Jorge Mateus

This article develops two original analytical concepts, the neuropanopticon and the Self-as-Platform, to examine consumer-grade neurotechnologies in the workplace. Taking as its starting point the bureaucratic act of declaring oneself mentally capable of performing a job, it asks what happens when self-attested fitness is replaced by continuous neurophysiological verification. It traces a spectrum of adoption running from employer-mandated monitoring, through institutional encouragement framed as wellness, to fully voluntary self-tracking, and argues that all three registers share the same logic of neoliberal governmentality, in which workers are constituted as entrepreneurs of their own neural capital. Neurotechnologies, on this account, actively produce the workers they observe. Through continuous extraction, algorithmic processing, and feedback of neural data, the worker is constituted as a Self-as-Platform, an infrastructure that generates data, hosts optimisation processes, and is recursively reshaped by them. The neuropanopticon names the apparatus sustaining this process, integrating devices, algorithms, managerial rationalities, and optimisation imperatives so that the subject it monitors is also the subject it shapes. Neither concept is intelligible without the other, since the apparatus produces the subject and the subject is what allows it to operate without coercion. Three unresolved issues follow: confession without a confessant, the reconfiguration of resistance once dissimulation collapses into compliance, and epistemic injustice arising from unreliable biometric data in employment decisions. The primary risk lies not in coercion but in the voluntary internalisation of optimisation imperatives, since consent to the collection of neural data is not consent to be governed by the norms a device encodes.