First, I absolutely love your writing. Thank you for sharing it.
So many thoughts on this one! I am a communications exec (comms is 100% warm collar) and a therapist (the warmest) - there is a gendered aspect here also worth exploring. As a person who is solidly Gen X, I think that marketing and communications were, for my generation, the nurse or teacher option. We used to call marketing and comms the "pink triangle." The labor of connection has often skewed feminine.
Given the naming of an economic shift, do you see this as an economic shift benefiting women?
Also, this: How do we know what fair prices are in this kind of exchange? How do we know what sellers and buyers owe each other?
My classic media training answer (that has the benefit of being true): our customers think it's worth every penny.
Hey Rebecca, first of all, thank you for this really thoughtful response. I appreciate it. I gave a lot of thought to the gendered piece, and I deliberately kept it out of this post because, while it was gendered in the past, I think as this market becomes more mainstream, it will become genderless. I think that's important because:
1. It will give more visibility, credibility, and monetary value to the invisible labor that women have done for so long, and not even just to the invisible labor, but underpaid labor of women who do currently do this.
2. It creates a clear path for men to enter this market, which I think is just important in general for a healthy culture to have this kind of labor be gender balanced, so overall benefit to everybody.
As far as the fair prices for this kind of exchange, you're totally right :) The way I was writing about it here was more about new customers entering this market and not understanding how to value these kinds of services. I think that's a hurdle that we'll have to get over.
Why do we need a new word for artists or performers? Dividing work into physical vs mental labor feels like a very corporate lens that misses all the humanity that your essay is trying to re-excavate
I get that. I'm not claiming emotional work is new. Performers and artists have sold feeling forever. But the intimate, 1 to 1 functions that used to be unpaid (being mourned for, witnessed, befriended, etc.) are getting pulled into the market, with none of the norms that art and performance spent centuries building. And I'm using the collar frame because it's the market's own lens, and my whole point is that the market is about to collide with work it has no category for. You're right that it's a corporate map, but that's also the map this work is being forced onto.
The 1:1 aspect is super interesting, I agree. In my mind it still relates to art and performance, just like a 1000 years ago. What started as a site-specific (e.g. church fresco) or person-specific (e.g. portraiture) art piece evolved into salons, then galleries, then mass reproductions, then global merch. Looking at markets like China or Korea where things like boyfriend for hire are much more common, you already see new marketplaces and the pressure to scale - which is the corporate lens you talked about. I wonder what a path to scale will look like for these intimate performances you're talking about - any thoughts?
The only thing I would challenge is the perceived inevitability of the current economic system. We have agency to make changes, to create a new speculative future beyond financialization. This new speculative future, imagining and building it, re-contextualizes technology and labor. A no collar future is possible if we dream strongly enough.
Could the concept of warm collar labor could even be applied to the mundane? A friend and I who run errands together because we wouldn't do it if the other one didn't go with, refer to our "Grocery Store Spouse" business model, and jokingly invent different membership tiers for the service.
First, I absolutely love your writing. Thank you for sharing it.
So many thoughts on this one! I am a communications exec (comms is 100% warm collar) and a therapist (the warmest) - there is a gendered aspect here also worth exploring. As a person who is solidly Gen X, I think that marketing and communications were, for my generation, the nurse or teacher option. We used to call marketing and comms the "pink triangle." The labor of connection has often skewed feminine.
Given the naming of an economic shift, do you see this as an economic shift benefiting women?
Also, this: How do we know what fair prices are in this kind of exchange? How do we know what sellers and buyers owe each other?
My classic media training answer (that has the benefit of being true): our customers think it's worth every penny.
Hey Rebecca, first of all, thank you for this really thoughtful response. I appreciate it. I gave a lot of thought to the gendered piece, and I deliberately kept it out of this post because, while it was gendered in the past, I think as this market becomes more mainstream, it will become genderless. I think that's important because:
1. It will give more visibility, credibility, and monetary value to the invisible labor that women have done for so long, and not even just to the invisible labor, but underpaid labor of women who do currently do this.
2. It creates a clear path for men to enter this market, which I think is just important in general for a healthy culture to have this kind of labor be gender balanced, so overall benefit to everybody.
As far as the fair prices for this kind of exchange, you're totally right :) The way I was writing about it here was more about new customers entering this market and not understanding how to value these kinds of services. I think that's a hurdle that we'll have to get over.
It’s hard to stay optimistic reading about renting bridesmaids but I will try!!
Why do we need a new word for artists or performers? Dividing work into physical vs mental labor feels like a very corporate lens that misses all the humanity that your essay is trying to re-excavate
I get that. I'm not claiming emotional work is new. Performers and artists have sold feeling forever. But the intimate, 1 to 1 functions that used to be unpaid (being mourned for, witnessed, befriended, etc.) are getting pulled into the market, with none of the norms that art and performance spent centuries building. And I'm using the collar frame because it's the market's own lens, and my whole point is that the market is about to collide with work it has no category for. You're right that it's a corporate map, but that's also the map this work is being forced onto.
The 1:1 aspect is super interesting, I agree. In my mind it still relates to art and performance, just like a 1000 years ago. What started as a site-specific (e.g. church fresco) or person-specific (e.g. portraiture) art piece evolved into salons, then galleries, then mass reproductions, then global merch. Looking at markets like China or Korea where things like boyfriend for hire are much more common, you already see new marketplaces and the pressure to scale - which is the corporate lens you talked about. I wonder what a path to scale will look like for these intimate performances you're talking about - any thoughts?
The only thing I would challenge is the perceived inevitability of the current economic system. We have agency to make changes, to create a new speculative future beyond financialization. This new speculative future, imagining and building it, re-contextualizes technology and labor. A no collar future is possible if we dream strongly enough.
Love all of this. Thank you for the work you do, so inspiring! 🙏🏻
Could the concept of warm collar labor could even be applied to the mundane? A friend and I who run errands together because we wouldn't do it if the other one didn't go with, refer to our "Grocery Store Spouse" business model, and jokingly invent different membership tiers for the service.