You must have seen them at your local cafe – young people armed with MacBook Airs, backpacks that look like they belong on an alpine trail, and the Wi-Fi password, freeloading on the internet and the table space for the price of a flat white.
These intellectual pieceworkers answer to job titles you won't recognise in occupations that have only existed since the dawn of the 2010s – content manager, brand strategist. Paid by the job, sometimes by the word (and sometimes not at all), they're the Uber drivers of intellectual labour, pieceworkers in the information economy.
Their concentration increases the closer you get to Collingwood or Alexandria, where some cafes are like cubicle farms where almost everyone is tapping away at some project they need to finish, or having a meeting about the one they have to start.
With real estate so pricey and intellectual piecework precarious and poorly paid, you can hardly blame entrepreneurial youngsters for wanting a cheap desk that isn't in a share house bedroom.
But when your local is full of people typing, not talking, you wonder exactly where the line between work and the rest of our lives is these days (maybe nowhere).
There's a backlash brewing in the UK, with cafe owners imposing a digital blackout on Wi-Fi freeloaders. Cafes in Copenhagen and even tech-friendly San Francisco have imposed similar bans.
While one Sydney barista ditched his Wi-Fi and used his chalkboard to tell people to put away their devices and start talking to each other, half the cafes in Melbourne and Sydney would have to close down if they evicted the digital guest workers.
People say they get a lot done in cafes. I can't think of a worse place to work. There are too many distractions: the endless hiss of the espresso machine, the inane chatter around you at the communal table, the waitperson topping up your water and offering you another coffee every five minutes. Then there's the barista's dodgy Spotify playlist pumping out and, worst of all, other people having meetings about jobs that you haven't got.
What about when your battery goes flat? You have to scramble around looking for a power point – not many cafes have those in an accessible spot – or go home. One Los Angeles cafe owner painted a fake power outlet on the wall as a not-very-subtle gag.
I've tried cafe hot-desking. I felt like a prat, peering earnestly at the screen and pretending to be doing something important and income-generating, when I was really just checking emails, updating Facebook and posting photos of empty coffee cups to Instagram.
Which sounds a lot like some of those social media workers' job descriptions. What was that Wi-Fi password again?
Matt Holden is a Fairfax Media contributor.
0 comments
New User? Sign up