Over the past decades, a number of EU member states have recorded large rises in the use of temporary employment. Young people are far more likely than other groups to be employed in precarious jobs, independently of their education and skills. In the midst of the global economic-financial crisis, in fact, the assault on the conditions of knowledge workers goes on, Hence the present article discusses the invisible face of the conditions of young knowledge workers that collides with the official one, which superficially considers them to be 'independent professionals', although they increasingly experience conditions similar to those of dependent workers and suffer the effects of the further precarisation brought about by the crisis, but without trade-union or political representation.

This article explores the notion of logistical connectivity as a twofold and ambivalent lens. On one hand, connectivity can be seen as a pervasive logistical tool for labour exploitation and surveillance. On the other, it opens up opportunities to establish new kinds of social relations and forms of worker organisation. The analysis draws on empirical data gathered during 2016 in Turin, a city in northern Italy, during mobilisations by Foodora workers. The findings show that logistical connectivity constitutes an unprecedented form of pervasive control, but -under certain conditions -can be shaken and reversed by workers and become a mode of mobilisation and self-organising.

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In knowledge-based industries, work is circumscribed by the cognitive frames of creativity in the representations of subjects, but simultaneously demands adaptability, in a context in which deregulation and individualisation are now normal. The ethics of self-activation are therefore inextricably intertwined with the demands of intensification, standardisation and self-commodification. The first volume of this Special Issue which is composed of two different parts is focused on the phenomena of hybridisation, self-employment and subjectification, at the core of the experiences of precarious workers in the knowledge societies. This article introduces the first of a two-part Special Issue on the precariousness of knowledge workers.

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