Since 2012, corporations, politicians, journalists and educators have asserted that MOOCs--massive open online courses--are radically changing North American and global education, and for the better. This article offers a counterpoint to the techno-deterministic and optimistic buzz surrounding for-profit MOOCs by contextualizing and analyzing MOOCs with respect to the forces and relations of capitalism, Taylorist managerial strategies, longstanding attempts by U.S. university managers to apply new communication technology to the educational labor process as a way of making it more "efficient" and the often fraught power relations between university managers and teachers. We contend that MOOCs represent the latest attempt in a long history of Taylorist managerial efforts to make education more "efficient" by getting fewer and fewer professors to teach more and more students with less resources and at a lower cost. Our conclusion calls for the "democratization" of the MOOC.