This article explores the distinction and passage between "precarity" and "precariousness". In surveying the various ways in which these terms have circulated, we wish to establish a framework within which questions of labour, life and social-political organisation can be understood. The various uncertainties defining contemporary life are carried over - and, we argue, internal to - the logic of informatisation. Our aim, however, is not to collapse respective differences into a totalising logic that provides a definitive assessment or system of analysis; rather, we seek to identify some of the forces, rhythms, discourses and actions that render notions such as creativity, innovation, and organisation, along with the operation of capital, with a complexity whose material effects are locally situated within transversal networks. Where there are instances of inter-connection between, say, the work of migrants packaging computer parts or cleaning offices and that of media labour in a call centre, software development firm or digital post-production for a film studio, we see a common expressive capacity predicated on the dual conditions of exploitation and uncertainty.

Marcello Tarì and Ilaria Vanni - On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives

Noi siamo la generazione post-socialista, la generazione del dopo guerra fredda, della fine delle burocrazie verticali e del controllo sull'informazione. Siamo un movimento globale e neuropeo, che porta avanti la rivoluzione democratica scaturita dal Sessantotto mondiale e lotta contro la distopia neoliberista oggi al culmine. Siamo ecoattivisti e mediattivisti, siamo i libertari della Rete e i metroradicali dello spazio urbano, siamo le mutazioni transgender del femminismo globale, siamo gli hacker del terribile reale. Siamo gli agitatori del precariato e gli insorti del cognitariato. Siamo anarcosindacalisti e postsocialisti. Siamo tutti migranti alla ricerca di una vita migliore. E non ci iconosciamo in voi, stratificazioni tetre e tetragone di ceti politici sconfitti già nel XX secolo. Non ci riconosciamo nella sinistra italyana.

Manifesto Bio/Pop del Precariato Metroradicale, 2004

2004 has marked the beginning of the spreading "cult" of San Precario, Patron Saint of precarious, casual, sessional, temporary, flexible and fractional workers. The Saint appears in public spaces in occasion of rallies, marches, interventions and demonstrations, and its popularity has lead to development of a precise and colorful iconography, hagiography and rituals. This popularity conversely is also the sign of the gravity of the issue of precarity in Italy and Europe .

San Precario epitomises current Italian activist practices. These practices, although specifically Italian, intersect with similar realities in Europe and are based on mythopoetic narratives and actions and mediatic embodiments. This paper analysis a variety of texts produced around San Precario, from posters, saint cards, product cards, videos, "official" narratives, personal accounts, relating them to the political debate surrounding precarity.

Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford - A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game Labour

Using the conceptual grid of "immaterial labour" in the age of Empire, this article is a preliminary portrait of work in the video and computer game development industry, a sector of creative, cognitive labour that exemplifies the allure but also the peril of new media work. Drawing on interviews we conducted with game developers in Canada , we examine the conditions of labour in game studios, this cultural industry's "work as play" ethos, the pleasures and potentialities of game production, the blemishes that mar this attractive vista, and the new infractions these tensions provoke. Confirming that Empire sets in motion potentialities it cannot fully control, we also observe an emergent counter-mobilisation of game labour, whose manifestations range from digital piracy to dissident games produced in the context of activism. These experiments of a playful multitude flow into the wider currents of tactical media, hacktivism, open-source software, and distributed computing that are generating tumults throughout the circuits of Empire.

Linda Leung - Postcard from the Edge: Autobiographical Musings on the Dis/organisations of the Multimedia Industry

This article is a critical reflection on the dot.com boom and the volatile industry, discipline and conditions of labour it has spawned. It offers an autobiographical insight into my past experiences as one of its labourers, as well as my current perspective as an academic responsible for cultivating these industry professionals. Not only is it an attempt at making sense of "then through now", but of the macro level of the multimedia industry at the micro level of an individual worker drawn into the profession during its heyday. This retrospection occurs at the edge of the discipline, at the interface between industry and education, and at the point of distinction between the lived experience and glamorous representation of working in a "creative organisation".

Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado - Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution

In contemporary discourses of business, it is often claimed that the post-Fordist global economy is revolutionary, radically transforming forms of social organisation and consciousness, and "virtuality" has come to signify the driver of this revolution. But how new is this development? Is it useful to call it a "revolution", using the term in the sense it had for Marx? Are there traces of a Marxist theory of virtuality, and how relevant is it today? We draw on chaos theory to identify important but shifting meanings for "virtuality" and "revolution" in Marx, to create a new terrain on which to better explore issues facing "digital labour" in the new environment.

Paul Newfield and Timothy Rayner - Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations

Theorists of learning organisations argue that learning calls for the emancipation of workers. Yet many critical analyses of contemporary control systems argue that this freedom implies a deeper slavery. This paper seeks to resolve this paradox through a theoretical analysis of the effects of control systems on workers. We argue that in its standard formulation, the paradox of control implies an inadequate conception of the nature of workers in contemporary organisations. Workers are perceived as passive, malleable, individuals. But as Gilles Deleuze claims, creative labourers in the controlled environments of the present day are not only (or even primarily) individuals - they are dividuals, that is, bearers of cognitive states and affective traits that are shared in common with others. As dividuals, workers participate in insurgent "becomings", collectively constituting modes of "minor" biopolitics that break with norms established by "major" regimes of biopolitical control. In our view, it is not the creative individual, but the generative dynamic between major and minor biopolitics that drives organisational learning as a complex bio-technological event.

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter - Dawn of the Organised Networks

This article introduces the political concept of "organised networks". We explore alternative currencies, critique blogs, wikis and Creative Commons. We revisit the legacy of techno-libertarians. We look at why scale is such a difficult thing for networks to negotiate - particularly tactical media networks, for our interests. Along the way we also have a running critique of liberal democracy. And we end up wondering if criminal networks might be angel investors of some kind of another.