Entrepreneurial affect: Attachment to work practice in San Francisco's digital media sector

Abstract

In this paper I examine entrepreneurial work in San Francisco's digital media sector to consider how affect and desire are invested in sites of neoliberal production. Drawing on recent writing on affect, I treat affect as ambivalent and coextensive with the mode of production, suggesting an approach that looks beyond the investment of value in commodities, to how desire is produced and directly located in economic infrastructures. Entrepreneurial affect functions through the embodiment of work as a site of personal “satisfaction,” the development of passionate attachments to that work, and the production of working subjectivities characterized by their “compulsory sociality.” I argue that affect functions through entrepreneurial forms of digital media work to produce and reproduce attachments to precarious working conditions. Drawing on recent debates on precariousness and precarity, I reflect on the possible consequences of affective attachments to entrepreneurial work as a primary site for the justification of precarious work practices and neoliberal modes of governance in general.

Keywords

Affect desire digital media cultural industries precarity work

Introduction

To be a good subject of neoliberal labor, one has to emit desire and identification with the affective ties of collegiality to make networks of shared obligation seem more grounded and permanent. (Berlant, 2011: 218)

In this paper I explore the relationship between entrepreneurship and the affective and passionate attachments that entrepreneurs form to their work. I consider how societal attachments to particular kinds of work are a function not only of the need to reproduce effective methods of capital accumulation but are also psychic investments in the efficacy of those methods over others. As noted in the epigraph above by Lauren Berlant (2011), I seek to theorize neoliberal capitalism as a system of investment, which is at once economic and affective. Affect in this paper is defined thus as a structuration of feeling, or infrastructure of desire, that is materially produced and circulates alongside subjects and commodities in the workplace. Through this concept of affect, I examine the visceral configurations of habit and desire that might blind and bind workers to dogmatic systems of governmentality by insecurity (Lorey, 2015) that encourage the production of subjects that identify more with productivist ideals than with other workers, unionization, or systems of welfare (Gibson-Graham, 2006). This paper builds on ongoing empirical research with entrepreneurs and engineers working in early stage digital media firms in San Francisco to examine the emotional geographies of neoliberalism (Cairns, 2013) and consider how work can be a site of subject formation, requiring personal forms of investment in and identification with the mode of production (Weeks, 2011). I link entrepreneurial forms of affect with recent debates on precarity to suggest that the promise of intimacy with one's own personal “human capital” offers a seductive justification for precarious forms of work.

As researchers on the so-called cultural industries have noted, work in these industries can be characterized as intensive, underpaid, flexible, temporary, and precarious (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Ross, 2008). Yet, cultural work is also often characterized as personally rewarding, satisfying, and glamorous, connoting high status and respect (Marwick, 2013; Pratt, 2002). I suggest that workers' romanticization of “cultural” and “creative” forms of entrepreneurial work, and the attachments that they form to the expected promises thereof are coextensive, not separate characteristics. Through an association with the perceived rewards of entrepreneurial work, ambivalent forms of affect may recast precarity itself as a desirable outcome of work. Entrepreneurialism is, then, the optimistic work of “maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object,” in spite of that object's potentially toxic effects (Berlant, 2011: 24).

These attachments are cultivated and developed in the context of entrepreneurial and precarious working conditions that are normalized, valorized, and validated by San Francisco's purported success as a creative and entrepreneurial tech hub (Pratt, 2006a). This celebratory commitment to precarious working conditions as a constitutive component of entrepreneurial success, in this sector and others, has been influential as a neoliberalizing model for other kinds of not-traditionally entrepreneurial work (Brown, 2015; Foucault, 2008; Gill and Pratt, 2008). While other excellent research has focused on the mobility of urban creative neoliberal policy (Christophers, 2007; Peck, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010), my focus is on how the desire for and affective attachments to entrepreneurial forms of work are produced and circulated. As algorithms, code, digital and social media, hardware, software, firmware, and data continue to influence our everyday navigation of space—urban and domestic, public and private—the desires and affects that are transmitted and circulate through the work practices of their producers (including entrepreneurs and engineers) become increasingly important to consider.

Hardt and Negri (2000) examine “affective labor” as a form of work characteristic of late capitalism, accompanied by a distinct kind of knowledge-based, information-intensive worker, including both service-sector work and the “creative” work in cultural industries. Rather than taking “affective labor” as an umbrella term to categorize and describe post-Fordist forms of work, in this paper I consider how affects circulate in and through the workplace to produce and reproduce normative attachments to objects, and, in particular, to work itself. In this sense, I am not making claims about “knowledge workers” or cognitive capitalism in general as necessarily more or less “affective” than other forms of capitalism. Instead I consider how affects function as a driving force in processes of accumulation, as a system of adherence, or orientation to particular modes of production (Ahmed, 2004a) rather than, as in Hardt and Negri (2000), seeing “affect” as a characteristic of a kind or type of work. As others have noted, categories such as “affective” or “immaterial labor” have too broadly elided real distinctions between different kinds of work (Gill and Pratt, 2008). Indeed, I agree with Deleuze and Guattari (1983), in suggesting that all forms of production, capitalist and non-capitalist, are always imbricated in the circulation and production of systems of desire and affect, though with temporally and geographically specific and differential effects on workers through the production of a social unconscious.

Therefore, in this paper I argue that affect functions through entrepreneurial forms of digital media work to produce and reproduce attachments to normative (and often precarious) working conditions. These affective attachments reinforce a privileged idea about what work “should be,” and how work ought to be practiced despite potentially deleterious effects on individuals' earning capacity, physical and mental health, and “life” as a category broadly conceived. The consequences of these attachments to entrepreneurialism reinforce the notion that precarious work is acceptable and desirable and, further, that it should be the necessary default approach to all forms of work.

In the next section, I describe digital media “startup” firms in San Francisco, in complement and contrast to other sectors that comprise the “cultural industries.” Then, in section three I make a case and provide evidence for the affective character of digital media work through the examination of three major themes. First, I consider the entrepreneur as homo economicus (Foucault, 2008), connoting “satisfaction” in work provided directly by their own productive capacities. Second, and closely linked to the previous theme on the embodied character of early stage digital media work, I examine “passion” and “love” for work as ambivalent affects connected to this entrepreneurial “satisfaction.” Third, I consider how social interaction is enforced through networking practices that keep people at work when out of the office through forms of disciplinary socialization or “compulsory sociality” (Gregg, 2010). Finally, in section four, and reflecting on the material presented in the previous section, I engage with the contemporary debates on precariousness and precarity to examine entrepreneurialism's role as an affective regulatory mechanism, producing attachments to normative work ethics and values, through its elision of clear distinctions between “work” and “life” (Weeks, 2007).

Digital media work in San Francisco

Digital media work in early stage firms usually consists of small teams of one or two founders. Firms starting out need at least one software engineer or technical founder, as well as an entrepreneurial founder managing the business and development aspects of the firm. In some cases, individuals with both sets of expertise act as the sole founder. Firms in this sector build digital applications for the web or for smart phones and tablets. These applications include (though are not limited to) social and locative media, video games and gamification add-ons, business-to-business products, “sharing” and e-commerce platforms, and software as a service. Cofounders typically leave full-time employment to pursue the development of their own firm and a working prototype of their product, working unremunerated for the prospect of equity while they self-fund by living on savings (or “bootstrapping”), either through personal wealth or contributions from relatives and friends.

Startups are usually not taken seriously by investors unless their founders are working full time on their firm and product. At early stages, engineers and entrepreneurs' main tasks involve developing their product, building a client or user base, and seeking funding from angel investors, venture capitalists, or from crowdfunding sources, which may be accredited investor- or user-driven. If firms are successful they will attract funding and expect to grow quickly, meaning that they will have to professionalize and build a corporate structure. Startup work at this stage is notoriously uncertain, extensively time consuming, and stressful (Marwick, 2013). Some entrepreneurs told me that it was not uncommon for them to work twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week during the fund-raising stage of their firm, with no guarantee of success.

The “cultural industries” denote a variety of creative and artistic forms of work associated with the production of “culture” including television and film (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2008), fashion (Wissinger, 2007), advertising (Pratt, 2006b), and music (Hracs and Leslie, 2013). While digital media work arguably is included in this definition of cultural industries, there are a number of discrepancies that set this work in San Francisco in particular apart. Other kinds of cultural work, though becoming more entrepreneurial, less dependent on union organizing, more flexible, and contract- and project-based (Perrons, 2003), still depend in large part on existing, often corporate-owned infrastructure such as production and design studios. In contrast however, most startups that work entirely on digital products do not require access to existing production or design studios (Pratt, 2006a). Many studies of “new media” have focused on “project work” (Christopherson, 2002; Gill, 2009; Grabher 2004; Jarvis and Pratt, 2006; Perrons, 2003; Pratt, 2013) as a way to deemphasize an essentialist economic emphasis on the firm as a privileged unit of analysis, and to highlight the increasingly precarious character of this work, defined as temporary- and freelance-worker driven. However, I suggest that the notion of the “project” does not adequately articulate work undertaken in San Francisco in digital media startups.

Startups remain oriented around the life cycle of a firm, which does not begin or end with a particular “finished” product defined by a single “project.” A product must continue to evolve and change as the firm itself grows. The life cycle of a startup is “complete” when the firm fails to attract funding, is acquired by a larger company, or the firm no longer seeks speculative investment and high growth by validating a “sustainable” revenue model. Though the focus on the “project” does not adequately define media production in San Francisco, I seek to retain the people- or worker-focused approach that benefitted project-based studies (Perrons, 2004) through a small-scale examination of entrepreneurial affect and embodiment and in the workplace (Ettlinger, 2003, 2004; McDowell, 2015; McMorran, 2012). Acknowledging the progress and importance of a “firm” as the focal point of digital media production should not be mistaken as an attempt to suggest that digital media work is less unstable, temporary, or ephemeral than a project-based focus on new media. While the firm remains one of the central legal and economic structures organizing digital media work in San Francisco, its potential to act as a determinist or essentialist component is undermined through the entrepreneurial coincidence of self and enterprise, and the continuing importance of and dependence upon personal social networks.

San Francisco itself provides a geographically specific example of digital media work, distinct from other current and emerging hubs in the United States such as Seattle, Boulder, Oakland, Austin, Chicago, and New York. The proximity to Silicon Valley is significant, providing already existing access to capital specifically directed toward investment in early and later-stage software startups. In 2014 alone, venture capital firms in the Silicon Valley made investments of over US$13 billion in software, more than half the total amount invested nationwide (PwC, 2015). Silicon Valley remains home to many high profile and large corporate technology firms (including Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Google, and HP), providing a network of knowledge and support in terms of professional advice and mentorship, as well as legal and financial services with technology expertise. Firms such as Facebook that style themselves as “startups” despite having validated revenue models, campuses of their own, and successful initial public offerings produce an affective promise of what “startup success” and startup work should look like. The proximity to Stanford University also bears comment, providing startups in San Francisco with access to cheap forms of engineering and entrepreneurial labor, as students and recent graduates are often willing to work cheaply, for equity, or as unpaid interns.

Turner (2006) describes how Silicon Valley and San Francisco's recent histories relate to the complex emergence of forms of technological utopianism that celebrate both the heroism of the liberal individual and generate popular imaginaries of “personal” and intimate computing as necessarily egalitarian, horizontal, and democratic. The evolution of computer production in the second half of the 20th century fed neatly into discourses reinforcing the primacy of Western development narratives, simultaneously appealing to both libertarian principles on the right, and the evolving counterculture on the left. This “Californian Ideology” continues its long and influential history of purporting the beneficial and revolutionary potential of technology. More than just “an incubator for newborn technologies,” Silicon Valley also incubates new forms of social organization and “cultural philosophies” (English-Lueck, 2002). Today the sector's “disruption” narratives can be seen as an example of this, often serving as a neoliberal valorization of flexible, precarious, and impermanent forms of work, facilitated by technological platforms including Uber and TaskRabbit, which undermine “traditional” business, and celebrate the liberal individual as an independent contractor—a form of on-demand, temporary, and poorly remunerated labor.

For these reasons, San Francisco software production provides a unique, though surprisingly underexamined setting for studies relating cultural work in the form of software or digital media production to the concepts of affect (as a system of attachment, orientation, and circulation, rather than a generic characteristic of post-Fordist production) and precarity. Due to its proximity to capital, recent and continuing history of technological utopianism, and relative independence from corporate infrastructures, entrepreneurialism thrives as a normative form of precarious work, serving as a benchmark for other emerging technology and cultural hubs and, as I argue in this paper, work in general. Having in this section introduced and contextualized digital media work in San Francisco, I move now to discuss in the next section how affect functions in digital media work, through the embodied figure of homo economicus, passionate attachments to work, and compulsory forms of sociality at networking events, which facilitate the devaluation of spheres of life that do not pertain directly to work.

Entrepreneurial affect

Embodying work and entrepreneurial satisfaction

Entrepreneurs and cofounders that I spoke with often displayed anxiety about the possibility of having to work for others.¹ These anxieties were articulated with a related fantasy of being in control of one's own means of production. One interviewee asked, “while I'm generating substantial results for them [an employer], what would that do if I was generating those same results for myself?” This interviewee communicated the assumption that entrepreneurial work necessarily places the individual in control of their means of production, leading to an unalienated form of work and resulting in greater degrees of working satisfaction (Hope and Richards, 2015). Structurally of course, this is not the case, since rounds of investment divide the control and ownership of a firm between cofounders, venture capitalists, and other potential stakeholders, rendering the entrepreneur not only accountable to themselves, but also to the capitalists who expect a substantial and expedient return on their investment. Despite the political economic reality necessitating the inevitability of the entrepreneur's alienation from their labor, the attachment to an idea of unalienated labor resulting in personal “satisfaction” is a powerful and productive fantasy.

In this section, I suggest that entrepreneurism in its very definition is the production of an intimate attachment to this aforementioned fantasy. I examine the entrepreneur's attachment to the embodiment of their work, an attachment that is located in and justified by “satisfaction” (Foucault, 2008) of which the productive capacity of the entrepreneur is imagined to be the lone source. “Satisfaction” erases the necessity for clear distinctions between “work” and “life,” as the former becomes the defining and central feature of the latter.

Related to the idea that entrepreneurial labor can be unalienated under capitalism is the understanding that individuals have a personal responsibility to depend on themselves and provide their own means of satisfaction, reinforcing the liberal values of individual sovereignty and personal freedom. The worker appears as an enterprise for him or herself, in which their working skills and capacities are inseparable from their person (Foucault, 2008). Homo economicus, the entrepreneur form, is the embodiment of the capacity to work and provide the source of one's own satisfaction. This is not a relationship of exchange between worker and capitalist, but one in which the worker is solely responsible for an investment in their own human capital, their production and earnings as a source of satisfaction for themselves (Feher, 2009). Not only is the entrepreneur both a producer and consumer, but they are also independently responsible for the continuing efficiency of their capacities for production and consumption, for the (re-)investment in their own human capital above all else.

The location of “satisfaction” in the body and capacities of the entrepreneur was an important talking point for many of the entrepreneurs I spoke with, and a frequent justification for moving away from other forms of work. One entrepreneur, discussing why he started his own business over remaining in corporate work or working for an NGO stated, “the only way I'm going to be fulfilled and satisfied is if I'm going to start something that I know is really important to me and that I'm one hundred and ten percent a good fit for.” Though some, like this entrepreneur, suggested that other forms of work could provide satisfaction (most frequently charity, not-for-profit, or NGO work), these forms of satisfaction fell short of returns in the investment in oneself that entrepreneurial work promised. Another said, making this comparison directly, “I don't think that I would feel such a deep sense of satisfaction [working anywhere else]. It's kind of like when you volunteer for an amazing non-profit organization and you feel you get something back.” “Getting something back” here is framed as the reward for volunteer work; the return is the affective feeling or sense of satisfaction. She continued, “you are gaining from that relationship even though you are volunteering your time for someone else. You are receiving that sort of good soul boost and that's kind of what it is like working here.” Satisfaction is a sense of anticipation for the realization of the idea, image, or promise of affect on the worker's body, an ambivalent though productive feeling of anxiety or pleasure located directly in their productive capacities, compelling the entrepreneur to partake in a circuitous repetition of production, which is also a repetition of affect (Deleuze, 1988).

In the two examples in the paragraph above, even though there is no direct financial reward, these entrepreneurs could still find some “satisfaction” in volunteering work. Yet, satisfaction in this sense intended by these entrepreneurs is not just affective, but also economic, a financial return on an investment made in the self. Indeed, as Donzelot (1991) notes, the important point is not the production of pleasure through work, but the coincidence of pleasure and work, so that they might mutually realize one another. Charity work provides only partial return on the satisfaction that is invested and sought, an affective “good soul boost” without the corresponding financial reward. The colocation of economic and affective satisfaction makes entrepreneurial work for these subjects the most efficient return on investments made in one's own human capital. As another entrepreneur said, “the beautiful thing about startups is that you're investing in them and in yourself as well.”

In these accounts, the seductive character of entrepreneurialism is located in the affective and economic sense of satisfaction in one's work, which is also satisfaction in one's self. This idea renders individuals responsible for reproducing their own conditions of exploitation (recast as an ambiguously pleasurable, though consummate experience), a goal that, through the valorization of entrepreneurialism itself, has become desirable in its own right. This desire manifests consciously not as exploitation, but in the satisfaction in one's own heroic individualism, a fulfillment of the promise of liberal sovereignty. Lazzarato (2012) describes how the individual as human capital is premised on the affective qualities of personal trust and guilt. The privileged, indebted subject of neoliberalism is the individual who can repay debts through the value of their personal promise or guarantee. I suggest that debt and enterprise share these characteristics, since both work on a similar speculative, anticipatory logic, trading on the promise of a productive future that seeks to guarantee the maintenance of present relations of exploitation and (re)turning the potential for future extractions of labor power.

The unwillingness to generate value for others, coupled with entrepreneurial fantasies of autonomy and control, relate closely to a desire for economic and existential freedom, embracing liberal individualism and responsibilization, while valorizing risk, failure, insecurity, and flexibility (Knight, 2013). The isolation of the liberal subject is necessitated by the operations of a social field governed by axes of permanent insecurity and inequality, and of opening oneself up to degrees of risk for which the individual becomes wholly responsible (Lazzarato, 2009). The accounts from entrepreneurs presented in this section reproduce the belief that entrepreneurial work is the only true source of satisfaction, eliding a clear distinction between “work” and “life.” Commenting on the absence of this distinction, one entrepreneur said, “I don't need to switch off, because the work that I'm doing is less work, it's more… it's more a passion, so it kind of just merges into everything else.” During time assigned to hobbies and relaxation, he said that he would also be “checking email, waiting for an investor to get back on a promising opportunity […] I mesh those two worlds together.” If one can only be truly satisfied through affective and economic returns on investments in one's own human capital, “life” as a domain of unproductive (and therefore inefficient) activity remains a secondary pursuit.

For Foucault, it is not necessarily the enterprise form itself that is at issue, but its generalization and normalization as the dominant standard for economic forms of subjectivity and governance under neoliberal capitalism. Foucault (2008: 148) writes, “this multiplication of the ‘enterprise’ form within the social body is what is at stake in neo-liberal policy.” This is the production of a default subject position for all workers premised on competition, efficiency, and efficacy, and the belief that one can only truly find satisfaction in oneself though work (Loomis, forthcoming). This logic works beyond economic practices, percolating into other models of governance and forms of life. Indeed, locating economic rationality driven by one's own satisfaction in work as the locus of all “life” is not only an valorization of the economic productivism, but simultaneously a devaluation of other forms of political, social, and cultural life (Brown, 2015).

Passionate investments

Closely related to the discussion of “satisfaction” in one's own entrepreneurial capacities of production and consumption was the location of that satisfaction in the affects of “passion” or “love” for work. In this section I examine how entrepreneurs discussed their passionate attachments to their work, the significance of the ambivalence of both of these affects, and how this attachment often provided a justification for working longer hours, increased levels of stress and frustration, and heightened degrees of risk and uncertainty.

“Passion” has been described as an ambivalent affective state, defined by a pleasurable satisfaction in one's work combined with the fatigue, anxiety, and doubt that characterize demanding employment situations (Armano and Murgia, 2013). As Ahmed (2010) notes, attachments to an expectation of success or “the good life,” might also serve as primary sites of ambivalence, in which good and bad feeling overlap. In this affective “trap” (Armano and Murgia, 2013), the relationship between anticipation and disappointment, intimacy and uncertainty become interwoven, to the extent that they may become indistinguishable from and conflated with one another. In the case of digital media work, for example, the promise of a glamorous and “laid back” working environment with “horizontal” employment structures and flexible hours is held as the gold standard of the successful startup. Optimistic promises, which remain unachieved and unachievable by most, serve as generalized incentives to remain unhappy at work, and for work to encroach on life beyond “work.”

One interviewee, Richard,² described a transformation in his attitude toward working in a small company. “If this doesn't work out,” Richard said, “we'll go and get a job, and something like that, well now we can't, because we've fallen in love with this.” Despite initially feeling like he could simply walk away and seek a corporate job in a larger firm, Richard had developed a passionate responsibility to his coworkers and a form of love for the product they were working on. This feeling of responsibility came quickly into harsh conflict with the progress of his first product, a social media platform that failed within a year because Richard and his team were unable to attract interest from investors. “Love” manifested in this case as a response to the failure of a demand for reciprocity through an intensification of affect directed toward an already-lost object (Ahmed, 2004b). Richard's attachment to latency through waiting for success could be seen as an attempt to extend his affective and economic investment, an aggressive and opportunistic, though perhaps futile, demand for trust and intimacy, a cruelly optimistic hope for economic and affective appreciation (Berlant, 2011).

Passion and a feeling of responsibility kept Richard and his team going, though with deleterious effects. Richard said that during this time, a

full year of our lives, not doing anything, not leaving our rooms, was dedicated to that [social media platform], we watched the sun rise and fall, did nothing else, we lost our friends, […] due to that lack of interaction, and then resurfaced, and didn't get any results. And it was the lowest point we've ever been.

Richard had invested more than just capital in the project; he had also invested a set of expectations that he did not want to give up on by admitting an absence of results. His passionate attachment to the platform became a justification for continued production, which became a happy attachment to an unhappy set of circumstances, and an attempt to generate a return for the psychic and economic investment on an already foreclosed promise (Ahmed, 2010). In this account, a failing startup might be incentive to work even harder, allow work to encroach further, and give up more of one's “life,” to retain an expectation of a return on a psychic and economic promise of success.

Kate, the COO of a pre-series A startup³ detailed her situation of overwork to me. Her responsibilities at the firm covered everything besides coding and communicating with investors. The tasks for which Kate was responsible included liaising with the financial institution that managed the firm's insurance, hiring new engineers and other staff, attending networking events, procuring clients, and managing the needs and expectations of customers. Kate had left her role as product manager at a large technology firm in Silicon Valley to pursue early stage work and had mitigated her initial impulse to join a later series-C startup because of the particular product this startup was building and the passion she could bring to the earlier stage company, “I probably wouldn't have done that except for the fact that it overlapped so perfectly with my working passion,” she said.

Despite the riskier situation at the smaller firm, higher working demands and absent benefits, Kate pursued the earlier stage firm because of her unique qualifications and the passionate attachment that she knew that she would bring to the position. Kate had anticipated the large amount of work in her new role, and now lived four days a week in San Francisco, away from her home and partner in Palo Alto. Though Kate had expected more work, she had not considered “the level of strain that coming to the city puts on me. […] I underestimated how hard it is to sleep in a strange bedroom and hear different noises outside and not see your spouse.” Kate had been able to mitigate the negative effects of working for a riskier, earlier stage firm with less benefits and lower pay because of the expectation that a passionate attachment to work would provide her with a proximity to additional personal and emotional rewards.

Through the accounts given by entrepreneurs in this section, I suggest that investment in digital media production cannot be explained solely in economic terms. Systems of affect and desire are immanent to and constitutive components of the economic infrastructure of production (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). Deleuze and Guattari situate social forces of repression (Marx's spheres of production and social reproduction) as primary in relation to psychic forms of repression. Social forces coopt otherwise productive psychic forces, delegating agents of repression to those psychic systems, and incorporating desire and affect directly into the infrastructure of economic production. This allows Deleuze and Guattari to provide an explanation for attachments to normative or otherwise damaging working conditions both in the home and the workplace. The infrastructure of capitalism works directly upon the unconscious desire of workers, orienting their own exploitation as an appropriate and expected social and professional goal.

These desiring investments in digital media work could be seen through the passionate attachments that workers described. For entrepreneurs, the promise of success, however unlikely, was an investment of desire in which the entrepreneur expects a return. Work is able to become the focal point in the lives of digital media workers, despite detrimental effects on social relationships, domestic intimacy, and mental health, because it was expected to deliver on a promise of success defined by wealth and status (Gregg, 2011; Marwick, 2013). Instead of knowing precisely where one's satisfaction was located, ambivalent “passionate” and “loving” attachments meant knowing how to act and how to appear satisfied. These attachments meant aligning oneself alongside the happily satisfaction of others’ purported success, in which “happiness becomes a form of being directed or oriented, of following ‘the right way’” (Ahmed, 2010: 9). Dangerously, this attachment to ambivalent passionate affects as a source of satisfaction was often described as unambiguously positive by research subjects, to the extent that happy attachments to unhappy circumstances resolved in consciousness as “good feeling” despite deleterious consequences in other spheres of life.

Networking and compulsory sociality

For many entrepreneurs and early stage founders, especially those without established funding structures, networking events provide essential opportunities to meet with angel investors, venture capitalists, or other workers with similar interests and skills. Networking events in San Francisco aimed at startups range from those with emphases on professional development, to those more aligned with social interaction. These include demo-table events, panel discussions, keynote speaker events, workshops, conferences, “pitching” events in the style of the “shark tank” reality television show, happy hours, and parties. Melissa Gregg (2010: 253) describes the kind of behavior required in offices and of attendees at networking events as a form of “compulsory sociality,” an enforced conviviality productive of particular forms of subjectivity. In this section, I examine attendance at networking events as an example of how entrepreneurs deploy the embodiment of their enterprise through the kinds of subjectivity they produce as a required extension of their working day.

Sociality at networking events has to be carefully managed, curated, iteratively repeated, and performed by workers to ensure one is making the “right” kind of impression and performing the “right” kind of work (Gill, 2010; McRobbie, 2002). Successful entrepreneurs at networking events are expected to convincingly perform their own human capital, demonstrating both their personal capacities for production and their affective attachments to their work. Affective attitudes that are professionally appropriate at networking events are ones of enthusiasm, happiness, optimism, and hopefulness (Gregg, 2008). Networking events reinforce their own conditions of possibility by excluding affective orientations that are not already aligned with the expected optimistic desires of participants.

The implicitly and explicitly compulsory character of these events was made evident by a number of interviewees. One entrepreneur framed every unattended networking event as a missed opportunity. He said, “I know how hard here everyone here is hustling, and if I'm resting on my laurels and not maximizing every opportunity, every interaction every day, someone else is going to.” In this framing, any time not spent maximizing the viability of one's firm and oneself was a wasted moment. Though this entrepreneur didn't frame networking as strictly compulsory, his comments implied laziness and a lack of personal responsibility on the part of those who are not always attempting to maximize their economic output through attendance. Other interviewees conveyed to me how necessary and important networking was in their work. One entrepreneur said “I think the biggest challenge,” of being an entrepreneur “would be building out the network. A disproportional amount of success I think here is based upon the network […] you really need to be in the club.” This entrepreneur framed networking as a necessary early step for first time founders, to build out their network so that they would be able to more easily use that foundation when starting other firms in the future. Not only is the importance of networking emphasized here, but so is the tacit expectation that good entrepreneurs are repeat entrepreneurs.

Many interviewees disclosed their discomfort and strain at the prospect of attending networking or other social events. “I barely had the energy to go to that event,” one cofounder said, when I asked her about the panel discussion at which we had initially met. Others said that they felt trapped into attending social events with work colleagues, such as company retreats framed as “morale building” activities that were supposedly imperative for a company's development, though also unremunerated and additional forms of work. Not all felt this way however. Another entrepreneur said, “it's not tiring, it's really inspiring,” while emphasizing that if his work in the evenings didn't consist in networking, it would only be another form of potentially more demanding work. “My team is based all over the world,” he said, “I have to be able to communicate at any given moment. Just period. So working late is not a thing for me, I'm used to that.” This entrepreneur's position was that since he would be working late anyway, he might as well work in a social capacity at a networking event that he found “inspiring.” Networking in social environments was just another form of work, albeit involving aspects of “leisure” such as socializing, alcohol, and conversation (McRobbie, 2002). Rather than attempting to delineate distinct boundaries between work and life, entrepreneurs, in their attempt to be “always on” partitioned work into “more” and “less demanding.” This approach minimized and mitigated the strain and stress that entrepreneurs place on themselves, while remaining open to being “at work” at all times if the need should arise.

Another entrepreneur discussing a typical work schedule said,

going into the evening, the night time, it's usually going to events, either pitching [their firm] or going and just kind of mingling, trying to find business. This evening I'm going down to Mountain View, Mozilla Firefox has an open demo day going on tonight, and that's until about ten, and then it's back on emails until about midnight.

This entrepreneur drives through rush hour traffic to networking events in Mountain View. If events start at 6 pm, he will try and go there early and “sandwich as many things as possible into the day.” Because, like this entrepreneur, many develop products that are business to business or directly marketed toward other startups, some entrepreneurs are in the complex situation of not just seeking investment at networking events, but also potential clients. If your user base is other attendees, entrepreneurs must also be salespeople, while simultaneously emphasizing programming skills, the social capacity to “build out” a network, and the professionalism expected of a CEO or cofounder. This highlights the flexible and unstable character of entrepreneurial work and the demand for workers to be able to perform multiple aspects of their marketable and self-satisfying subjectivities at once (Benner, 2004). In these settings, entrepreneurs have only a few seconds to catch the attention of an important investor before their interest wanes and the next in the long line behind them is given a chance. For many, the remote promise of a potentially life-changing moment was sandwiched into that short space of time, a promise reinforced by the occasional stories that lucky founders had been cut checks on the spot by investors.

Networking, as a compulsory, typically unremunerated activity, along with the entrepreneurs' location of “satisfaction” in their own productivity through the ambivalent affects of “love” and “passion,” represents an erosion of a clearly demarcated concept of a working day, as well as a further breakdown of distinctions between what counts as “work” and “life.” As work functions framed ostensibly (though unconvincingly) as social events, the networking event is a temporary performative commodity designed for the affective orientation of attendees' desires, normalizing the additional extraction of after hours and surplus labor time. The behavior and affect of individuals is carefully disciplined in these spaces, though through processes that are often tacit and silent. Attendees' capacities to demonstrate the efficacy of their carefully curated, appropriate subjectivities (and the respective merits of their firm's product) were put to the test. They must demonstrate happy enthusiasm for constant work, and reinforce the productive status of failure, while dispelling negative affects from their embodied performances, connoting no sense of anxiety, doubt, or frustration.

In this section, I discussed networking as an economic setting in which workers present appropriate entrepreneurial subjectivities in a form of “compulsory sociality.” Because of the requisite character of “building out a network” in early stage startups, networking settings and their participants mutually reinforce cultures of acquiescence and consent to unpaid work in social environments, extending their working day to collectively produce settings in which desire might be said to be directly part of the economic infrastructure (Berlant, 2011). Next, I reflect on the material presented in this section to suggest that affective attachments to entrepreneurial work reinforce normative expectations of and investments in neoliberal, precarious forms of production. At the same time, entrepreneurs themselves, in many cases considered the privileged subjects of neoliberalism (McDowell, 2004), are able to provide themselves with personal forms of security, a standard of self-responsibilization impossible for the majority of precarious workers.

Precarity, precariousness, and in/security

In the previous section, I discussed how ambivalent affects such as “passion,” “love,” and “satisfaction” circulate through entrepreneurial forms of digital media work. Here I examine the possible consequences of entrepreneurs' prioritization of their working lives over other forms of life, considering the attachments to precarious work that entrepreneurialism valorizes. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1983) I suggest that thinking through how desire and affect circulate in forms of economic production provides a way to understand how particular kinds of work and their potentially repressive effects become normative.

Precarity has been understood in a number of valences, as a political concept (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008), an economic concept (Standing, 2011), or as an affective and existential concept (Butler, 2004). Precarity is often understood as a temporally specific condition, some arguing that the “precariat” is the neoliberal economic or post-Fordist class equivalent of the proletariat (Ross, 2008). Precarity, as associated with an economic condition, and often with “creative” work in “cultural industries” (Gill and Pratt, 2008), connotes the normalization of temporary contracts, un- or low-paid work, the lengthening of the working day, and flexible work schedules, as well as the erosion of the provision of welfare and support structures, provision by one's employer or by the state (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010). Writing with a specific focus on precarity in digital economies has been instructive too for a focus on how the management (and not necessarily the abatement) of economic insecurity and uncertainty have, at least partially through the diffusion of new technologies and associated working cultures, encouraged the normalization of labor markets characterized by volatility (Ross, 2003, 2009). I add to these contributions in this section through an exploration into the affective and existential dimensions of precarity (Butler, 2004), and how precarity is managed to regulate the category and condition of what is able to count as “life” and “work” under neoliberal forms of reason (Brown, 2015).

Indeed, though these writers understand precarity in a number of different ways, here I focus on definitions put forward by Judith Butler (2009, 2011) and Isabell Lorey (2015) among others who define “precariousness” as a shared ontological condition connoting a common state of vulnerability, and “precarity” as a social and economic organization of insecurity across different groups, which include the economic dimensions of precarity mentioned above. Finally, these authors define “precarization” as a mode of governmentality, in which governance is distributed unevenly through a regime of permanent insecurity. This insecurity must be carefully managed, rather than resolved altogether. As Berlant (2012: 166) suggests, there are clear affective dimensions of this form of governance, in which “capitalist forms of labor make bodies and minds precarious, holding out the promise of flourishing while wearing out the corpus we drag around.” For Berlant, the governmentality of precarity is closely related to the maintenance and attrition of a fantasy of “the good life.” As Ettlinger (2007) aptly describes, precarity is unevenly managed through the intimate creation of temporary and essentialist illusions of certainty as a mechanism to manage and cope with the stress of the necessary inaccessibility of this aforementioned fantasy, with both personal and national scope. If entrepreneurialism as a set of affects is an attempt to generalize, naturalize, and normalize homo economicus, this “good life” becomes the promise of independence, status, wealth, and glamor delivered by the passionate and affective attachment to a form of entrepreneurial work as life itself.

Entrepreneurialism, as a “precarious” economic condition related closely to a set of affective attachments to work, serves to justify those experiences of precarity. Though entrepreneurs romanticized “risk,” quitting their jobs and working long hours under conditions of considerable stress and uncertainty for equity rather than a wage, the most negative aspects of precarious work were substantially mitigated through their own financial and social networks of personal security (Neff et al., 2005). Though precarity and governmental precarization might be increasingly generalized states of neoliberal reason, they have vastly different effects depending on the population in question and their spatiotemporal context. As Waite (2009: 413) notes, the usefulness of precarity as a concept “will be hollow and of questionable value if it flattens or homogenizes difference.” Entrepreneurs celebrate themselves as “scrappy” risk takers, and though they are in positions of “precarity,” they make carefully calculated risks that are made “acceptable” through other forms of personal security, as well as through their passionate attachments to their work. For the vast majority, for whom entrepreneurial and precarious forms of work become “the norm” by varying degrees, the ability to mitigate risk through personal security may be severely curtailed or absent altogether.

Precarization, as a form of governmentality predicated on the maintenance of permanent insecurity, depends on the formation of the ontological category of “life,” connecting the governmental aspects of the precarity discourse to ontological forms of precariousness (Butler, 2009). Life must be first constituted as a category before it can become governable (Foucault, 1978) and as such, attention must be paid to the conditions through which life is able to come to be known as “a life” in the first place, and how those conditions are subject to systems of maintenance and attrition. As I have argued throughout this paper, affect and desire function in digital media work to produce ambivalent passionate attachments to one's satisfaction in precarious form of work, allowing entrepreneurs and engineers' work to increasingly encroach on other aspects of their lives. “Life” as a category qua “work” is at risk of abbreviation or abandonment, through the processes by which workers become attached to their entrepreneurial or working selves (Weeks, 2011). When categories or ways of constituting “political life,” so that it might be rendered recognizable or governable, are subsumed under neoliberal definitions, “life” might account only for those lives that are productive, contributing, and managed efficiently to generate the highest return on one's invested time (Brown, 2015).

Entrepreneurialism normalizes forms of social and economic precarity that, by and large, entrepreneurs themselves are not directly and personally affected by. Further, through the production of intimate systems of ambivalent affect in which attachment to working life is reproduced, there is a danger that under economic forms of neoliberal governance, the constitution of “a life” becomes directed and dictated by neoliberal reason, to the extent that only enterprising and self-satisfied working lives are rendered fully recognizable by systems of governance. The possible erasure of life by the category of work connotes not just an economic and social distribution of precarity, but also the production of a system that directs and produces the desire for the generalization of such a system, in this case an attachment to the generalization of the entrepreneurial or enterprise-based form of work (Foucault, 2008).

Indeed, many of the entrepreneurs I interviewed and spoke with informally, especially the younger and less experienced, suggested that everybody should at least attempt to start their own business at some point in their lives, displaying an apparent obliviousness to both their own privilege and the many sets of circumstances that might prevent most individuals from quitting their job or starting their own company. One interviewee even suggested, after being laid off twice from jobs in the financial sector, that he had come to view entrepreneurialism itself as a form of security against the risk of getting fired from corporate work. This view, which was troubling though prevalent, was that an entrepreneurial attitude should be the norm for all forms of work, or the default subjective and affective position of workers, irrespective of the work they were doing.

If precariousness designates vulnerability through the shared dependence on the condition of what counts as a life (Butler, 2009), the generalization of entrepreneurial precarity, as not only an economic form but also an affective, existential condition, attests to precariousness insofar as what is allowed to count as a life as such is only a life managed through affective attachments to work's promises and fantasies. Any social or political promise of security, insurance, or protection is therefore in danger of being extended only to forms of life that demonstrate appropriate forms of personal productivity, efficiency, and commitments to this productivist fantasy. Under these conditions of “life” as “work,” the efficacy of this political promise is undermined, becoming instead an economic promise directed instead by neoliberal forms of reason (Brown, 2015).

Conclusion

In this paper, I have presented an account of work that examines entrepreneurialism beyond a political economic approach. The workplace (broadly defined), beyond the investment of labor time in commodities as their source of value, is also a location for the production of subjectivities, affects, desires, fantasies, and promises. I suggest that entrepreneurial forms of production also involve the production of entrepreneurialism itself as a desirable object of neoliberal work. Or put another way, to fully understand how neoliberal forms of reason and precarious modes of governance become the norm, it is important to consider spaces of economic production as sites for the investment of affect and desire. Capitalism therefore, is not just a system of accumulation, but also a system that both curtails and procures the circulation of affective attachments to particular kinds of work. In this paper therefore I've argued that the values and affective attachments transmitted through normative and seductive entrepreneurial working practices among digital media workers in San Francisco might serve to normalize and valorize precarious working conditions in general.

Butler (2004) has demonstrated that “precariousness” can be located in the shared realization that we are all foundationally vulnerable and therefore have an ethical responsibility for the welfare of others. Other writers on precarity have noted the complex relationships between precariousness, the distribution of inequalities and differences through political and economic forms of precarity, and a system of governmentality based upon the effective maintenance of that system of insecurity (Lorey, 2015). Lorey's acknowledgement of the relationship between precariousness, precarity, and pracarization complicates Butler's (2004) earlier observations. The unequal distribution of economic and political forms of precarity renders some recipients the beneficiaries of insecurity as a form of governmentality. Moreover, considering precarity as a system of ambivalent affects through which attachments to precarious forms of life as work are managed, perpetuated, and valorized, how and why would recipients of uneven forms of precarity come to recognize their shared vulnerability and responsibility to one another?

The answer, perhaps, can be located at least partially in how we consider, understand, and contend with the concept of desire, the development of the unconscious, and the psychic modes through which subjectivity is inaugurated (Butler, 1997). Indeed, taking work as a domain in which subjects are produced and affects circulate is a significant step in understanding the production of neoliberal forms of desire. The maintenance of precarious life as “the condition of being conditioned” (Butler, 2009: 23) necessarily depends upon a governmentality of insecurity (or, the means of iteratively sustaining said condition) in which some lives become the beneficiaries of the system, while the majority, unable to provide personal systems of security, face systems of temporary and informal employment, speculative, un- or under-paid work, and permanent debt. Meanwhile, the justification for the maintenance of this insecurity is directed, at least in part, by the production of an affective system in which taking on personally responsibility for one's precarious, indebted subjectivity is more highly valued than democratic commitments to social systems of welfare, support, and security. In this case, attention to the psychic production of the subject's unconscious desires, already oriented and aligned toward their mode of economic production becomes increasingly significant (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983).

Considering how life is subordinated to the disciplinary demands of work requires attention not only to the structural legal and economic systems that reinforce that work, but also the workplace itself as a site of affective investment (Weeks, 2011). Digital media work is a particularly significant example of the need to consider workplaces as systems for the production of affect, because of the forms of utopianism and universalism that technological discourses have a tendency to purport and extend. The promise that digital media can and will “change the world,” however disingenuous (and with no attention toward for whom that change might be made) has carried substantial discursive weight now for over half a century (Turner, 2006), managing to line up with promises of horizontality, empowerment, and “democratization” that have been met with approval among popular and academic audiences alike (e.g. Castells, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2000). I suggest that in close alignment with these technological fantasies are the forms of work they valorize, which necessarily include normative entrepreneurial and affective attachments to precarious working conditions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many early and late readers of this paper, all of whom provided excellent, thoughtful, and generous feedback. Any remaining shortcomings are my own. These readers include Brittany Cook, Patricia Ehrkamp, Malene Jacobson, Leif Johnson, Jessa Loomis, Anna Secor, Kelsy Yeargain, Matthew Zook, four anonymous reviewers, and excellent editorial guidance from Deborah Cowen. I would also like to thank the people who took time to speak with me while I conducted research in the Bay Area.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author acknowledges generous support from the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. This research for this paper was also supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, Geography and Spatial Sciences Program, award number 1536265.

Notes

Daniel Cockayne is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. He conducts research on labor and work, through frameworks developed at the intersection of feminist, economic, and cultural geographies. His doctoral dissertation is a critical examination of entrepreneurial and digital media work in San Francisco, focused in particular on the dynamic relationships between embodiment, affect, desire, gender, sexuality, and economic production.

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