Affective Feudalism · Research Series · 2025–2026
Sociology of Affect. Economics of Exhaustion.
An independent research and essay series examining the mechanisms of emotional exploitation, occupational burnout, and class hierarchies in modern organizations — at the intersection of critical sociology, labor economics, and agent-based modeling.
“I’m not proposing another version of techno-feudalism theory (Varoufakis, Dean) — those analyses address platform capital and digital rents. Affective Feudalism is an analytical perspective operating on a different level: the psyche, organizations, and affect as the currency of subordination.”
About
Researcher, author, theorist of affective labor
Computational sociology & organizational diagnostics
Over a decade of corporate work in banking, finance, automotive, and call center sectors gave me firsthand insight into the mechanisms that most sociology only reads about. I create an independent monograph series under the Affective Feudalism brand.
I combine Bourdieu’s field theory, Hochschild’s sociology of emotions, and agent-based modeling (ABM) to describe how modern organizations produce exhaustion as an economic resource. I am currently developing an original organizational diagnostics framework — SOK.
2025 — 2027
SOK Framework & Commercialization
Organizational diagnostics · ABM · RAG
2025 — 2027
Affective Feudalism Series
Volumes I–V
2014 — 2023
Corporate Experience
Banking · Finance · Automotive
4
Published Volumes
20+
ABM Simulations
New Release · Volume IV
Featured Reading
The Distinction of Affect
Available exclusively on the author’s website — affectivefeudalism.com
Combining Bourdieu’s field theory with Hochschild’s sociology of emotions, the book examines how control over emotions becomes a currency of the labor market and a mechanism for reproducing class inequalities.
„Legitimizing inequalities by presenting them as differences that are ‘natural’, ‘mature’, ‘compatible’, and ‘deserved’.”
Simulations ABM
H1·H2·H3 Confirmed
Format
My Books
Burned Out – How the Exhaustion Economy Profits From Your Fatigue
Burnout isn’t a system malfunction. It’s the system’s product. Burned Out reveals the mechanism that turns your fatigue into someone else’s profit — and the eight levers that shift the boundary of…
Distinction of Affect
The myth of emotional authenticity is a class myth. The Distinction of Affect introduces the category of affect-capital — a class-inherited capacity to emit a socially digestible signal in interactions. It shows…
Middle-Class Homeostasis in the 21st Century: Trapped in Its Own Warmth – The Public Edition
Middle-Class Homeostasis is a work of critical theory and systemic diagnosis — a volume in Szymon Woźnica’s Affective Feudalism cycle. Building directly on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of doxa, the book argues that…
The Tired System – The Public Edition
The Tired System names Drift — late capitalism’s third attractor that Schmachtenberger, Han, and critical theory left unnamed. Neither catastrophe nor dystopia: a low-energy stability in which the system survives by privatising…
The Exhaustion Economy of Education
Reports on teacher workload, work boundaries and the future of the teaching workforce
In 2026 the Polish education system appears stable in vacancy statistics, yet it carries clear signatures of high workload and blurred work boundaries. A low number of vacancies is not evidence of system health. Record pay rises coexist with persistent stress and low pay satisfaction.
The Ouroboros reports synthesise TALIS 2024 data, the University of Warsaw / ZNP study led by dr hab. Małgorzata Żytko, and public data from MEN/SIO, GUS, ZUS and Eurostat. Source findings are clearly separated from authorial interpretation.
„Available only in the Polish version of the site”.
Esseys & Blog
Shorter formats: theoretical analyses, commentary on current trends, methodology.
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The War Over Our Nervous System: On How Corporations Leverage Boundaries and Monetize Exhaustion
The sound of a Slack notification late at night, a casually thrown “ASAP” on Teams, or an informal meeting where you find out about yet another “urgent project.”…
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The Thermostat of Late Capitalism: Why the System Needs Our Exhaustion
One of the most poignant experiences of our time is not a spectacular crisis, but a permanent, quiet drift. We get the impression that everything around us is…
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The Dusk of the Middle Class. When Excel is Not Enough, and KPIs Become a Trap: From Affective Feudalism to the Personal Economy
For the past decades, the corporate middle class built its identity and sense of security on one seemingly unshakable skill: optimization. We were proud of how efficiently we…