Americans thrive on an illusion of freedom in a prison they do not recognize

By James J. Devine

Hatim A. Rahman is an award-winning assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who described a world increasingly run by algorithms and artificial intelligence, in which corporations are using algorithms to control workers in an “invisible cage.”

The man driving your Uber doesn’t know why his pay dropped last week. The woman packing your Amazon order doesn’t understand why her productivity score suddenly flagged her as “low-performing.” The delivery cyclist racing against the clock doesn’t realize the app is nudging him to skip red lights.

These people are not free. They are trapped inside an invisible cage—one built not of iron bars, but of algorithms, designed to exploit them while whispering in their ear that they are their own bosses.

This is the paradox of modern labor under digital capitalism: workers have never been more surveilled, more controlled, more manipulated—and yet, they are told they have never been more independent.

The platforms call them “partners,” “contractors,” “micro-entrepreneurs,” but the language of freedom is used to disguise the reality of bondage.

Behind the sleek interfaces and cheerful notifications, the machines are in charge and the people are enslaved.

The algorithms decide who gets work and who gets ghosted. They adjust pay rates in real-time, ensuring the company always keeps the upper hand. They punish dissent with shadow bans, throttled requests, and sudden deactivations.

Workers scramble to adapt, but artificial intelligence changes the rules without warning.

There is no union to appeal to, no manager to confront—only an opaque system that demands obedience while pretending to offer choice.

The consequences ripple outward. Exhausted by the grind, workers lose the capacity to think beyond the next shift.

They stop reading. They stop voting. They stop believing change is possible. Democracy withers because the people who were supposed to safeguard it are too drained to care.

And yet, the cage has no lock. Workers can leave anytime—if they can afford to. If they have another option. If they aren’t buried under rent, medical debt, or the algorithmic blacklist that punishes those who step out of line.

The system thrives on this illusion of freedom. It is a prison where the inmates do not even know they are imprisoned.

History has seen this before—the factory hands of the Industrial Revolution, shackled by wages just high enough to keep them alive, just low enough to keep them desperate. But this new control is more insidious.

It doesn’t just demand labor; it rewires minds. The gig worker glued to his phone, the warehouse associate chasing ever-faster pick rates, the content moderator numbed into compliance—they are not just exploited. They are being turned into instruments of their own oppression.

The question is no longer just about wages or working conditions.

It is about whether democracy can survive when the people meant to uphold it are too exhausted, too distracted, too broken by algorithmic demands to even lift their heads.

The cage is invisible. But it is real. And unless it is shattered, the workers inside it will remain both the prisoners and the architects of their own captivity.

This is not just an economic crisis. It is the slow death of self-rule.