This contribution by Juliette Cezzar is part of the special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine on the Entreprecariat. Read it here and download it for free as PDF or EPUB.

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This text by Phil N/A is part of the special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine on the Entreprecariat. Read it here and download it for free as PDF or EPUB.

☕

Coffee #1 stares back from its thick, semi-spherical container. No milk to adulterate its primordial blackness, its motherly embrace. Cheeky grains oscillate, leaving a brownish trail as they float.
Their words oscillate also, on the frighteningly thin line between “You’re convincing on an intellectual level” and “I can tell you’re way more invested in this than I care to disprove you.”
My face must look pale, so they ask me if I’m troubled by all the terrorism, people dying quite often now. I am not, I just haven’t had the chance to drink my coffee yet.
Caffeine and its promise of delusion are very important, for if you stare into the phd the phd stares back into you. What it sees is about as empty as your cup, just before you say bye, shove your papers in your backpack and venture into the light rain.
Supervision meetings can be inspiring at times, others frustrating, occasionally dreadful. The above has been a case of the Ds.
Caffeine, however, I was saying, is enough to delude you back into focus and self-confidence, with crisp goals and research questions planted firm into your head.
It reminds me I am a man of difficulties rather than problems, and that even when I spread my ideas too thin, when I spread them invisible, there are still ways to communicate them.
Coffee #1 is often all it takes to conjure up visions that, if not bright, are at least vivid. They’re at least not ∞.

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This text by Evening Class is an extended version of the contribution to the special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine on the Entreprecariat. Read it here and download it for free as PDF or EPUB.

What follows is a selection of anecdotes on the micro-aggressions, insults, anxieties and danger experienced while working as precarious designers. The stories were gathered in order to be performed at the event Dependent on Experience: Tales for an Accelerated Workforce, which was part of the Antiuniversity Now festival (London).

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This contribution by Katriona Beales is part of the special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine on the Entreprecariat. Read it here and download it for free as PDF or EPUB.

Banner designed for the exhibition Are We All Addicts Now?, taking place at Furtherfield (London). In the show, Katriona Beales looks at online behavioural addictions and digital dependencies, conditions that are exacerbated by the demands of precarious working conditions within network culture. The phrase ‘stress the mother of all emotions’ comes from Neuromarketing in Action – How to Talk and Sell to the Brain (2014) by Georges, Bayle-Tourtoulou and Badoc. It acts as heading for a book section explaining how to force consumers to make decisions quickly by raising stress levels.

This text by François Girard-Meunier is part of the special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine on the Entreprecariat. Read it here and download it for free as PDF or EPUB.

– Hey 🙂 (…) What’s your name?
– (shouts heavily) 🙂 François, and you?
– 🙂 I’m (name)…
– 🙂 Sorry? I didn’t hear properly (…)
– ‘(NAME)’ 🙂
– Ah, (N-A-M-E)! Like (name, the pop culture character or public person)?
– Yeah, like (name, the pop culture character or public person) 🙂 And… what are you doing (implied: for a living)?
– Hum… (that’s complicated)… what do you mean? :/
– knDMvowijfhgDKJSidsgkjpowefoiukFqwc 🙂
– ‘I can’t hear you’!
– ejfdojnFEJHEJHOFO :/
– ‘I          CAN’T HEARYOU’… :/
– … 🙁
–                             … ↘

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For knowledge workers, the concept of ‘prosumerism’ aptly depicts their struggle to turn cultural consumption into cultural production, two activities that look substantially the same, despites the fact that the latter produces wealth while the former consumes it. This state of affairs becomes particularly evident if we look at a practice that partly constitutes ‘research’ nowadays. I’m speaking of outsourcing on social media the collection of books, films, essays references. All the harvested tips are then cherry-picked and afterwards digested in the form of an essay, a grant application, a syllabus, a proposal for a show, a design brief and so on and so forth.

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Here’s the interview I did with Petra Milički in occasion of PlanD, an international design festival focused this year on “techno-optimism/techno-pessimism”. The interview was originally published in Croatian on dizajn.hr and in English on the festival catalogue.

Photo: Tjaša Kalkan

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Soon I’ll be in Zagreb for a talk (on the 29th) during Plan D design festival, dedicated this year to the theme of Technoptimism / Technopessimism> Below you find the abstract of my talk. Hope to see you there.

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Photo by Charlotte Webb.

Photo by Jon Sueda.

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Revolution Mug ($30,00), Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez.

Recently, I began to notice what could be called a trend, a series of coincidences, or simply the product of my carefully, yet unintentionally crafted filter bubble. I’m talking of a typology of merchandising (or merch-like products) created or tweaked to express precarious concerns in an antagonistic, ironic or illustrative way. In fact, I myself have produced some sort of precarious merchandising, in the form of ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ stickers, à la StayFocusd.

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