Fragility is a better framework than precarity for us, since it focuses on internal structural things potentially within our control rather than external risks that are not (“precarity” has also become overloaded with political baggage lately, so I’m going to avoid the term).

Clutch time is when capital and labor both try to rest and relax and gigworkers get going. That’s the time when those of us in the clutch class really come into our own. We go to meetups, we get coffee with each other. We scan the social streams for openings, seek out room to maneuver, ways to deploy high-leverage cheap assets, learn breakout

For us in the clutch class, with our Slightly Scabby Tendencies, the mechanisms for working towards shared goals are much newer—loose, intelligent coordination around information advantages. We swap notes, we share leads, we pitch in to help each other out on specific gigs, we put ourselves in crucible groups to rapidly learn skills far faster than

We are clutch. We don’t waste time in bad equilibria. We either individually help drive discontinuous movements towards better ones or we leave the scene for a better one. We are clutch. We do not waste time on collective-action political mechanisms. We let individual instincts guide us, and rely on emergent networked dynamics, and the power of

With the right talents, you can make an excellent video with an iPhone, upload it to YouTube, raise money on Kickstarter, and make an indie movie on your own, with rented equipment and non-SAG actors. The value of various high-leverage distribution channels like movie theaters is falling by the day.

Why? Because the gig economy, especially the indie consulting corner of it, relies on production capabilities that are 5% based on owned capital equipment and 95% based on affordances of the free internet.

A graphic designer or independent strategy consultant is fundamentally a more mobile type of economic actor than a welder or an auto-assembly specialist. We work with our own cheap tools: laptops and notebooks for the most part, rather than with million-dollar machine tools or billion-dollar factories owned by investors seeking returns. We serve

If you think of organizations as cars, a good mental model of the politics (not economics) of work is that capital is the accelerator, labor is the brake, and middle-management is the gearbox. And we gigworkers? We are the clutch. We help disengage/re-engage the drivetrain during gear-shifting, as operating regimes change and organizations need to

The central political question in gigwork is this: are we gigworkers part of labor or are we part of capital? For our purposes, capital is a loose category that includes the professional managerial class as well as the share-owning class. Labor includes anyone for whom incentives suggest collective action as a good general strategic approach to