We’re all consultant serfs

Next time a teenager asks me to help them with a resume I’m going to tell them to write “I’m a consultant”.

It’s late summer in Tasmania. Afternoon’s have that gorgeous long sepia light that catches all sorts of smallness you otherwise miss. Swarm clouds of breeding midges dancing erratically. Plumes of grass pollen that fall with movement. Blackberries sagging with leaky fruit, dusty from the adjacent unpaved roads. You can hear the mouths of everything feeding. Everything sings with the same mouths. The air carries that dusty ochre smell that resembles the faint and ambiguous cooking smells that come from other people’s houses. This light gives pause- makes you stop on some sideroad to look out onto the river, or detour towards an afternoon swim, or call someone you haven’t spoken to for a while just to talk shit.

I’m a consultant now. By that I mean I’m in the competitive casualised workforce of the gig economy. “Consultant” has no real meaning other than that you’re employed by different businesses for a short period to offer something. Advice, services, whatever is required to fill a temporary role that has been moved out of house. The rise of consultants means we’ve gone turbo-neoliberal and we outsource everything. Me using a digging bar to break 200x200x500mm holes into hard dry clay the other day does not count as consultant even though it was contracted casualisation. You’re not allowed to come away from a day consulting with a sore body and an inability to close your right hand because of muscle cramps. I also don’t think relief teaching counts as consulting, even though you probably do more actual consulting than other consultants. I think consulting means you feed IP on a casual basis. That it is your individual thinking rather than body-in-space labour that is the means for value. The rise in consultancy shows that our sense of value has shifted towards favouring information and the tech that supports it. This shift in value also signifies a greater shift in power and thus class structure that has accompanied the information age. On my feed I’ve seen a rise in long articles, fast-paced tiktoks, and left-leaning youtubers hamming on about how we have entered an era of neo-medievalism and techno feudalism. I am a little seduced by these arguments but also my brain lacks the wrinkles to understand global political philosophy, and perhaps I’m too aligned to the ambiguity of poetics and arts to fully align to any diatribe that suggests full comprehension of the world and its workings. This said, ideas that suggest that we have entered a new set of economic and political structures that go far beyond capitalism's wildest dreams, and have a class system that closer resembles a feudal society where a new tech-information class rules supreme, well… it feels apt. Enter the work of McKenzie Wark, who was first recommended to me by a previous lecturer of mine through a paper titled “This is not capitalism, it’s something worse”. You do your own thinking, but a billionaire’s lifestyle, power, and sheer unattainable wealth is enough to make most people feel as if they belong to a peasant class. As one guardian article wrote in a piece on techno feudalism and its main proponent Yanis Varoufakis: “Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital… he charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs””.

I’m considering calling myself a consultant as corporate drag. Where drag aims to mimic and queer notions of social constructions, most commonly gender, I think there is room to drag all sorts of social constructions. To mimic, perform, and play with various societal performances and positions that generally come apart at the edges if you look closely enough. This is the genius of the name of one Naarm/melbourne drag queen ‘Karen from Finance’. We don’t only do gender, we also serve performed bureaucracy.
Slay. buyout. takeover.
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A student in a class where I was teaching relief the other day said that they wished I was a real teacher. I don’t think I actually was doing what a teacher is paid to do, I was just listening to a teen and asking questions rather than delivering curriculum. To be a good consultant comes mostly from just that. Most people have the answers already, they just need to talk their own way into them.

Before lunch I had a period off teaching so I sat in the library and listened to a teacher’s assistant try to wrangle a bunch of boys off the computers where they had found a way past the school’s internet filters and were playing first person shooter games. The library windows looked out onto the oval and I watched whilst someone in bright pink running gear walked her dog, a big overweight staffy in a matching pink vest, onto the cricket pitch and oversaw it as it took a shit right in the middle of the pitch. She then patted the dog and they walked off, almost as if it was intentional. Then the bell rang and hoards of teen boys flooded the oval.

As a consultant I spend a few days a week at the local library, pretending to do important work. The other day I watched a woman in her late 70s use her two index fingers to slowly type “deep house music” into google. She took the first youtube link, reclined in a chair that wasn’t meant for reclining, closed her eyes, and bopped. She bopped so hard that she accidentally tugged out her headphones and deep house music played into the library. Everyone noticed except her. She kept her eyes closed and kept bopping until the librarian gently tapped her on the shoulder and told her that her music was playing out loud. Without a blink of embarrassment she plugged her headphones and continued on. We have so much to learn from her. At 1pm the librarian kicked everyone out so she could take a lunch break. I saw her at the local beach, looking like anyone but a librarian as she did flawless butterfly through the water.

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In a week I leave the island for a small farm-sit at my family’s farm in Victoria before flying to Japan. Taking any and all recommendations.