ON EXPOSURE 2/3 - Labour

It seems nobody wants to work for free these days

This is a letter of The (Im)posture — the newsletter from Julien Posture. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing

Dear creatives, I hope you had a lovely week hidden away from exposure to the heat and to predatory practices. Last essay was all about the cultural underpinnings of exposure, and the history of what it means to be visible. Today’s letter is all about work, or rather, labour. While the technological and cultural aspects are important, exposure is always proposed in an exchange for work. This means there are particular ideologies regarding what work is, what it’s for, anchored in capitalism and neoliberalism, that create a fertile ground for people to work for exposure. At the end of the day, no matter if we consider visibility as capital, working for exposure is free labour, or rather, what Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan have called hope labour.

A Labour of Hope

Kuehn and Corrigan interviewed SB Nation sports bloggers and Yelp consumer reviewers in order to understand why they would write for these platforms for free. They found that a lot of them saw their writing as self-promotion, hoping that it would be “noticed” and lead to paid gigs but also as a creative outlet, bringing them pleasure on a personal level. In debates about free labour, the latter - pleasure - often justifies the former - working for free. But the authors point to a specific type of free labour we only see in creative professions in digital spaces :

Without discounting participants’ compelling desires for creativity and community, we argue here that online work’s seduction as a future-oriented investment is an understated motivation for social production—and one that is increasingly incorporated into online business models. We describe these processes as ‘hope labour’ or un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow.

Sounds familiar ? This work ideology didn’t happen overnight. They trace it back to what Gina Neff has called venture labour, a form of personal investment - of time, energy, and other resources - from employees in their jobs, particularly in tech. In contrast to the previous era in which an employee didn’t feel personal stakes or agency in the fate of its employer’s projects, this new form of work involved the shifting of economic risk from the collective to the individual. I’ve witnessed this in my previous life as an ethnographer for organizations in Montreal, when I worked with a tech company in which each employee felt very much like an entrepreneur, and would be encouraged to feel like one. This means they had personal stakes in the success of particular projects, without ripping off the benefits (profit, or intellectual property) of their extra work.

Hope labour is a continuation of this logic. Neoliberal ideology has reframed uncertainty and precariousness as glamorous “risk taking” or “investment.” In this context, it is up to individuals to take risks, such as working for exposure, in order to sow the seeds of future success, the same way you invest in stocks in order to get rich. Work, now understood through this stock market metaphor, can be highly volatile and dependent on your “risk tolerance,” aka privilege. Venture labourers are characterized by their (feeling of) agency, that they are in charge, at least to set up strategies to minimize their exposure to risk. Meanwhile, hope labourers, working in an even more precarious and competitive industry, gave up on that agency to “hope” for the best outcome. We work for exposure, no matter its quality, and hope it’ll bring something good.

In the creative industry, hope labour takes many forms, not just exposure. “Side projects,” “personal work,” “drawing challenge,” etc. are forms of rebranding of hope labour. I’m not gonna make friends here but take a figure like Andy J. Pizza and the pragmatic discourse he created around creativity through his podcast and Skillshare classes. His goal is to help creatives function within the rules of the neoliberal game in a way that feels “authentic.” To achieve this, he operates a clever rebrand of free labour marketed for artists, speaking in a language that feels like they are not selling their souls. Working on a fictional project on your personal time becomes a “side project,” giving it away for free is deemed “generous” (because creativity if a gift blah blah blah), networking becomes “collaborating and connecting,” etc. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done all these things and appreciate Andy’s pragmatic advice, this is not a tear down, but I think we need to call things by their real name, and the real name of “side project” is “hope labour.”

One of the major issues with exposure and hope labour is that it puts the creative in a double bind situation :

As more firms adopt and/or draw from the hope labour market, though, aspiring creators confront a difficult economic paradox: if you want the work, you must first be willing to do the job for little to no pay. In this, hope labourers undermine the very labour market that they aspire to enter by continually supplying it with individuals who are willing to work for nothing. Hope labour thus contributes, in part, to the precarity of contemporary work.

Once everyone is willing to work for exposure, the people who are supposed to hire us in the future will skip our name and hire someone who is willing to work for exposure then. Because no matter how much we think our style is unique, we’re all very much replaceable.

The exposed takes it all

Another mechanism that supports the logic of exposure as a form of capital is the notion that the creative industry is a winner-takes-all market. A winner-takes-all market is an economic system in which the very few sellers/products at the top receives a disproportionately large share of the revenue of the whole market. The contemporary art market for example is very much like this. You have a few artists repped by New York galleries making millions of dollars from sales in the primary market while the vast majority of artists barely make a living.

The creative industry, illustration might be less contrasted but still has wild discrepancies between the bottom and top illustrators in terms of income. But our perception of this reality tends to be skewed because of the way we create success stories in our creative media. We see the same illustrators featured on It’s Nice That repeatedly, working with the biggest clients, etc. But does this equates economic stability ? Not always. Talking to my peers, I realized that seeing the same name everywhere often means that people have said yes to things most of us would have refused. So-called successful illustrators are sometimes the ones who happen to say yes to sometimes abusive work conditions, which you can only realize when the next year the same client reaches out to you, and let you know how much they paid the precedent illustrator. This is not a comment on the ethics of accepting poorly paying jobs, but one on how we tend to conflate being visible with getting paid in many different ways. Just like 90s band TLC you can sell millions of albums and still be broke, because there are many ways to turn visibility capital into sterile exposure.

Exposure is an external definition of what creative labour looks like, it’s not made to benefit you as a creative. It’s a justification for an industry that is leaving its most crucial workers more precarious than ever, with stagnating wages, and always more ways to have us compete, and fewer and fewer ways to be protected. Exposure, and hope labour in general, is also a mechanism of homogenization of the industry by which the only people who will be able to work for exposure are the ones already in a position of relative comfort. Those who have a social support network (parents, partner, etc.) or existing economic capital (a house and no rent to pay) are less impacted by this work logic, while marginalized folks, particularly BIPOC individuals, have to refuse “opportunities” to work for exposure, and ultimately leave the industry. Having the time and resources to work on and promote a “side project” or working for exposure is a privilege, and shouldn’t be a standard.

In order to change this, we need to redefine how we value work in our industry in general. Does being successful mean to be seen a lot, or does it mean to make a decent living, for years, with clients that respect you ? I often got sucked into this former version of success that the creative industry is so prompt to celebrate. Quick viral success after a feature in a magazine. Brand deals right off university, interviews, getting invited on podcasts, etc. For a long time that idea of success - as visibility - warped my perception of what success looked like for me. I’ve worked full time for years, making an OK living, enjoying my work, having time to do personal stuff, collaborating with respectful, regular clients and connecting with my peers in meaningful ways. Yet, the absence of visibility milestones (the viral posts, the interviews, the features…) made me feel somehow unsatisfied, I felt invisible; therefore I wasn’t *really* successful. Looking at the economic ideologies of contemporary labour helped me to contextualize these feelings, and most importantly, to define in my own terms what creative work and success looks like to me.

If you enjoy receiving this newsletter in your inbox, please consider going to the paid version. The paid version is exactly the same as the free one. This is because I believe paying for someone’s creative work shouldn’t be about paywalling readers but about “payspringboarding” writers. If you agree and can afford it, you can switch to the paying version here.

You can also follow me on Twitter or Instagram. This letter is the start of a conversation, don’t hesitate to share it to someone who might like it, or to like or comment below.