By 2009, with the floor of the global economy having collapsed, I had become dependent on Skype to stay afloat. I got in touch with a few friends working for book publishers and large corporations back home and work trickled in. Though I found it relatively easy to find a junior-level job, it was immediately obvious that I’d need to earn more to survive. When I first moved to New York in 2006, I learned that my professional experience beyond the borders of the United States counted for little. (I try not to dwell on the fact that in Sydney I worked out of a dedicated study in my home living in a New York apartment is all about sacrificing space.) Using Skype I have coached Australian authors living in Kenya, Melbourne, Los Angeles, the Gold Coast, Sydney and on a remote Queensland farm through writing their respective manuscripts, all of which have been, or soon will be, published. ‘With work increasingly invisible, it’s much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the internet economy.’ As one of the lesser stars of that universe, Skype’s workings as a corporation remain a mystery to me as its happy customer, in the same way that the logistics of my virtual office must baffle some of my clients.įor seven years now I have commuted around the world from the comfort of my bedroom-slash-office. Companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook are ‘ubiquitous in our lives but with no physical presence or human face,’ he wrote. In a recent blog post for The New Yorker, George Packer described the invisibility of the worker in today’s digital economy.
Product consumers are accustomed to the fact that the things they buy are often manufactured at a great geographical distance, but in the service economy this is a recent and transformative change. Clients enjoy the trick, though neither end of the line – or is it the optic fibre? – has a clue as to how it’s done. Super-sizing my Skype account, I acquired a ‘Skype-in’ telephone number for $60 that begins with the Sydney area code and diverts to my laptop for a local call cost to the dialer. For a consumer accustomed to the Rosetta Stone of her monthly Telstra bill, my Skype usage was not only a bargain but straightforward to track. By opening a Skype credit account, for example, I could dial landlines from my laptop for two Australian cents per minute. Started in 2003 and named for the awkward progeny of ‘sky’ and ‘peer’, Skype facilitates free calls between computers over the internet and provides additional ‘freemium’ services. I work from my bedroom, like I did as a student.īecause the majority of my freelancing is for Australian companies and authors, my working life orbits around Skype. Hunched at communal benches, wearing oversized headphones and staring into their laptops, these café-offices could be mistaken for call centres. Numerous cafés in my Crown Heights neighborhood have become the home office away from home for many independent workers in today’s ‘knowledge economy’. But as a freelance writer and editor over here, I’m about as rare as the common cold. These days I write grist for my client’s marketing mill from my desk in Brooklyn. But having ‘consciously uncoupled’ myself as a full-time employee from the corporate workplace eight years earlier, it felt like viewing Earth from deep space.
Looking around, I felt a retrospective pang for the lifestyle extras a corporate job used to afford me.
Designed as a hub for meetings of all kinds, the mezzanine encourages flexibility of human movement within the larger workplace, which remains tethered to that relic of twentieth century work practices, the billable hour. The office’s split-level mezzanine and cafeteria exaggerated the sense of a space–time continuum. The cost of maintaining the illusion of worker freedom through extravagant fit-outs seems to grow with every decade. At any moment I half-expected the two of us to defy gravity and lift off from the gleaming polished floor. As we strolled the eerily quiet corridors, the towering windows, antiseptic surfaces and noiseless elevator doors put me in mind of the inside of a spaceship. Her employer, a large law firm, recently moved to swanky new premises and she was keen to take me on a tour. VISITING SYDNEY FROM New York before Christmas, I dropped by the office of a client and former colleague.