, locked into a partnership both grinding to serve the same debt.

Ironic how the system acknowledges that you cannot survive alone but stops short of allowing you the legal or actual means to build a community of support. Instead, it enforces a specific configuration - the couple, the partnership, the household of two, the DINKS - because that arrangement keeps you isolated while appearing to be self sufficient. You're dependent, but only on one other person who is equally trapped. You can't build the wider networks of mutual aid that might actually support you because you're too busy trying to keep your household afloat.

The medieval extended family, the village commons, the gift networks that distributed risk and resources across many people, all of that has been systematically dismantled. What remains is the nuclear unit, just large enough to survive, just small enough to remain precarious. You need each other to make rent, but you're still one illness, one job loss, one unexpected expense away from catastrophe. Those in power have created a system that gives you just enough rope to hang yourselves together.

The phenomenon is telling - your compliance is bought through debt. But it also requires your isolation, because isolated people don't organise. The enforced pairing masquerades as intimacy whilst functioning as a pressure valve. This is not to diminish two person relationships generally, but to illustrate the economic necessity built into them, rather than the free choice that comes from, actually having autonomy. You have someone to share the burden with, so you don't look to build something larger. You're too busy coordinating two work schedules, two sets of student loans, two careers that both have to keep running or the whole thing collapses. Which is a specific arrangement that ties into a system of value, and brings me to my next point.

Debt as moral

In his book Debt: the first 5,000 years, David Graeber discusses how debt functions fundamentally differently from other economic relationships. It's not just "you owe money." It's a moral claim. The language around debt is drenched in morality: you have an "obligation," you must "honour" your debts, failing to pay makes you "irresponsible". This moral language allows shame to become attached to debt. It becomes a personal failing which prevents you from seeking community solutions.

This moral dimension is also what makes debt so effective as a tool of social control. If you owed someone a favour, the relationship remains social. You might repay it, you might not, the terms are fuzzy, the timeline is open. But debt is precise. £50,000 at 5.4% interest over 30 years equals exactly £97,183.18. The relationship is mathematical, not social. And it's enforceable by violence. They can take your wages, your house, your future.

There's a reason the moral language of debt sounds so familiar - almost sacred. Remember the Protestant ethic? Once again Christianity has left us a legacy entirely structured around theology of debt. You owe an unpayable debt to God for the sacrifice of his only son. You are born into this debt, inherited through the original sin in the garden of Eden. You can never fully repay it, you can only demonstrate your worthiness through a lifetime of devotion and good works. The debt is infinite, the obligation eternal.

This is why Max Weber insisted that the particular form of capitalism we live under would not exist without Protestant Christianity. The two are so fundamentally intertwined in their logic and illogic.

The moral weight of debt, Graeber discusses is not just economic, it's centuries of theological conditioning that links a person's worth to their ability to honour their obligations. Your lack of free choice become obscured in what seem to be personal choices and your subjugation can therefore be written off as your own fault. You chose to go to university. You chose to sign those papers. To agree to those terms. To sign that contract. The fact that to choose any alternative would result in a lifetime of precarity is by the by. The entire structure of opportunity was designed to funnel you into this arrangement while placing the blame entirely on the individual and their personal failures. Your debt becomes proof of your moral inadequacy, just as your poverty would have been in Protestant theology.

However, this form of debt, is actually a historical aberration. For most of human history, debt was understood as a social relationship embedded in community life. It could be renegotiated, forgiven, or contextualised within broader social obligations. The shift to treating debt as an absolute mathematical claim, enforceable by impersonal institutions and backed by state violence, is historically recent. It's also historically weird. And its moral foundation rests on a particular theological inheritance that we've secularised but never actually questioned.

Ancient wisdom and economic resets

Ancient societies cared quite a lot about citizenship. What it means to be a citizen, to show up as a citizen, to participate in the political life, in the rules and engagements that made communities flourish. The problem is that eternal indebtedness runs contrary to this need to be a good citizen.

So they didn't enforce lifetime debt.

One way of doing this was through Jubilees. Every 49 years, seven cycles of seven years, debts were cancelled. Hebrew slaves were freed, and land reverted to its original family ownership. The religious underpinning was crucial: "The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers" (Leviticus 25:23). That is from the Bible and an interesting reference on land considering the current atrocities taking place in that region today.
This principle asserted that property and debt were temporal and subordinate to a higher, sacred order. The ultimate purpose was to ensure that no family fell permanently out of the means of production, thereby preserving the social and political structure of the free tribes. Debt, in this context, was never meant to be a permanent status.

Why? Because a population crushed by debt can't participate in political life. They're too busy surviving to be citizens.

Sumerian kings proclaimed periodic "clean slates" called mīšarum acts, literally "to make justice" or "to restore order." These proclamations were often announced when a new king ascended. Akkadian rulers did the same with andurārum edicts. These weren't random acts of kindness. They were necessary to prevent total social collapse. When too many people fall into debt bondage, the whole system breaks. The economy seizes up because debtors can't buy anything, creditors can't collect, and the productive base erodes. Michael Hudson's work on Bronze Age economics demonstrates that these debt cancellations were pragmatic state policy, not utopian fantasy. They understood something our current cohort of men in power seem to have forgotten: an economy is only functional if people can participate in it.

This very scenario almost happened in ancient Athens. By the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE, many Athenian farmers had fallen into debt bondage, becoming hektemoroi - sixth-parters - forced to surrender one-sixth of their produce or face literal enslavement for the debt. This situation threatened to annihilate the peasantry, the demographic bedrock of the state. Until Solon's reforms in 594 BCE cancelled all debts and freed all the slaves. As the historian Moses Finley argued, this was not a generous economic stimulus. It was a radical political intervention necessary to prevent civil war and secure the foundation of the democratic demos.

These societies shared a common understanding: the economic sphere was embedded within the social and political sphere. They prioritised the stability of the citizen body over the absolute rights of the creditor, recognising that economics must serve society, not dominate it. They knew that a populace too busy surviving to be citizens are unable to sustain a society. Economic relationships were always subordinate to the political need for a functioning citizenry.

So what changed?

The great disembedding

Karl Polanyi's concept of the "embedded economy" captures what was lost. In his book The Great Transformation, Polanyi argues that for most of human history, economic activity was subordinated to social relations. Markets existed, trade happened, but they operated within a framework of social obligations, religious duties, and political necessities. The economy served society. It didn't dominate it.

In the 19th century, something unprecedented happened: the creation of what Polanyi calls the "self-regulating market." Economic logic escaped its social constraints and began to organise society itself. Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations became embedded in the economy. Everything, including human labour and land, became a commodity to be bought and sold. This wasn't evolution. It was a catastrophic inversion.

The shift is profound. In an embedded economy, you couldn't sell yourself into permanent servitude because you were a member of a community with rights and obligations that transcended economic calculation. Your personhood wasn't for sale.

But in a disembedded market economy, labour becomes just another commodity. You sell your time, your effort, your future. And if you can't sell it at a high enough price, that's your problem.

This is what debt enforces. Not just the sale of your labour, but the obligation to keep selling it regardless of the cost. You must work, regardless of whether the work is meaningful, regardless of whether it aligns with your values, regardless of whether it destroys you, regardless of its impact on the environment. The bills are due. The market demands it. And the market, unlike the community, doesn't care whether you survive the transaction.

But there's a deeper structural logic at work. The debt economy exists because capitalism requires constant growth, and constant growth requires constant consumption, and constant consumption requires that people keep working in order to keep buying. If people achieved economic independence, if they could work less and still meet their needs, the whole system would collapse.

The ancient apprentice worked under authority temporarily, building towards independence. The modern debtor works under authority permanently. You never graduate from dependency because in the system that was supposed to lead somewhere, education, has itself become a site of extraction. You traded years of your life and tens of thousands in debt for credentials that grant you access not to autonomy but to another form of subordination. You just keep performing the rituals, making the minimum payment, waiting for an independence that never arrives.

This is how debt guarantees permanent adolescence. Not because you've failed to mature, but because the system has dismantled the conditions that once made maturity possible. The embedded economy offered pathways to autonomy because the community had an interest in your independence. The disembedded economy offers only permanent dependency because your debt is someone else's asset. Your subordination is profitable. Your freedom is not.

The psychic cage

The disembedding of the economy doesn't just change material conditions. It changes consciousness itself.

In episode four i talked about Byung-Chul Han's achievement society, how we've internalised productivity so deeply that we exploit ourselves without needing a boss standing over us. But debt is what makes this self-exploitation inescapable. You can't opt out. You can't take a break from the performance. The bills are due whether you're burnt out or not, whether the work destroys you or not. Debt turns Han's achievement society from a cultural pressure into a material trap.

You push yourself harder, work longer hours, perform emotional labour without being asked, not because you believe in the work but because you can't afford to stop. The whip is invisible but you feel it constantly.

Arlie Hochschild showed how service work requires not just labour but emotional performance. The flight attendant doesn't just serve drinks, she produces genuine warmth on demand. The debt collector doesn't just make calls, he projects measured authority. This isn't surface acting. It's deep acting. You actually produce the required emotion, over and over, until the boundary between your authentic self and your performed self dissolves.

When you're in debt, you can't afford to refuse this bargain. You can't quit when your boss demands you stay late, take on extra work, smile through another pointless meeting. Your entire personhood gets subordinated to making the monthly payment. You're not selling labour anymore.

You are selling your capacity to choose how you want to live.

But it's worse than that. The corporate performances you're forced to sustain are so prolonged, so totally detached from anything recognisably human, that people become severed from their own souls. You spend eight, ten, twelve hours a day performing enthusiasm for projects you don't believe in, deference to managers you don't respect, collegiality with people you're secretly competing against. You perform concern in meetings where nothing will change. You perform gratitude for opportunities that exploit you. You perform alignment with values you know are pure theatre.

And you do this because the debt demands it. You can't afford to drop the mask. You can't afford to let your real feelings show because your real feelings might get you fired, and getting fired means you can't make the payments. So you learn to perform so thoroughly that the performance becomes you.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil," how ordinary people commit atrocities not through malice but through thoughtlessness, through the bureaucratic performance of duty. The corporate environment operates on this same principle. You don't need to be cruel to participate in cruelty. You just need to keep performing your role. The manager who fires half the department whilst talking about "rightsizing" isn't necessarily a sadist. He's someone who has performed detachment so thoroughly that he no longer registers the human cost. The executive who implements policies she knows will destroy people's lives has learned to experience this as "tough decisions" rather than violence.

They can do this because they're insulated from consequence. But you're not. You're in debt. You have to perform detachment even when it destroys you, because refusing the performance means losing everything.

This also is how bullying becomes systematic rather than personal. The person who undermines you in meetings, who takes credit for your work, who makes you feel incompetent, they're not necessarily trying to hurt you. They're performing what they've learned gets rewarded. Domination doesn't require malice. It just requires everyone to keep playing their assigned roles in a system that values performance over humanity.

And debt ensures you keep playing. You can't refuse the role because you can't afford to refuse. The bully knows this. The leaders know this. Your compliance isn't bought through violence but through the monthly payment schedule that says you have no choice.

The longer you perform, the more the mask fuses to your face. You start to lose access to your own reactions. You're not sure anymore what you actually think versus what you're supposed to think. Your disgust at what you're being asked to do gets reframed as "not being a team player." Your exhaustion becomes evidence that you need to work on your "resilience." Your rage at the injustice of it all transforms into quiet anxiety that maybe you're just not good enough.

Living in debt does something to your mind. The psychologist Sendhil Mullainathan calls it a "scarcity mindset." When every decision gets filtered through "can I afford it?", your cognitive capacity narrows. Long-term thinking becomes impossible. Creativity shuts down. You can't imagine alternatives because you're stuck in survival mode, and survival mode is both exhausting and risk-averse.

The longer you stay in debt, the more conservative you become. You take the safe job, the predictable path, the conventional life because any deviation feels too expensive. But the safe path isn't safe. It can be automated, outsourced, disrupted by forces you can't control. The promise of security in exchange for compliance turns out to be a lie. You just don't discover this until you're 40 and still paying off your student loans.

The cage isn't bars and guards. It's a mathematical claim on your future that makes every other choice feel impossible. And the lock on the cage is your own severed capacity to remember what freedom felt like. Assuming you have that memory.

The violence beneath

There's something else we need to talk about - the violence that underwrites the entire system.

Debt's violence is distinct from other forms of capitalist coercion. When your boss exploits you, the extraction happens at work. When you clock out, the exploitation pauses. But debt never clocks out. It follows you home. It follows you across borders. It follows you after death.

The bailiffs show up. Your wages are garnished. Your credit rating collapses, which means you can't rent a flat, can't get a phone contract, can't access the infrastructure of modern life. In some US states, you can still go to prison for debt. Medical debt drives more than half a million Americans into bankruptcy every year. This isn't metaphorical violence. It's material destruction.

This violence is the foundation of the debt economy, enforced by institutions that claim neutrality. The credit rating agency isn't your enemy, it's just "assessing risk." The debt collection firm isn't cruel, it's just "following procedure." The algorithm that denies your loan application isn't biased, it's just "optimising outcomes." The violence gets laundered through bureaucracy until it feels natural, inevitable, deserved.

David Graeber traces how debt has always required violence to enforce, but the violence changes form historically. In ancient Mesopotamia, unpaid debt meant slavery. In medieval Europe, debtors' prison. The modern system doesn't need to imprison debtors directly. It just needs to make life unliveable without credit. You can't rent. You can't get a phone. You can't get hired for jobs that check credit scores. The violence is slower, more diffuse, but no less totalising.

Maurizio Lazzarato argues in The Making of Indebted Man that debt creates a specific kind of subject: someone who experiences time as already owned. Your future labour is already pledged. Your future choices are already constrained. You don't just owe money, you owe your life. This is why debt feels different from wage theft or exploitation. Those take what you've produced. Debt takes what you haven't yet lived.

Silvia Federici's work on primitive accumulation helps us understand how this system was constructed. In Caliban and the Witch, she describes how the transition to capitalism required the violent destruction of common resources and mutual aid networks. People who had been able to support themselves through access to common land, through community support structures, through non-market forms of exchange, were systematically dispossessed. They were forced into dependence on wage labour because all other options had been eliminated.

Debt works the same way. It eliminates alternatives. It forces you into dependence. And once you're dependent, you have no leverage. You take what's offered or you starve.

Mortgaging the future

What does it mean to have your future mortgaged? When you're in debt, your present is shaped by obligations incurred in the past to pay for a future that never arrives.

You're working now to service decisions made years ago. The university degree that was supposed to open doors. The flat you rented because you couldn't afford to buy. The medical treatment you couldn't avoid. Your present labour is always already claimed.

You can't inhabit the present because you're always projecting forward to the next payment, the next bill, the next crisis. You can't plan long-term because your future is already mortgaged. And you can't escape your past because it follows you as compound interest, as credit history, as the accumulated weight of choices that weren't really choices.

This is different from other forms of economic coercion. The factory worker's exploitation happens in the present. When the shift ends, there's a pause. But the debtor's exploitation is temporal. It never pauses because time itself has been colonised. You're working to pay for yesterday whilst tomorrow is already sold.

You trade your student debt for a mortgage, your mortgage for medical bills, your medical bills for care home fees. The treadmill never stops because stopping would mean re-entering time as something you own rather than something that owns you.

Ancient societies may have already known this, which is why they practiced debt cancellation. The jubilee wasn't just economic relief. It was temporal release. It allowed people to re-enter present time, to make choices about their future that weren't predetermined by their past. It acknowledged that permanent debt creates a permanent underclass not through material deprivation alone, but through temporal imprisonment.

The system we live under inverts this wisdom. It requires your temporal imprisonment. Your past must determine your future so completely that your present becomes a site of pure extraction. You're not living your life. You're servicing the accumulated claims on your time.

What was lost

There's a running pattern in most of the ideas i am sharing throughout this series, on how sacred obligations and rituals that tie together communities operated on different logic from mathematical obligations, zero-sum games. The openness, and playful logic of social obligation allows for a fuzziness to exist around how things are repaid and reinvented.

When Polanyi described the great disembedding, he was describing the destruction of an entire way of relating to each other, not just about a shift in economic arrangements. For most of human history, economic relationships were embedded in social relationships. Or as Graeber referred to it as a form of baseline communism: reciprocity based on need, not quid pro quo exchange. Early societies operated on a gift economy, rather than barter or debt as such. Gifts created obligation but the obligation was social not mathematical.

When i give you a gift, you're expected to reciprocate. Eventually. Somehow. In some way. But the terms are fuzzy. The timeline is open. The relationship is ongoing. The Kwakiutl potlatch we discussed in episode two exemplifies this: a chief gives away or destroys vast wealth in a public ceremony in order to create social bonds and demonstrate status. This event existed to prioritise the maintenance of the social fabric over the mathematical tally.

This is fundamentally different from debt. Debt is precise. It closes the relationship rather than opening it. When i give you a gift, we're now connected. When i give you a loan, we have a transaction that ends when you repay.

Anthropologist Keith Hart describes money as having two faces: the impersonal, quantitative token we use in transactions, and the personal, relational object that remembers relationships. In a healthy economy, both faces are present. But in a fully disembedded market economy, only the impersonal face remains. Money becomes pure calculation, stripped of social context. And debt becomes a mathematical claim enforceable by violence, not a social relationship that can be renegotiated within community.

This is the world we live in now. Your student debt is not a relationship with your university or your community. It's a relationship with a faceless institution that will pursue you until you die. There's no renegotiation. There's no forgiveness. There's no jubilee. There's just the interest rate and the repayment schedule. This is what makes negotiating with employers extremely challenging because oftentimes the very personal, real human experience you are having as an employee is not being calculated or tallied in the same way as the profit margin of the employer.

Gift economies create community. Debt economies create isolation.

This shift from gift to debt logic mirrors the shift from play to game that i've been tracing throughout this series. Gift economies are playful: the terms are open, the outcomes are unpredictable, the point is to maintain the relationship. Debt economies are game-like: the terms are fixed, the outcomes are predetermined, the point is to extract maximum value and exit.

When economic logic begins to dominate rather than serve, we lose the capacity for genuine play. Everything becomes a game with winners and losers. And if you're in debt, you've already lost.

Rethinking debt

So where does this leave us?

Recognising that debt is not a personal moral failing but a structural mechanism of social control is the first step. It allows us to stop blaming ourselves and start questioning the system.

The second step is recognising that alternatives exist. Debt hasn't always worked this way. Societies have organised economic life differently. They've prioritised community over accumulation, social stability over creditor rights, human flourishing over mathematical efficiency.

The gift economies i touched on here offer one such alternative. Not as a literal model to copy, but as a reminder that economic relationships can be structured around reciprocity and mutual aid rather than extraction and domination.

Next time i'll explore this further: what does it mean to build an economy based on gifts rather than debts? What would it look like to create structures of mutual obligation rather than mathematical precision? How do we move from the closed logic of debt to the open logic of reciprocity?

Because if debt colonises your future, then gifts might be how we reclaim it.

Next: #7 The Gift

References

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.
Finley, M. I. (1973). The Ancient Economy. University of California Press.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
Hart, K. (2000). The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. Profile Books.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.
Hudson, M. (2018). ...and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year. ISLET.
Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.
Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Farrar & Rinehart.