Inside the bowels of the third industrial revolution -- where industry 4.0 meets crowdsourcing, where digital requests meet physical labor -- lies the so-called "sharing" economy. In the revelatory space of this so-called sharing, our laundry is done at the tap of a button; our groceries are delivered from the corner store; we hire others to wait in ticket queues; and we have finally learned how to carpool -- or rather, to use the properly commercialized term -- to Uberpool. "For-profit “sharing” represents by far the fastest-growing source of un- and under-regulated commercial activity," wrote Noam Scheiber in the New Republic (2014). Meanwhile, the distributed workers operate as islands, often never meeting each other. As this new economy continues to evolve, we wonder: What will the future of work look like?
The collective Anxious to Make is creating the Center for the Sharing Economy (CSE) as a research organization, hub for the gathering of sharing economy workers, artistic work, and a traveling center which will work to do the same. Its new archive seeks objects and ephemera for a sharing economy archive. Sought-after objects include:
T-shirts with logos
Lyft moustaches or equivalent
Receipts
Embossed pens, pencils, USBs, etc.
General ‘swag’
Uber stickers or equivalent
Reviews from customers
Print materials
Employee manuals
Tote bags with logos
Employee awards
Cease and desist letters
Anxious to Make’s work has appeared recently in in EMMEDIA (Calgary, CA), Transmediale (Berlin, DE), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), The Luminary (St. Louis), Werkartz (Los Angeles), and in online interventions on Temporary Art Review. More at www.anxioustomake.ga.