Venture labor gives us a conceptual hook to understand changes to the nature of work and to understanding evolutions in new media. Venture labor, work that entails bearing entrepreneurial risk, is an explicit continuation and intensification of trends that began with deindustrialization. While “venturing” is not new—just think of the many who staked potential fortunes on the gold rush—compensating workers with stock options for part or all of their salary is relatively new, at least below upper-management level. Work in cultural industries has always been riskier for the people working in them. But what I have tried to present in this book are the financial implications of the shift of the burden of risk onto employees, the implications for media making in the digital era, and the potential of the application of the concept of venture labor to other industries. This suggests that venture labor is in part a response to changes in workplace security, the increased individualization of risk through health and retirement benefits, and structural changes across the economy.

My fieldwork uncovered the cultural frames that workers used to calculate value in their jobs—and by extension to frame and manage the risks they perceived they faced. Their acceptance and management of risk served capitalist functions by supporting the growth of companies and industries. In effect, their individual-level, culturally informed explanations that my respondents offered for how people get ahead, why work is meaningful, and how to navigate a career in this field masked the social or collective forces at play within their jobs. This does not bode well for creating a sense of old-fashioned solidarity among workers facing increased uncertainty. To echo the words of one of my unemployed respondents after the crash, when a job is thought of as an investment—and not as a right, an obligation, or an earned position—losing a job can seem like “easy come, easy go.” A sense of moral outrage or indignation at being part of an economic arrangement that devalues work and views, in Louis Uchitelle’s terms, workers as “disposable” is missing when people use these investment frames to understand their choices.25

Venture labor stood in for venture capital—both in the real sense of resources needed to build companies and in terms of seemingly being an accessible option for wealth accumulation of middle-class knowledge workers. This plays into the political right’s rhetoric of the “ownership society” that employs the middle-class dream of profiting from ownership. Whether from one’s labor or one’s home, the false dream of the ownership society promises that generating profits in a capitalist society is as easy as cashing a paycheck or paying the mortgage. So-called ownership society ownership comes without power, just as the stock option holders of Silicon Alley exercised little power over their companies’ choices. Similarly, the U.S. housing market crisis exposed the culpability of middle-class investments in a global financial marketplace.