Middle-Class Homeostasis in the 21st Century: Trapped in Its Own Warmth – The Public Edition

A Note from the Author

• Why This Version Is Different

INTRODUCTION

• Homeostasis — The Middle Class Trapped in Its Own Warmth

Chapter 1. Han Was Right — But Not Entirely

• The burnout society as the forefield of a new immunology

Chapter 2. The Dictatorship of the Vibe

• From sovereign violence to affective selection

Chapter 3. Doxic Immunology

• Who hands out the oxygen
• The smart air filter — a short image
• Not homophily, something more
• Toward the empirical

Chapter 4. Binary Games

• Zero or one
• A scene from the office
• Every criticism as an immunological attack

Chapter 5. The Geopolitics of Mood

• Homeostasis as an export product

Chapter 6. The Economy of Exhaustion

• Ghosting as punishment
• Silence as punishment
• Circulation without community
• Diagnosis

Chapter 7. Affective Cannibalism

• Why homeostasis eats the future
• Loyalty to the vibe
• The trap of one’s own warmth

Chapter 8. The Politics of Abrasiveness

• A return to negativity and the right to discomfort
• Three functions of abrasiveness
• Can the middle class manage it?

Chapter 9. Prisoners of Status and Ceiling Leaders

• The quiet contract of withdrawal
• The Ceiling Leader
• The fear of incompatibility
• Self-quarantine

Chapter 10. Affective Feudalism as a Political Order

• Affective apartheid and the twilight of the citizen
• Three forms of pressure
• The cannibalism of democracy
• A sentence without a trial
• Circulation without community

Chapter 11. The Digital Buffer and the Algorithmic Thermostat

• The architecture of avoidance
• The screen as a membrane
• The algorithm as thermostat
• The death of the public sphere
• The thermal death of the political

Chapter 12. Geopolitics Disrupts Homeostasis

• War, climate, and the bursting of the bubble
• A stimulus that resists aestheticization
• Soft denialism
• Performative care
• The bursting of the bubble
• A test of maturity

Chapter 13. The End of the Political

• The administration of mood and the atrophy of the citizen
• The citizen as patient
• Ceiling Leaders in parliament
• Thermal censorship
• A shadow theater

Chapter 14. How Bourdieu’s Doxa Became the Middle Class’s Shield

• No chemistry
• A consensus of mood instead of reasons
• Affective habitus

Chapter 15. When Homeostasis Becomes Entropy

• Work as a performance of temperature
• The cannibalism of the nervous system
• Apartheid as an operating cost
• Heat death
• The right to switch off the thermostat

CONCLUSION

• What the Machine Taught Me

Seven Things This Book Says — As Briefly As Possible

• 1. The middle class doesn’t exclude — it cools you out
• 2. No one plans it. And that’s the worst part
• 3. Doxa — what “everyone knows without saying” — works like an air filter
• 4. Selection is soft — and that’s exactly why it’s cruel
• 5. The middle class cuts differently from the rest of the world — it defers
• 6. Homeostasis doesn’t lower exhaustion — it redirects it
• 7. The bill is most likely paid by someone outside the room

EPILOGUE

• A World Without Strangers and Without a Future

• 1. A world without strangers
• 2. The pack as a soft apparatus of violence
• 3. When comfort becomes an ideology
• 4. A world without a future
• 5. The right to cold

AFTER THE EPILOGUE I

The Gender of Homeostasis. The Affective Tax

• The cannibalism of care
• The affective tax in Binary Games
• Gendered cold strategies
• Affective patriarchy

APPENDIX 1

What the Simulation Showed — Without the Math

• Why a simulation at all
• Five things that really came of it
• What this model does NOT show

APPENDIX 2

Homeostasis in Organizations. Vibe Management

• The organization as thermostat
• Vibe Management and Binary Games
• The tower and the pack
• Shadow Assessment — the invisible guillotine
• Ghosting and the censorship of temperature
• What HR can do about it
• Summary

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The books this book reads most closely
• Articles and supplementary texts referenced
• Data cited in the book
• A note on the footnotes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PROJECT: AFFECTIVE FEUDALISM