Silvio Lorusso – Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe

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Onomatopee, ISBN-13: 978-9493148161, English, 260 pages, 2019, The Netherlands

Despite the fact that this book is extremely contemporary, it seems to emerge from the best traditions of 1970s-1980s counterculture. The author has a diversified background and quite a few research interests, but we can speculate that design, academic research and activism have been permanently among them. In Entreprecariat (a translation from the first edition in Italian), he connects a substantial amount of disparate data, facts, thoughts and personal experiences, flowing through different media and sources. Lorusso has a genuine ambition to ‘debunk’ the major toxic mantras of the global digital industry, and here he investigates and contextualises rhetoric in the economy discourse, especially in its embodiments through different media. He slowly tears to pieces the start-up paradigm, joining significant signals from, among others, pop culture, street culture, philosophy, news and social media. This pocket-sized book, with some exquisite graphic design ideas, condenses the text, which is nonetheless alternated with related iconographic sections. The author’s criticism, present also in his digital artistic career, thoroughly contextualises what he calls the “life in permanent beta” of precarious intellectual workers, and the indoctrination of “change” is ultimately dismantled with ironic disillusion.