The "hope labor" economy
It's all a scam.
MEDIA: Cam'ron – "I Hate My Job"
Event: Contemporary economic conditions have deteriorated to comparable levels to those which once informed this 2009 Cam’ron song.
ANALYSIS: A big thing that people have been talking about lately is the sort of slow heat-death of the creative class, specifically as a cohort who are able to use their “soft skills” to earn “hard cash.” I am one of these people, both in the sense that this is a thing I’m talking about as well as in the sense that the main vocational skills that I possess are writing and editing the sorts of articles that appeared on the internet during the 2010s.
This isn’t really about me, though, because honestly who gives a shit. I’m more interested in the fallout of it all, because there’s suddenly thousands of people who, like me, have no skills and also no jobs. People will figure something out, surely, but for now there’s a certain palpable discomfort, desperation even, to be found on the TL. External circumstances brought about a lack of work for musicians during the pandemic, and a lot of dark stuff happened before things got even remotely better. I fear that media people may be in the first stages of something similar.
I found this piece, by Kyle Fitzpatrick of The Trend Report™, a worthwhile read. He makes the case that the moment we’re in now isn’t an aberration but instead a reversion to the mean. He writes:
When we talk about the trend of people hating their jobs, I think we’re talking about a very unique Gen Z and Millennial person who was crafted by the 2010s landscape, who believe that they could be X creative and get a good job. The context here — which is increasingly going away — is that you had a booming, expansive tech market who was subsidizing the dreams of creative careers that were otherwise siloed to marketing agencies, freelancers, and the like. This was the dawn of the creative director! In-house writers! Brand illustrators! Company photographers! Those jobs still exist, but they’re becoming harder to get, not to mention the work being reshaped by AI. Pair this with what feels to be a growing market of people who want these very limited jobs and you see the problem.
[...] the moment we’re exiting, where you could work as a creative, was not the norm. Creative jobs are supposed to be precarious. Creative jobs are not real but a creative profession is real. Look to the careers of Vivian Maier, who worked as a nanny while doing photography, or Octavia Butler, who is noted for her odd jobs that freed her creative mind, or even Bill Hader, who spent his twenties working as an editor in reality television. Getting paid to “do the thing you love” as a creative is not reality: it’s an unreal promise that the tech industry gave us, to exploit us before discarding us — and we’re at the end of that lifecycle. I find it wild that creatives of all ages and skill sets aren’t seeing this and, if you’ve hired for any creative position in the past five years, you’ve seen this first hand: any creative job you post gets thousands of applicants who largely don’t have the skillset or talent but harbor a dream of “working as a creative.”
Fitzpatrick is, I want to say, absolutely right when asserting that jobs like the ones I once held were propped up by people who believed that online media could produce the same types of hockeystick growth that companies like Facebook and Uber and Amazon all had. Local newspapers were generally worse and worse at making money; meanwhile, online media properties had relatively smaller staffs and could reach larger audiences, paid lower freelance rates, and ran ten bajillion articles a day because while it costs money to print stuff on paper it costs zero to print stuff on the internet. Back in the day if you snorted enough Adderall and then hung out in a room with a bunch of VCs who’d also just snorted Adderall, you’d probably all end up agreeing that internet news was a cash cow in waiting and it was all simply a matter of betting on the right charismatic founder who could bullshit their way to an exit.
None of this happened, obviously, and the fact that companies like VICE and Complex and BuzzFeed are all at best shells of their former selves isn’t just proof positive that they were run by con men who thought they could get away with conning their investors only to discover that their investors were more powerful and effective con men themselves who were trying to leverage their money during a period of low interest rates. To claim so would be to take an overly myopic view of media, when in reality this was how shit worked in the 2010s because American culture is gambling culture and is becoming more so by the day.
Where I disagree with Fitzpatrick is the implicit conflation of “working as a creative” with “actually doing the creative work you want to do.” There was definitely a period where people at certain publications could just do whatever they wanted, and this happened for a bunch of different reasons — sometimes, writers and editors were encouraged to take crazy risks in the interest of winning “the traffic game,” while at others, companies were so flush with money that they encouraged the editorial staffs to “not give a shit about traffic” and instead “chase prestige,” and quite frankly, a lot of the time the people who made real decisions at these companies simply couldn’t be bothered to read what the editorial staffs were putting out because they were lazy or dumb or only consumed information via TED Talk. But even then, people had to post so, so, so, so much that complete freedom quickly began to feel suffocating: being funny/entertaining/creative on demand all day sucks ass. Meanwhile, when guardrails were imposed — namely, imperatives to stick to certain formulas for pieces or “carefully pick our shots” to “maximize potential traffic,” depending on the outlet — the hypothetical fun was drained out of the job. Either way, you left work underpaid and overly drained, even if you had a lil’ help.
It’s a special kind of hell to have a job that closely resembles the thing that you want to be doing without actually being that thing. If I’d spent my twenties being a mechanic or something, I’d have probably cranked out four books by now instead of one. Instead, I channeled my creative energies into something that was, more often than not, never fully mine. Always shooting down ideas I liked because they wouldn’t pop off on Chartbeat, sneaking weirdness and experimentation into pieces that were ultimately commercial objects, rearranging things that were perfectly fine pieces of writing so the nut graf could go at the part of the article where the nut graf was supposed to go even though no actual reader gives a shit about the nut graf. This isn’t to say I’m not proud of the work I did — I am — just that it was only that. That’s not the relationship I want to have to my own creativity!
Fitzpatrick ends his piece with a vague gesture in this direction, quoting a passage from Chauncey Hare’s Work Abuse that directly speaks to this disconnect. But elsewhere, he does not come across as particularly sympathetic:
Creative work is hard work because you are your boss, your manager, and distributor who often operates outside of a steady job. To be a creative requires resilience as you’re entering a marathon game that is part survival of the fittest and part deferred (or no) payments in exchange for doing what you love. Get a dumb day job to pay your bills — then do you outside of the job, until the day comes when the tide shifts, when the creative work pays off: such is the grand tradition of creative work. Don’t blame the clogged, saturated industries for not giving you creative work. You own your destiny.
Yes, sure, but also, like… that’s not universally true. Look at France, where artists of all stripes receive government subsidies almost by default, or Germany, where you can just go to grad school forever and get paid for it and spend your days making bad techno to your heart’s content. Even in America’s not-so-distant past, academia offered a similar, albeit highly convoluted safety net: if you did cool stuff some college would end up hiring you to a tenure-track job and you’d be able to continue to do cool stuff as long as you agreed to talk in front of bored adolescents every once in a while. That’s over, though, because universities have been overtaken by Administration Brain and it’s more “economically viable” to employ a smaller number of tenured professors, many of whom focus on conducting the types of research or paper-writing work that brings in grant funding and maybe teach a few grad-level courses here and there, while farming the actual “university product” (i.e., teaching hungover 19-year-olds) to grad students and adjuncts.
Rather than acknowledging that things do not have to be this way and in fact there are real-world examples where they are not, Fitzpatrick seems to embrace the logic of Portfolio Realism: that our greatest asset is our time, and that as creative people we must adopt a barbell investment strategy with it, devoting most of our time to the safe and boring investment of working a crappy job while placing small bets on the possibility that making art we truly care about might pay off. I’m in no way advocating for a return to the fat middle of the Low Interest Rate Era — I survived the 2010s one time already and I don’t recall it all that fondly — as much as I’m trying to articulate an ideal that exists beyond capital.
For now, though, I don’t really foresee a return to Good, Honest, Boring work that Fitzpatrick seems to suggest we seek. Too many people just straight-up lack the skills, and even for those who have the ability to become a woodworker or a HVAC repairman or a nanny or whatever, we live in a world where employers want a “sure thing,” and that usually hiring a candidate with a recent track record of doing the job. Instead, things will get worse before they get better. Most people are going to optimize, trying to find work that they can get paid a lot of money to do in exchange for very little effort. There will be hustles. There will be life-coaching. There will be cryptocurrency trading, and there will be calls to parents and “client work” and meetups and plasma donations and horse rustling and links in bios and so much more, and then at some point, like magic, something will happen and everyone will get hired again and we’ll all pretend like it never happened and we’ll once again live in the fat middle until it fails once more, and the cycle will repeat again and again and again.
But maybe it doesn’t have to. Fruitful job market or not, this entire paradigm runs on “hope labor,” which the homie Ryan King-White, who studies sport and society at Towson University, recently hipped me to. In a paper with coauthor Matt Hawzen, he characterized the term as a “reframing [of] the individual as a rational productive subject pursuing investment in oneself” when navigating underpaid, highly precarious work like internships, freelancing, independent projects that could hypothetically pop off, and the like. It came to prominence because of a 2013 paper by Ewan Mackenzie and Alan McKinlay on the subject, in which the authors note:
Since the 2008 financial crash, free labour, token-wage work, casualisation, outsourcing and ‘flexploitation’ have proliferated. Ill-defined ideas of ‘passion’ and ‘fun’ have become dominant tropes, embedding the idea that work is that which allows the individual to self-actualise. The onus has been placed on, and assumed by, individuals as the bearers of structural ambiguity and as socially engaged ‘entrepreneurs of the self’. [...] Hope labour obscures the exploitative realities of unpaid or under-compensated cultural work among those who seek subsistence or autonomy in their work.
Hope labor is one of those things that, once you learn about, you can’t avoid. All that research an editor wants you to do before they give you a yes or no on your pitch? That’s hope labor. The internship that editor did after college to “get their foot in the door” in the first place? Hope labor too, and the fact that they’re still in the industry and probably have a bunch of Twitter followers obscures the experiences of all the other people who didn’t make it. Those 18-hour days you spend streaming Fortnite to a Twitch audience of 150? Hope labor. This podcast that is also a blog that relies on paid subscriptions from its supporters? Hope labor! That “dumb day job” Fitzpatrick wants you to take while you wait for “when the creative work pays off”? THAT JOB IS SUBSIDIZING YOUR HOPE LABORRRRRRR. Buying into the ruse of hope labor isn’t the solution for neoliberalism’s increasing devaluation of creative work: it’s what allows neoliberalism to devalue our creative work in the first place.
Once you see that, then it becomes less a matter of playing to the fat middle or employing a barbell strategy with your time: instead, it’s about figuring out the fastest way to get us all the fuck out the gym.
