About the Project — Affective Feudalism
Affective Feudalism is an independent research and writing project by Szymon Woźnica exploring how contemporary organizations and social systems extract psychological resources from people — attention, emotion, loyalty, the capacity to recover — and the cognitive and health price the individual pays. The central thesis: twenty-first-century relations of work and status increasingly resemble feudal dependency rather than market exchange, with affect as the tribute — permanent emotional availability, self-managed exhaustion, and the invisible labour of keeping up the appearance of balance.
The cycle consists of theoretical essays and systemic diagnoses written in the spirit of critical sociology (with inspirations from Pierre Bourdieu): “The Tired System: An Economy of Fatigue” — on fatigue as a systemically monetized resource; “Middle-Class Homeostasis: Trapped in Its Own Warmth” — on how the middle class reproduces the conditions of its own captivity; “Leveraging Boundaries” — on KPIs, ASAP culture and wellbeing as technologies for monetizing structural exhaustion; and “The Distinction of Affect” — on affect as a social technology for legitimizing inequality.
A distinct place belongs to Volume V — “Affective Feudalism”, the research volume of the cycle, which moves the project from essay to the systematic study of psychological pressure. Its core is the Tripartite Classification of Psychological Pressure (TKPP) — a new working taxonomy distinguishing hot pressure (overt aggression), cold pressure (relational exclusion, informational isolation) and stochastic pressure (unpredictability). TKPP underpins the project’s operational tools: the TS-Z narrative coding system, the PU-Z attentional-tax index, and SOK (in development), a questionnaire-based index of stochastic cognitive overload. The volume also documents the first systematic quantitative study of mobbing based on a corpus of Polish court judgments (142 coded cases, 2011–2026; total validation sample N=216).
Research status: exploratory. Findings confirm the codability and structural stability of the TKPP dimensions and provide empirical support for the non-linear character of stochastic pressure; the tools are ready for preliminary studies and pilot organizational audits, while requiring further calibration, double coding and convergent validation. The project’s tools are not intended for individual assessment.
Szymon Woźnica — independent researcher and author of the “Affective Feudalism” series (Middle-Class Homeostasis, The Exhausted System, Leveraging Boundaries). For a decade he worked in corporate environments — in banking, finance, and the automotive industry — where he observed at close range the machinery he now describes: the exhaustion economy, stochastic pressure, and the shifting of the boundaries of normality. He combines critical theory with formalization: he builds agent-based models (ABM), develops a taxonomy of psychological pressure (TKPP), and diagnostic tools for cognitive overload in organizations. Across the series he engages in dialogue — and debate — with Byung-Chul Han, Nancy Fraser, Eva Illouz, and Pierre Bourdieu, shifting their diagnoses from the level of the individual to the level of the system. He publishes his research packages in open access — GitHub.
Contact: affectivefeudalism@gmail.com