Precarity, globalism and resistance in emergent collectivism : the case of Enspiral

Growing isolation and labour precarity in media work has generated novel forms of organised networks. This article presents the example of the ‘Enspiral Network’, established in 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand, as a harbinger of future responses to precarity. Participants in the network draw on a blend of digital literacies to function sustainably within, whilst working to resist and update current organisational paradigms. They have created relatively fluid, hybridised structures and practices to move beyond the rigid hierarchical interaction that characterises corporate organisations. An example is cloud-based software that permits carefully governed and recorded decentralised decision-making by a spatiotemporally distributed group. Participants also write reflexive commentary and host and participate in public fora via a range of physical and digital platforms, reformulating activism as an interventionist narrative that promotes the global whilst valorising and nurturing the local via both everyday and public forms of resistance. Lovink and Rossiter’s concept of the ‘orgnet’ (Lovink, 2007; Rossiter, 2006b; Lovink & Rossiter, 2011) is adapted as a means by which to locate these characteristics as part of a larger picture of interacting networks, arguing that the relative stability of the Enspiral Network is generated by social-technical systems that facilitate a novel mix of entrepreneurial market pragmatism and ethically framed social enterprise.