Yep, we are now living in a sci-fi dystopia. Last week, ZDnet provided a handy list to its readership: the five best bike desks for people to “stay active while working from home”.

Featured were reviews and pictures of exercise bikes with small desks attached to them. The photographs were of women – exclusively women – pedalling in exercise leggings, focused on perching laptop screens. Prices ranged from $420 to a bargain $179. A link to an Amazon site revealed other models can cost as much as $1,500.

I’m a perpetual sucker for an April fool’s joke. I once almost sent money to a friend in Korea who claimed on Facebook to have disastrously impregnated a girl named – say it slowly now – Jyo Khson Yu. Another time, I rang a number provided in an ad for a secret “emoji restaurant” that supposedly prepared food to resemble all the pictograms, only to be laughed off the phone by the pranksters, who could not believe someone had called.

Even I checked the date for the bike desk piece. It was not April Fool’s Day. It also was not an example of chindōgu, the Japanese art of “unuseless” invention. In this, the joke lies in designing something that creates an efficiency in one direction and inefficiency in many others – like a playsuit made of cleaning rags for a floor-crawling baby, or mini-umbrellas that attach to your shoes.

How many emails could you realistically send, after strapping yourself into a human-sized hamster wheel? Yet it was 1 June and with seriousness that the article explained that the best desk bike “will help you create the habit of exercise and activity while also potentially increasing your cardio and productivity”.

“Potentially” is the relevant word here because what’s suggested by the marketing images of the shiny machines and beleggingsed women isn’t the material solution to an actual problem. Anyone so obsessed with work that they’re doing it from an exercise bike is not visibly serene with diligence, but rather in the sweaty grip of either ruthless exploitation or desperate addiction. The bike desk is merely an avatar for what’s really being sold by their makers – an aspirational gesture that we can somehow maximise our productivity at work and perfect our bodies at the same time.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the infinite material capacity of the megarich Khloé Kardashian to beautify herself apparently hadn’t assuaged her own low bodily self-esteem. From pubic “fur oil” to USB coffee mug warmers, the bike desks are just one more example of capitalism’s endless exhortations to believe that personal feelings of inadequacy around beauty or work efficiency can be remedied with a product purchase … only for a market research team to discover more inadequacies to encourage.

Where does this end? Cookies have no doubt been collected somewhere by my online visit to the bike desks, so I await the imminent arrival of ads for an in-bed alpine walker and a shower-based kitchen. Somewhere, you just know an industrial designer has been commissioned to create a birth-table multimedia editing suite so babies can learn from the get-go that no one across western modernity is ever allowed to freakin’ relax.

The nefarious political edge to this message is sharp in Australia today.

Our new Labor government campaigned to raise stagnant worker wages. Traditionally, wage demands are met by employers with their own demands for increased worker productivity – and yet while productivity growth has averaged between 1.2 and 2.5% a year during the last 50 years, wage growth has not followed.

Why not?

Because attempts to decollectivise organised workers out of making wage demands weren’t just achieved by busting their unions. There’s also been 50 years of cultural messaging from online ads to self-help books to management courses that insist workplace productivity is not something an industrial system facilitates, but a test of individual character.

These decades of relentlessly inhuman self-improvement have their metaphor in the horrific Cybermen of Doctor Who, who emerged from the cultural subconscious in 1966. Once human, from Earth’s twinned planet, they replace so many of their body parts to perfect themselves they’re obliged to also remove emotions from their brains so they can live with the cybernetic monstrosity they’ve become. And they reproduce their values by forcibly mutilating anyone they capture into Cybermen.

They terrified me as a kid. They terrify me more as an adult, given I found the bike-desk article online because I felt unproductive at work, a bit low and porky and I wondered if a thing to so improve myself had been invented yet.

Our yearning for maximisation may be human, but the capitalism we’ve created isn’t. When we mount no collective resistance, it seeks out every personal brittleness, to entice out the Cybermen lurking within.