Entreprecariat

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Mocking self-entrepreneurship and exploring the miseries of precarity, this biting new book identifies the aesthetics of productive anxiety

Written by Silvio Lorusso, foreword by Geert Lovink, afterword by Raffaele Alberto Ventura.

Entrepreneur or precarious worker? These are the terms of a cognitive dissonance that turns everyone’s life into a shaky project in perennial start-up phase. Silvio Lorusso guides us through the entreprecariat, a world where change is natural and healthy, whatever it may bring. A world populated by motivational posters, productivity tools, mobile offices and self-help techniques. A world in which a mix of entrepreneurial ideology and widespread precarity is what regulates professional social media, online marketplaces for self-employment and crowdfunding platforms for personal needs. The result? A life in permanent beta, with sometimes tragic implications.

Entreprecariat is a book about entrepreneurialism, but it’s not a manual to “make it”. It’s not a hagiography of visionaries like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. On the contrary, it describes the reality surrounding the so-called “self-entrepreneurs”: students, freelancers, unemployed (and sometimes even employees) pushed or forced to develop an entrepreneurial mentality not to succumb to the growing precariousness that affects the professional, the economic and the existential sphere. Welcome to the entreprecariat, where the entrepreneurial spirit is a curse rather than a blessing.

Entreprecariat features a rich selection of images that chart the spread of entrepreneurial propaganda. By subverting the language of branding, the book’s design and structure speak both to free enterprise enthusiasts and to innovation skeptics.

This new edition, published seven years after the first and expanded with a new full chapter, is a needed update for a time when precarity has become ubiquitous and entrepreneurialism has gone berserk.