Is sadness a bug or a feature of today’s internet? How are we asked to stay optimistic towards a highly insecure future? During the fourth and final Life Hacks event, net critic Geert Lovink will discuss his upcoming book Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism (2019) while sociologist Marguerite van den Berg will talk about her research about how the state demands optimism now and the kinds of affective labour that workers are performing to remain optimistic about sometimes quite bleak futures.

Life Hacks is part of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s fellowship program around the theme of burn-out. As 2017 fellow Ramon Amaro states, “On the one hand, to ‘burn out’ is to stall, break, or become otherwise unusable. In other words, processes, procedure and participation simply stop working. On the other hand, ‘burn out’ is an opportunity to break open, promote action and catalyse change towards new structures and relations.”

Life Hacks manifests in a series of gatherings that respond to this ambivalence by exploring the approaches and techniques adopted to design or redesign life against the backdrop of growing precarity and an intensified entrepreneurial regime. Together with theorists, practitioners and XPUB, the Experimental Publishing program of the Piet Zwart Institute, Life Hacks looks into the tensions and releases that emerge from the constant reinvention and progressive self-optimization necessary to inhabit public and private space, manage time and productivity, and tweak one’s own thoughts and feelings.

Life Hacks is curated by Silvio Lorusso, and jointly organized by HNI’s Research Department and XPUB.