Part II: The Internal Struggle and The Pivot from Human to Social Capital.

In Part One of this series, I established the basis of the move from the negotiated flexibility that surrounds contemporary employer/employer relationships, the choice, for example, to work from home, to full freedom of the contemporary, freelance/contract worker in which no compromise is made. This is a move representative of the direction of the labour force as a whole and the creative class in particular, with this industry being particularly fond of utilising freelance workers. Workers, seeking full control and freedom over their working life, took on full responsibility, and businesses were more than happy to offload this responsibility onto them. While initially described as an individual change, it is a shift that accompanies a generation, brought into a world in which rapid change drives massive uncertainty, we became uncertainty embodied.

However, the shift results in an even more precarious working situation. In taking on full responsibility, workers actually take on full risk. Self-employment is in fact self-entrepreneurship, complete with all consuming auxiliary tasks and a sense of isolation. Faced with these challenges, self employed workers pivot to being around and working with each other, both formally and informally, to offer opportunities for work and also gain relatedness to each other.

"Introduction — From the frying pan into the fire"

The previous piece concluded at the emergence of a fully free worker. Someone that has taken, either by force or by choice, control of their working life and career trajectory. It is a status that comes in many guises, from the aesthetically focused boutique hotel hopping micro-influencer to the always on, red-eyed media entrepreneur. What is consistent in all its manifestations though is that the risks of doing business are fully embodied within the person, the responsibility is individualised and total, unlike their FTE counterparts. For the freelance/contract/self-employed worker, economic and mental wellbeing is intrinsically tied to performance. While the potential for success is, in theory, as much as you can work — each hour awake has the potential to be a working hour, the potential for failure is likewise latent in every minute that is spent not working — “everybody has the same 24 hours”. It is a freedom that is both inspiring and anxiety inducing. Like the skeletal bobsled, the base jumper, the free-climber — humans are forever ridding themselves of excess weight in order to go as fast and as high as possible. Dispensing of the baggage of the traditional office work — the peer reviews, the commute, the meetings — we head into the self-employed, the self-determining world, with a similar youthful optimism and determination — the weight is off.

We are optimistic because, when it comes to the idea of vocation and identity, social media provides us with an illusion. Like the over photoshopped Airbnb pictures overselling “cosy” abodes, social media fuels a rose tinted image of self-determination and success in the world of self-employment. The purveyors of this image, the Idols of Promotion (introduced in the previous essay), show only the positive aspects of working in this culture — the pre-meeting pictures taken in foyers of global businesses, the post-work stops at the rooftops of upscale co-working hotels — the spoils of the game. These spoils give an inaccurate presentation of work. On top of this, the task of actually masking the underside of working under unhinged circumstances — the anxieties, stresses and inconsistencies — is exhausting, one cannot show they are “fed up” in fear of damaging their image. Social media first dismisses the existence of this ghost labour and secondly the difficulty in constantly keeping it at bay.

In one sense, we are consistently shown stories of normal people amassing fortunes by doing ordinary things, ordinary things that morph into extra-ordinary careers we, because of the normality of the work involved, believe to be simple undertakings. Through media, we are shown, both directly via the output of the worker or indirectly through media reports of these people, that authenticity and passion are routes to a successful career. Tweens amass fortunes opening toys on youtube, football fans create media empires by talking about football, here passion and presentation leads to an audience, and leveraging that audience leads to money. Superstars in this arena are invariably relatively unskilled — they do not inspire because they do things that we can’t do, they inspire us because they do things we can do. Their success is a valorisation of the normal, their rawness and authenticity is their selling point. You sense that they are working, not because they have to, but because they want to. Full time work on the other hand, requires a subversion of oneself, the idea of having a work self, the character you become when you enter the office, and an outside of work self, this being closer to who you actually are, and devoid of pretension — we can grow to resent this subversion — and freelance life provides a quixotic remedy for this frustration. In another sense, we are not shown the difficulty it takes to constantly portray this authenticity and passion, the valorisation of normality is entirely full of unnatural effort, a sort of pressure of positivity — we do not see the behind the scenes where the lost contracts, the exhaustion of travel, and, ultimately, the failures lie.

"The costs of doing business"

As such, due to this blindness, the optimism one has going into this fully autonomous work is quickly proven naive. As with most aspects of life, no one shows you this underbelly of the glamourised self-employed lifestyle. Becoming an fully self directed worker, in whatever capacity, comes with a mountain of additional labour that quickly cools the initial zeal of being totally free. In the first instance there is the various additional tasks that one must complete in order to obtain objective success in the free market i.e setting up systems that ensure basic survival. On the other had, this zeal is undermined by a sense of loneliness that plagues the self-employed worker that is dealing with work that increasingly digital (i.e immaterial), and increasingly remote, both in a sense of proximity to a centralised office or other workers, but also in a sense of proximity to a project en masse.

“You are required to train yourself, keep up-to-date, find or create your own work, monitor your progress, compare yourself with others, anticipate what will come next, maintain your distinct reputation, meet deadlines whatever costs they exert on your body or relationships, prepare for contingencies such as illness, injury or old age, make contacts, network and socialise, and to do all of this in an atmosphere in which your success or failure is understood in entirely individualistic terms.” (Gill 2010)

The additional tasks required to ensure survival can be split into three general buckets;

• Administrative work
• Branding work
• Development work

Administrative work is the work involved in managing your own working life and career. In the first sense it contains administrative tasks related to the operations of working; personal administration i.e tax, general administration i.e invoicing, the sourcing and securing work (developing a system to). All of these administrative processes are developed by the actor and need to be reinforced every working day. Whilst it is not overwhelming, these processes need to be adapted still to the administrative practices of hiring companies as each will have different procurement procedures and organisational structures, and the ad hoc traversing of these varying procedures can be cumbersome and frustrating. Internally there is also the logistical problem of organising how to work e.g where to work, when to work. This unstimulating work takes up time and energy, the exhaustion at chasing invoices is a common freelance woe and even trope, while individual time and resource management requires an additional level dedication both in its planning and its everyday application and reinforcement. We’re starting to see companies like Underpinned that act as the ecosystem for this type of administration, the equivalent of the labels services music deal, that allow worker to offload these administrative processes to programs, leaving the artists free to focus on the art.

Once you enter the free market, you are a product, and like other products, you need a brand to stand out from the crowd. This self-branding labour is necessary endeavour to become visible in the open market. There is the (personal) branding work involved in consistently presenting yourself as a product, and there is also labour in consistently presenting the sentiment for what it is you do while you present yourself.

In the first instance, one has to develop a brand by managing various online of offline touch-points. Online, one needs a website and social media profiles, offline one needs to be visible and present at relevant events and happenings. There is labour in building and maintaining these touch-points that your brand can be seen — each platform requires it’s own content strategy, each industry event requires it’s own personal investment. Furthermore, for those that are more creatively inclined, e.g photographers and graphic designers, this might mean working on gaming the algorithms of portfolio platforms to get to the top of the pile. This is done by constant broadcasting and interaction.

“talented, creative people became secondary, in terms of landing commissions or bagging work, to people with exceptionally large social media followings and, well, not much else” — LINK

Additionally, when present and accessible, there is the emotional work involved in consistently portraying the right sentiments, with the “right” sentiments often meaning “the most engaging”. Whilst many/most autonomous workers will naturally have an interest in the field they work in, merely having one is not enough to stand out, one needs to present these thoughts in the most engaging way. Likewise, one must always portray a sense of passion and authenticity when in person. There is an effort involved in such performance, to constantly be front of stage, aware of potential clients and collaborators watching — but unfortunately it is this branding labour that generates new opportunities — the personal brand is more valuable than the person. This brand building, as Nancy Baym, academic and researcher at Microsoft explains, “exemplifies contemporary demands to engage in unpaid social labor to have any hope of professional success”.

In the same way that products, when faced with competition, have to improve upon themselves to stay relevant, so too does the contract worker. When competing against all other freelance workers (potentially in the world), the worker has to continually improve upon his or her self to stay relevant and functional in an ever-changing market. This results in the constant anxiety around upgrading oneself, or “upskilling”, to stay both in the game and ahead of it. Workers of the liquid labour force need to stay up to date on the latest technologies — advertisers need to understand how to use the latest social listening tools, project managers need to adapt to the preferred management tool of choice. Indeed, many have prophesied the age of constant reskilling and lifelong adaptation well into our 60s.

As well as these three buckets of hidden labour providing a physical and emotional burden, a personal toil, it is also a financial burden. Networking events cost money, building and maintaining websites cost money, registering for online courses cost money. So not only is all this labour uncompensentated, but it is done at a loss, hence the growth of personal coaching, a kind of catch all solution that seeks to address the hidden labour and also find some direction in the sense of precarity.

Lone rangers

On top of all this there is also the underlying uncertainty and loneliness that accompanies any type of entrepreneurship. The relative proximity to both success and failure and the irratic way that the pendulum swings between the two. Many self-directed workers suffer through cycles of inactivity and overactivity, some weeks struggling to balance the workload of different clients, other weeks struggling to find any work at all, and, at these low points, are hit with a wave of existential anxiety both psychological and material. The high points, when they do come in, are blemished due to the fact that contract and freelance workers, while contributing equally to projects and work, don’t enjoy the same privileges as FTEs, a sting sharply felt by Airbnb contractors, who, when let go due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, found themselves with only 7% of the restitution offered to its FTEs that got laid off. Psychological in the sense that the autonomous worker is a worker that sells themselves first and their skills later, any knock back to their working legitimacy is seen as a knock on character and identity, it is truly difficult to be impersonal when your labour is your person. Material in the sense that no work essentially means no income, income that covers basic living requirements, and if we’re honest, provides a basis on which we can measure career success. Bounding between these “cycles of feast or famine, and concern about basic income continuation” (Ashford et al) the worker can become mentally exhausted and can find themselves trapped in a sort of vortex of chronic fatigue.

Finally, for a majority of the time, freelancers are alone, moving from one job to the next, often balancing multiple jobs at the same time, like an emotionally hollowed out lothario. Their social relationships with their workers, so vital for job satisfaction (the reason for expensive company away days) are fleeting. In one sense they are remote as they are physically distant to their co-workers, in another sense they are distant to the collective mission that accompanies the task. They are lonely mercenaries constantly questioning their legitimacy.

Social Capital and the true a solution — lateral thinking.

Here is where we come to the pivot. The pivot is away from tackling the problems of lonely freelance work directly, such as in the constant struggle with aforementioned labours, to investing in relationships that will combat these labours indirectly. My previous essay highlighted a few reasons why I thought this pivot happened;

1. Work is immaterial in the sense that is there is no objectiveness — if there is no objectiveness, why learn anything?
2. Social media and curation have made the flow of information and skills spread laterally, between people, rather then vertically.

In relation to this essay we can see that social capital solves both problems of the self determined worker simultaneously and as such is superior to the human capital. So much so that the acquisition of Social Capital has replaced the acquisition for human capital. It helps one navigate the objective problem of hidden costs of doing business and the subjective problem of personal legitimacy at the same time. Human capital, provided that we are doing something that is generally accessible, is seen more of a burden, a tax for playing in the market, whereas social capital connects us to people that can assist us in our labour, and also through the connection give people a sense of relatedness to their peers.

Social Capital solving objective labour.

Investment in social relationships is used to increase access to work through others as opposed to the effect of a direct action of the agent (i.e upskilling, in-person networking with new people). WhatsApp Groups, Facebook Groups, Membership houses, Unions, Creative collectives are all manifestations of this pivot, both offline and online. While the practice of networking has existed for a long time, e.g finding work through friends, in 2020 networks are used to combat the to combat the labour involved in being a freelancer directly as the main tool, rather than to supplement individual labour. People have access to skills, resources and contacts that can assist any actor in the production of work.

• Social Capital allows for skill sharing

Knowing people with specific skills can help complete a project of which you don’t have the human capital to do.

• Social Capital allows for resource sharing.

Knowing people with specific resources can offer easier and less expensive routes to acquiring means of production than traditional e.g knowing people that have spaces/studios/equipment

• Social Capital allows for audience sharing

When the majority of the output is based around engagement of content, the sharing of audiences is integral to gain maximum effectiveness and exposure.

By using social capital, you can bypass the need for developing your own human capital (developmental labour) multiply your visibility by working with other people (branding labour), and bolster the more external parts of your administrative labour i.e by asking anyone how to do personal tax or getting a recommendation of a service that can do this. A recent study by social scientist Asfhord, developed to unpack the skills that contract workers might need in the future, concluded:

“While workers in traditional organisations likely enjoy a somewhat stable set of relationships, independent workers must construct relationships agentically, building a constellation of social ties, including to other independent workers with similar skills, potential clients, supporters, and employers”

Social Capital solving personal labour.

There is another benefit of social capital outside of pure administrative outsourcing. Social Capital also facilitates a sense of relatedness to other freelancers — in short in creates a community, a community that combats the lonely nature of self employment.

Walking into a space like Shoreditch House (a London chain of private members clubs created by Soho House), you are struck by the a sense individual industriousness, that everybody there is working on something — wether that be coding a website, organising an event or having a meeting. This fact, and the fact that you are there too, provides a social ecosystem in which to embed your career and provide it with some legitimacy. Being embedded in these social ecosystems via Social Capital provides one with this legitimacy that one cannot get through individual labour alone. This is half of the selling point of such places, especially branded co-working space, such as WeWork, that advertise themselves on the basis of being a community for nomads. The other half is, of course, that they are areas of co-operation — hubs in which skills and expertise are shared and where knowledge capital flows freely throughout the building.

This effect is especially poignant in the creative industries. Initially because creative industries are infused with with “cultural lore” that have accompanied the arts since its conception and most recently in late capitalism. In the arts, the culture lore being the stories of “it was a time and a place and these were the people” that infuse a scene/subculture with their reputation / inspiration. This culture lore has now been co-opted by capitalism, with brands brands like Nike and Apple trading off a sentiment of being innovative and forward thinking and “cool” culturally and being associated with arts and cultures that are innovative and forward thinking and “cool”. This practice of investing in portraying such an image is most commonly known as cultural marketing, and will range from anything to artist sponsorships, branded events, art focus workshops etc. An autonomous worker that works in such an industry without social capital is both doubly unrelated and illegitimate, they are unconnected to the artistic scene and they are unconnected to the professional scene, they are complete outside of the conversation. So being part of a “crowd” is ingrained and intertwined with both internal and external legitimacy.

It has recently been announced that Matthew Williams is the head of LVMH fashion house Givenchy. Matthew Williams first gained exposure to his affiliation to Virgil Abloh as part of the Been Trill collective, which gained exposure through it’s affiliation with musicians like ASAP Rocky and Kanye West. Here is an example of how social capital is a cause of both personal and professional legitimacy as they, in the environment of late capitalism are inextricably linked. It is this sense of affiliation that contemporary working creatives are now seeking, both as a way to open up opportunities for themselves to bypass the problems described above, but also to provide a level of relatedness to each other that combats the sense of displacement when one works alone. In the case of the acquisition of social capital within the creative industry, the effect of relatedness is felt twice over. You are part of the professional and creative community.

In general the same study also recommends:

“[it will be] important to have the capability to craft a costal support system that can both buffer the demands of the work drain and enable feelings of stable personal connection and belonging”

In general, the acquisition of social capital is entirely more beneficial than the acquisition of human or personal capital in the sense that it offers the potential for both subjective and objective career progression. Likewise, the blending of work and leisure has blurred personal and professional relationships, so that the relatedness legitimises the actor professionally and personally. It uniquely address the blend of the formal and informal that act as markers of both the objective and subjective understanding of career satisfaction. This is the “how to make it in America” generation. The HBO show that ran from 2010–2011 is near cult like in its status, I imagine because people can relate to it, and specifically the idea of utilising semi-professional relationships to get ahead. It is arguable that places such as Shoreditch House and other ground zeros of gentrification are meccas for Social Capital in the sense that they are constructed perfectly for the the purpose of:

“Finding individuals doing similar work and forging ongoing relationships with them through formal and informal interactions [that] may be essential to independent worker’s ability to survive and thrive in the gig economy”

Discussion

I am of the opinion that, like with most things capitalism will come for these groups too, some might brand themselves, selling their collective creativity or identity to the highest bidder. See Brand Federation as an example. What are now informal WhatsApp groups will become formal, paid for groups, where industry resources and information is exchanged behind a paywall.

Acknowledgements:

This essay was shaped with valued feedback from Jamie McCraken, Sarah Johnson and Georgia Meyer.

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