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In post-digital capitalism, digital disconnection is not merely a “luxury” but also an obligation. Aiming to re-contextualize digital disconnection outside of digital detox resorts, social media, and elitist activism, this article asks how the ongoing disconnection turn affects how we (think about) work. With cues taken from digital disconnection studies and (digital) work/labour research, I inquire three facets of disconnective work. I elaborate, firstly, what disconnection might mean for work, as I scrutinize ideals pertaining to “deep” and “slow” work. Secondly, I unveil how disconnection may materialize at work, as I inspect “the post-digital workplace” and “disconnective technologies of work.” Thirdly, using “The Post-Digital Housewife” as a rhetorical figure for grasping the daily, typically unpaid, work that the disconnection turn makes acute, I recognize disconnection as work. The article concludes by presenting four dialectics of disconnective work, which serve to remind us of the paradoxical role of disconnection in processes of empowerment and exploitation.

Over the last decade, free labor has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding new or semi-new forms of labor in the contemporary digital economy. This article critiques and develops this concept, with specific reference to work in the media industries, by presenting a historically grounded typology of free labor that also highlights some of the analytical problems with the current use of the concept. Our typology presents seven metaphors of free labor based on historical instances of roles people have taken on when performing unpaid labor: those of The Slave, The Carer, The Apprentice, The Prospector, The Hobbyist, The Volunteer, and The Patsy. A key conclusion is that free labor is performed by different actors at either end of increasingly complex and temporally stretched out value chains. This necessitates a more fine-grained and historicized use of the concept of free labor.

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