Alienation perhaps: the entanglement of suffering and agency of young employees in Chinese internet companies

Highly educated young employees in Chinese internet companies experience profound alienation, yet many refuse to identify as alienated because alienation is often seen as preferable to unemployment or failure. Instead, they perceive actively alienating themselves as a strategic means of securing a place in a highly uncertain world, aligning with corporate discipline and technological regimes in hopes of achieving future autonomy. This reflects a social imaginary in which technology appears more stable than the state, anchoring life projects to the tech industry. When anticipation gives way to stagnation, workers face temporal dislocation, somatic distress, and a loss of orientation. Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation as a deficient relation of appropriation, this ethnography argues that the crisis lies in ruptured self-relations, when one can no longer make life one’s own. Finally, Castoriadis’s theory of social imaginaries and his philosophical writings on the “indeterminate” nature of imagination offer an anthropological insight by conceptualising alienation as a temporal and relational category, where the analytical power lies not in a fixed meaning, but in its very ambiguity.