Free will is a curse: the ability to choose, is often our own enemy. The call of the void (l'appel du vide) compels us to act against our own interests, towards self-destruction. By removing human agency, forcing people to navigate through bureaucracies which have the ultimate power over them, free will can be subverted entirely. The only agency that people have in totalitarian systems is in the realm of trivialities: one has the freedom to choose between ranch, or cool ranch, as either option leads to the same outcome.
Unlife is that which has the characteristics of life, but isn't truly living. The giant vermin from Kafka's Metamorphosis is more concerned with still being able to show up to work and pay bills; the true meaning of life. The villagers from The Castle exist in a state of perpetual limbo, their lives controlled by castle's bureaucracy and being powerless to challenge it (nor would they even want to). The characters of Kafka's novels exist within systems which are purported to lawful, unquestionable, flawless despite their many contradictions.
We may already live in a post-simulation. While Sim City's Magnasanti, or The Matrix, are simulations, unlife is a simulacra or a mockery of life. Kafka's Castle may represent a post-medieval feudal state on the surface, but even medieval serfs had more freedom. Meat automatons of today may as well be following a scripted life path, where any deviation from the path will be detected by AI systems and corrected, as if it were an error. There can only be diversity of expression in things which do not matter, whether a meat automaton is wearing black metal corpse-paint, or a fursuit, they are irrelevant details. They are nothing but distractions which keep people away from understanding the unnecessary cruelty of their situation.
AI-assisted surveillance
Kafka's Castle is the ultimate bureaucracy that self-proclaims it is flawless, and what could be more flawless than a computer? Technocrats are open about summoning their AI god into existence. To be able to psychologically profile everyone and build behavioral models at scale is to be able to control the populace by subverting free will. As the totality of human activity is recorded digitally, analyzed by corporations and governments alike, they have an unprecedented power to shape and direct society towards their teleological ends.
One of the operating principles of the authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity.
The real threat of AI is the reduction of human autonomy into that of meat automatons. Spying on an entire population was a technical challenge that wasn't feasible in the past, due to the people outnumbering intelligence agents. With massive amounts of digital input and GPU clusters, they are able to identify and neutralize any anomaly in the system. They can subvert any organized movement, identify any thoughtcrime, and destroy the lives of anyone who may oppose them. Companies such as Oracle, Palantir, and many others comprise what I will refer to as the Beast System.
Their goal is to use social norms to enforce conformity to arbitrary standards, often in contradiction with one another. The Beast System does not need to be internally consistent, it will attack conservatives and Christians along with anarchists, communists, Muslims, it does not matter what the belief or ideology is. All sides will claim they are oppressed, and all sides will be correct.
Control by secrecy
A prisoner in a panopticon doesn't know when or if the warden is watching them. The panopticon rules by fear, so that prisoners assume that they may always be watched at any moment. The meat automaton internalizes the idea of a digital ledger for everything, and behaves accordingly. The Beast System wants you to know that it knows everything there is to know about you, and that you can not know anything about the system. The system functioning as a two-way mirror is most advantageous to them, lulling people into a false sense of security as they carry their government surveillance devices on their person at all times.
In Kafka's Castle, official paperwork is destroyed for arbitrary reasons. The true criminals work for the government, and will do anything to remain in control, especially by suppressing information. The people will never get the truth confirmed about the JFK assassination, September 11th, Epstein list, COVID-19 pandemic, attempted Trump assassination, the list could go on. History shows repeatedly that the government can not be trusted regarding governance, and that people as a collective across all eras were retarded.
Rule by fiat
It's unclear if there is any central authority or who is really in charge, they have learned to remain faceless and nameless, hiding behind so-called prestigious organizations. They are the secret police, secret courts, and secret information which run Kafka's world, and ours. The protagonist in Kafka's Trial may as well have been sentenced to death as soon as charges were pressed against him. It also does not matter what criminal activity he was or was not involved with, as his guilt is presumed and the process is the punishment.
There is no doubt that there is a large organization at work behind this court’s every operation... And the point of this large organization, gentlemen? It consists in arresting innocent persons and instituting pointless and mostly, as in my case, fruitless proceedings against them.
In the parable Before the Law, the protagonist exists in a state of unlife, seeking the unattainable goal of being admitted to the law to the detriment of everything else, wasting his entire life waiting for the doorkeeper to let him in. One can expend their entire lifetime and all of their resources to defend themselves, and still lose to the Beast System. Despite how flawed the institutions are in Kafka's world, they are unassailable, much like in the real world. Even after societal upheaval, worse institutions replace them, repeat ad infinitum.
Precarity is a condition of unlife
Having little to no certainty about one's own future is the goal of the Beast System. It's a recurring theme among Kafka's works, which aim to be unsettling, inducing a sense of disorientation and helplessness. The world of Kafka's stories is bizarre, illogical, and cruel, much like the real world.
Rather than thinking about or spending time on what one really wants to do in this life, people who are trapped in unlife have no teleological ends other than to escape the system at best, or meaningless distractions at worst. Anecdotally, I have asked the most conventionally successful people I know, what they want to do with their lives, and they have all answered similarly: to make enough money to escape the rat race. Even money is an illusory goalpost like a mirage of an oasis in the desert, as money is worthless if there's nothing worthwhile to spend it on.
We are in a Hell of our own making, there is no reason why the system has to be so cruel to most people. The worst institutions which are a blight on humanity can be abolished if there is a will to do so, but blind deference to authority keeps people ignorant.