Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #82

Illustrator Karlotta Freier recalls being mocked by her art school classmates for asking about how to make a living as an illustrator. “No one would make fun of a plumbing student for asking about the business side of things,” she says, “so why don’t I get to ask?” For decades, the promise of a creative career was the alleviation of the worst parts

We’ve been told that doing “good work” will lead to economic success, but really, it might just be the other way around. With the help of large collective organising, worker-driven structures, and knowledge-sharing, we can accomplish better work conditions and more beautiful, more fulfilling creative work.”

For several decades, the price of this belief has been creatives’ difficulty in conceiving of their work as labour – and by extension, to benefit from the gains of other workers’ struggles.

“We have a problem with scale. The planetary crisis can seem impossible to grasp. But focusing on the local can feel limited. How do we work to a scale that feels manageable? There is a way of reorganising how we think about scale: the -shed. -sheds (from Old English scead) describe the natural boundaries between waterbodies. They are not hard-edge

The Boomer generation was dealt with outstandingly good economic cards. We’re living in a different world now, but the stories we tell ourselves, the goals we chase after, and the ideals we compare ourselves to—e.g. a steady career trajectory—still often come from a time that is now increasingly seen as an anomaly. It’s time to move on!

‘We made a mistake and by that I mean my generation and my parents generation. The mistake we made was thinking that the period from 1946 to 1980 was the norm. No it was not! It was the anomaly! We had just wiped out the manufacturing capabilities of anyone who could challenge us. So the idea that you had that job with the gold watch and you could

The narrative that art or creativity isn’t real work (as described below) is just one element of a much bigger discussion about what is considered and adequately valued as “real work” in today's society and economic system and what isn’t. As I wrote in Aliveness: Reframing Productivity: “We don’t really think of productivity as a measure of being

Because managerialism has spread so thoroughly into society, its effect has been to anesthetize everyday life to the point that many people cannot envision an alternative way to organize themselves.