The project - Labora

I am happy to share that my Ph.D. research will soon be published as a book. “Make, Fail, Repeat” will be released in 2025 as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Creative Working Lives series.

The book is based on my 22-month ethnographic Ph.D. investigation of Vancouver’s digital and new media industries. Through participation in professional groups, interviews with creative workers, and analysis of managerial literature, in the book I analyze how the concept of startup has transcended its original meaning as a synonym for early-stage, hi-tech company to become a way of seeing and organizing the socio-economic reality, a way of acting within it, and a way to relate to others and oneself. This is a conception, I argue, that reflects the technological and economic conditions of the dot-com era.

The book in a nutshell

The book contributes to the ongoing and ever-relevant debate about the future of work in the creative industries. It does so by examining how the concept of start-up has transcended its original meaning as a synonym for an early-stage, hi-tech company to become a historically specific way of knowing and acting in the world, something I define using the Foucauldian concept of episteme, understood as a series of regularities across contemporary discourses.

Echoing ideas from complexity economics, design thinking, and Agile software development, the start-up episteme furthers the free-wheeling and entrepreneurial spirit that, 25 years ago, Barbrook and Cameron defined as the Californian Ideology: a “bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism.”

Unlike this earlier Californian Ideology, the influence of the start-up episteme is not limited to the techno intelligentsia of skilled workers in the media, computing, and telecommunication industries. The Economist hailed the diffusion of the start-up thinking in every nook and cranny of the economy as a new Cambrian moment, one in which anyone can “become an entrepreneur—anywhere in the world.” If entrepreneurs are everywhere, then it is essential to understand how the start-up way of knowing and acting is reshaping work practices and constituting new professional identities.

To capture the manifold implications of the start-up episteme, the book presents the findings of a 22-month ethnographic fieldwork within Vancouver’s burgeoning digital and new media industries. Through participation in professional groups, interviews with creative practitioners, and secondary analysis of managerial literature, the book describes how living and working in the start-up episteme requires creative workers to constitute their personal and professional identities in ways that conform to start-up values such as agility, speed, and scalability.

Through the internalization of managerial practices, creative workers characterize themselves as independent economic agents constantly open to jumping on new projects (pivoting in start-up jargon) in the hope of stumbling on the one that will propel their career beyond the boring linearity of conventional jobs. This need to stay flexible and agile at all costs justifies risk-prone practices of self-exploitation, which are justified as performative displays of a proper hustling work ethic. The result is the proliferation of professional figures (e.g., the digital nomad, the solopreneur, the freelance, the bootstrap entrepreneur) trapped in a state of perpetual becoming, where self-actualization and personal freedom always seem one project away but are hardly ever achieved.

The findings emphasize digital and new media workers’ tactics to escape new forms of managerial (self-) control and create a more just and inclusive workplace.

Nomads and hustlers

I rely on the concept of episteme to discuss the professional subject positions predicated into existence by the managerial discourses of lean entrepreneurship. Advancing a Foucauldian conception of subjectivity which regards it as being derived from power and knowledge without being fully dependent on it, I investigate the influence that power has over the constitution of the self and vice versa: the role that subjectivation has in the constant regeneration of epistemic power.

Relying on my experiences in the fieldwork, I discuss how the percolation of managerial discourses from the organizational down into the personal, urges people to chase authentic and fulfilling professional identities. In doing so, the start-up episteme creates a culture where professionals’ subjectivities are maintained in a perpetual state of becoming, where self-actualization and stability seem always within reach, but are never fully achieved.

Focusing on subjectivity I was able to observe the process of subsumption as it incorporates critiques, and hopes into the mechanisms and the spirit of capital accumulation through the active participation of desiring subjects. The emergence of restless professional subjectivities, I argue in my conclusion, represents the most visible aspect of capitalism’s ability to recuperate previous forms of alienation and to introduce new ones contextually.

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Emphasizing the critical role of occupational communities

I the book I also explore the interstitial spaces of resistance and critique within the start-up episteme. In particular, I analyze the role that informal communities of tech workers (meetups) can play in reforming the episteme from within.

Based on my fieldwork observations, I argue that these gatherings could potentially become significant in the constitution of individual subjectivities and collective professional cultures capable of tactically reforming the organization of labour informed by start-up-inspired managerial discourses.

Theoretically, I borrow the concept of occupational communities as developed by Van Maanen & Barley and defined by the authors as informal organizations connecting workers with similar competencies and professional interests.

Transposing the concept of occupational communities from industrial to flexible capitalism, I investigate the critical role that meetups have in reforming the start-up episteme.

In my conclusion, I discuss how, on the one hand, meetups effectively help new media and digital workers to navigate the uncertainty of start-up labor. On the other hand, these gatherings represent an enormous reservoir of immaterial labor which is selectively compensated by organizations and corporations to pursue their institutional goals.

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Who should read this book and why

The book contributes to the current debate about digital, mediatized, and entrepreneurial creative labor. If you enjoyed books like “Code Work” by Hector Beltran, “The Quantified Worker” by Ifeoma Ajunwa, and “Ghost Work” by Gray and Suri, then you might enjoy this one too.

More broadly, this book can be relevant for people in media industry studies, labor studies, political economy of media, and critical management studies. Specific chapters could be used as teaching materials in courses about new media, political economy, labor studies, and ethnographic research methods.