Life’s a pitch – Open Democracy

Credit: Flickr/Umbro Umbro. CC-BY-NC-2.0.

Todays economy has reduced life to a never-ending pitch. We parade before bosses and clients for work. We position ourselves on social media for friendship, love, sexor just attention. We work longer hours for less pay, and due to technology and globalization, fewer jobs mean workers can demand less and bosses more. As the hotelier Conrad Hilton says to Don Draper inthe TV series Mad Men, When I say I want the moon, I expect the moon.

Yet the colonization of life by the pitch is a symptom: unionised jobs with social benefits have disappeared, and without the fixed ropes enjoyed by a previous generation the marketing of ourselves and our souls has become required rather than chosen. The painful truth is that, at work, were on trial all the time as Roger Mavity and Stephen Bayley write.

Now, pitching has expanded way beyond the world of work and into social media, dating apps, and reality television. Life is experienced through the prism, or prison, of pitching. How did this happen, and what can be done?

The wordpitchcommonly means to throw, as in pitching an idea or a product. Sales pitches are crafted to be persuasive and logically impenetrabledesigned to bring the customer to the point where they care enough to buy, or just want the stream-of-consciousness selling to end. InGlengarry Glen Ross, Blakethe character played by Alec Baldwinembodies mercenary salesmanship at its purest: only one thing counts in this life, he says, get them to sign on the line which is dotted...A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing. And always be pitching.

We have to be connected, to be visible, gramming or tindingtwo forms of contemporary pitch-work performed in the electronic sweatshop. Part of this pitch-work involves forming networks, because someone has to be there to catch your ideasto catchyou. Networks become our new safety netsthe stronger the network, the safer you are. Time is taken up making and cultivating links, turning weak links into strong links.

We pitch all the time, because when it's increasingly less about a piece of paper from a university, the way YOU appeal to others becomes more important...even in private life, says Christoph Sollich, a Berlin-basedpitch doctor. The tool to stand out is how you pitch yourself, like on Tinder.

We even have pitch TV. Anna Richardson, the presenter of UKsNaked Attraction, calls the show Tinder television. Contestants choose a dating partner based on their naked bodies alone, standing inside semi-transparent Day-Glo boxes and slowly revealed from the bottom upfirst the legs and the groin, then the torso, and finally the head.

The showclaims to demystify the rules of sexual attraction for the Tinder generation by giving young people a true picture of each others bodiestruer than the photo-shopped versions available on social media. Yet this naked nightmare simply glorifies choice by body-partsYou've got six vaginas staring you in the face and you say you like feetensuring that the show explodes on social media and harvests even more advertising revenue.

An alien watching from another planet might think that this showand other naked reality televisions shows like Love Island and Strippedshow a people comfortable with their bodies and desires, and suggests a society at ease with itself, with few obstacles to freedom and self-expression; a heroic society in which the best can pitch their virtues to be admired and emulated.

But all this shows is the pornography of the pitchthe fact theres no longer any distance between our desires and those who might fulfill them. You can pitch your apartment on Airbnb or your body onNaked Attraction, and if Obamacare is scrapped you can join the other people wholl bepitchingto cover their healthcare costs.

This isnt a gig economy, its a pitch economy, and the pitch iswhere the rivers of neo-liberalism meet and the crocodiles feed. Everyone is free, yet onlyto submit to another round of degrading competition. Theres always a winneryet the prize is elusive. Pitch platforms are democratic but all they democratise is need. Pitching has become a secular prayer for meaning in a culture of generalized meaninglessness. Like a mycelium growing underfoot it destroys social belonging and drags us into a sinkhole of sameness and despair.

How does life as a never-ending pitch work?A system cannot operate without a culture to give it shape, and pitch culture invokescompulsory non-stop positivity, the blue-sky thinking of the Facebook Like button. Drawing on positive psychology and the cod-philosophy offast capitalistliterature found at airport bookshops, systemic inequality is propped up by a sea of untested beliefs and fortune-cookie sound-bites that distil the changing times into something we can understand, delivered in the deracinated vernacular of the pitch.

Researchers at StanfordUniversity analysedthis vernacular by looking at 26,000 Kickstarter pitches. The successful ones generated emotional responses; they were tentative and framed the pitch collectively by using we. The unsuccessful ones generated affective responses; they were more certain and were framed using I. Sadness and anger also indicated failed pitches. The research team found that successful ones were more emotive, thoughtful and colloquial, yet this is a particular kind of thoughtfulness devoid of negativity and empathy. For Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, such a culture of non-stop positivity (and blocked negativity) turns us into exhausted slaves in a burnout society. Does this sound familiar?

Whats the answer to these problems? In a world dominated by the apostles of capitalisms Good Newsthe hierarchy-hopping, soy-latte-sipping, sexually-voracious-yet-emotionally-hollow millennials orMeh!-lennialsthe future is not just being cancelled but reduced to an elevator pitch.

Or is it? Perhaps millennials, living with colossal levels of debt and subject to the churn and burn workplaces of the gig economy, form part of the solution.

Millennials are numerically far bigger than our generation, the sons and daughters of baby boomersand theyre going to have a massive impact on politics, Dmytri Kleiner told me when I interviewed him in Berlin. Kleiner is the founder of theTelekommunisten Collective,a group that explores the political impact of communications technology. Actually theyre already having an impact, he continued, just look at Corbyn and Sanders. Politics is opening uptheres a Left and a Right again. Unfortunately the Right is Trump, and we cant stop talking about him.

Kleiner believesthat the Left has lost the skills of organizing. Our generation had no political representatives to vote for, we could only vote for Left or Right variants of neoliberalism, and so we invented a politics that reflected this: a politics of horizontalism. His idea ofVenture Communismmoves beyond horizontal politics by turning the weapons of capital back onto the capitalists while fighting to preserve workers historic gains.

First we need to find new ways of organising our economy, creating worker-controlled organisations and businesses that add value to the commons; and second, we need a vigorous counter-politics that holds the state to account in providing health, education and social services. Thats Venture Communism.

Kleiners work centres on the digital world like theTelekommunisten, who came out of Berlins hacker community to create hosting services and tools that give users more control over their data. But what about the physical world? What about organising real bodies in real places in real time?

In her bookTwitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,Zeynep Tufekci emphasizes the crucial importance of capacity within social movements, and reminds us of the importance of place. Artists and free-thinkers fleeing the First World War had ZurichsCabaret Voltaire(perhaps including a young Lenin); the New Left in England had thePartisan Coffee House; the American Civil Rights Movement had a network of churches and homes for activists to stay in.

But where are the places of the precariat? Where can people go to share stories, empathise and organise? Outside of online there are few places to gather. Pitch culture drowns out solidarity; online organising builds more barriers than bridges; and by pitching our problems into corporate servers were merely providing the fuel for our own destruction. Our pitches lift capitalism higher and higher.

So heres my pitch. Todays workers need places to organise offline, so lets combine the ideas of the hacker community with the needs of the precariat to establish them. For want of a better word Ill call them Precr-Spaces: Prekris German for precarious,and Precris my English-German compromise. Lets put a Precr-Space in every town and city, spaces where precarious workers can gather together, share stories, build empathy and organise for better working conditions and better lives.

Pitch culture works on anonymity, while the platforms of the gig economy keep workers isolated and unaware of each others struggles. A Precr-Space would be a place, a project and a disruptive technologyto bring new collective ideas to light, and to help people break free of naked exploitation. In the words ofCabaret VoltairesHugo Ball, we demand a space not only for those who enjoy their independence, but for those who wish to proclaim it.

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Life's a pitch - Open Democracy