You write: ‘The ambivalent status of the precariat makes it the perfect sacrifice, since it is a victim forced to deny being one.’ How does this ambivalent status affect people?





I think it’s an honest condition of euphoria mixed with moments of doubt. It’s true that you might have hints of what we would call success; one day you might be proud of your life and then have a complete shift a couple of days later. For example, you can say ‘I have some positive feedback so I’m considered a professional’ but then at the same time I might not be able to pay my rent. It’s a fight of narratives that happens within the self.

One positive thing I see more and more is that people are saying ‘fuck it’ with the whole narrative of selling the self. I see people presenting themselves as precarious, bringing forward the precarity that characterizes their lives. There’s an artist called Alina Lupu. She studied at an art school here in the Netherlands and after she finished she was asked to speak to the students about how her career was going. At the time she was working for Deliveroo and therefore she decided to speak about her art practice with no twists other than she was dressed as a bike courier with the big square bag on her back, and without saying anything just bringing that kind of reality and embodying it in a certain way.

How did the art students react?

Apparently they were tweeting: ‘The only graduate speaking here is wearing a Deliveroo jacket. Great.’ But precarity is real. It’s there.

In the book you mention Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s attempt to reclaim the concept of entrepreneurship with their ‘entrepreneurship of the multitude’. What are your feelings on this?

Part of what I wanted to do was to acknowledge that people on the left are dealing with this notion of entrepreneurship, so this means that the concept is somehow hegemonic. Because one valid critique of my book is that we have been speaking about entrepreneurship critically ever since The New Spirit of Capitalism. However, my argument is that entrepreneurship has radicalized itself even further because now it is crystallizing into interfaces; the third chapter of my book shows the sheer scope of entrepreneurialism as it condenses into the digital services we use every day. And so the legacy, the heritage of entrepreneurship is not easy to get rid of.

But I don’t think that in order to fight entrepreneurialism we should reappropriate the term because that has been done already: social entrepreneurship, ethical entrepreneurship, and so on.