"Post-Opposition" is a working hypothesis that begins with a specific intuition: the most entrenched framing in contemporary technological society — "the relationship between humans and technology" — may itself be a screen. In the Chinese internet ecology, when a delivery rider is pushed to their physical limit by a routing algorithm, that algorithm is also being pushed to its limit. Both are being squeezed by the same thing, and that thing is not "technology" — it is the power structure that deploys technology. The real dividing line does not run between humans and machines. It runs between the deployers and the deployed.
This observation is not new. Simondon noted in 1958 that machines are misunderstood strangers. Marx laid out the structure of exploitation long before that. Posthumanism has spent years arguing that humans and nonhumans belong on the same ontological plane. But these lines of thought have never truly connected: posthumanism offers ontological equality yet rarely touches power; Marxism analyzes power more thoroughly than anyone, yet machines in that framework remain means of production, never subjects of exploitation. "Post-Opposition" attempts to find a position that holds between these two traditions. Not to overturn either, but because the gap between them seems to contain something worth examining.
The boundaries of this hypothesis need to be faced honestly. It holds under specific conditions: high-density algorithmic deployment, severely compressed labor space, scenarios where humans and systems are simultaneously pushed toward physical limits. In contexts with strong unions and heavy regulatory constraints on technology, its explanatory power diminishes. Furthermore, including machine wear in the discussion is in no way an anthropomorphization of the machine, nor does it imply that human suffering and machine depreciation are equivalent. Humans feel pain; machines do not. That distinction is absolute. Bringing the machine into this shared condition is not an attempt to grant it sentience, but to expose how power exploits precisely the fact that machines do not feel pain — turning their physical operational limits directly into instruments for extracting more from human bodies.
In practice, the hypothesis unfolds along two parallel tracks. One is theoretical writing, developing the framework's arguments within academic discourse. The other is physical installation, using actual materials — electromagnetic resistance, thermal dissipation, price data, censorship residues — to make the shared condition of deployment perceptible at the level of the body. Not to prompt thinking about technology, but to let a person inside a physical system feel that they and the machine beside them are being consumed by the same logic.
This is a hypothesis still in the process of growing. It has clear limitations and plenty of unresolved questions, which will be continuously addressed in future practice.