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

In this pocket-sized paperback volume, Italian writer and conceptual artist Silvio Lorusso guides us through this era of the “entreprecariat,” or the relationship between entrepreneurship and precarity.

The precariat class consists of those whose working lives are comprised of disjointed bits, lacking financial or professional stability. In our entreprecarious society, everyone is an entrepreneur and nobody is stable.

Through analyses of memes, photographs and advertisements, Lorusso explores tensions surrounding labor, productivity, autonomy and failure while dissecting the media objects that encourage a precarious lifestyle. Precarious economic conditions demand an entrepreneurial attitude, while entrepreneurialism breeds instability and change; thus, entreprecarity is characterized by a cognitive dissonance. Lorusso weaponizes irony and sarcasm in order to shift our collective understanding of work ethic, labor, leisure, production and competition.