A visionary concept about empowering entrepreneurship through a shared live/work space with like-minded driven individuals, or a pragmatic way of collective living that can help save costs as well as providing a nurturing environment? Filmmakers Marta Dauliute and Viktorija Šiaulyte offer a balanced yet gently sceptical look into a new business modus operandi in which worktime and downtime are indistinguishable.
There is a good deal of profound talk from the founders and funders of Tech Farm, a resolutely exclusive neo-liberal collective in central Stockholm where entrepreneurship has come to be something far more than the implementation of a business idea. Quite what their notion of ‘entrepreneurship’ actually is is never quite clear in the film, but as Lisa Renander (who is interviewed in the film as ‘Start-Up Founder’), creator of Hus24 and its parent company, Tech Farm, has previously explained in an online interview: “An entrepreneur, for us, is someone who is driven, open-minded, and at the front of their field.”
Dauliute and Šiaulyte shoot footage inside the Stockholm building (and also get some of its young residents to wear head cameras to record life in the sprawling apartment) where a large group can be seen lounging around chatting, eating, hanging in the ‘Zen Room’ and most importantly spending time glued to the screens of their MacBooks or iPhones.
They work in communal areas, their only private space being micro-apartments (or ‘pods’) where there is barely enough room for a bed let alone personal items. But then, the idea is that these entrepreneurs want to often work 24/7 and be around people on the same path. It is peopled by well-to-do young folk from around the world, and while the rent costs are never made clear, when asked if they would like to part of the Tech Farm experiment, one of the filmmakers admits she wasn’t sure she could afford a single room there.
As Renander also points out on a brief tour of the apartment with the filmmakers, there is also a sauna where they have brainstorming sessions, and a glass wall where they can plant post-it notes.
There are great plans for Tech Farms to be set up around world (though the film appears to have been shot pre-Covid, given there is not a mask to be seen), and there is also a sense – especially from the founders – that Tech Farm can also be viewed as a learning lab…in essence an experiment in a new way of working and living.
With knowing irony, Dauliute and Šiaulyte shoot an investor in his vast room, replete with sprawling bookcase and sparkling chandelier, as he debates what these micro-entrepreneurs might need. Another entrepreneur talks rather smugly how he has outsourced his life (he hasn’t opened his own mail in years he adds), while a determined young man is filmed trying to secure his role in a start-up by selling an on-demand directed sales concept to a clearly bemused street market trader.
The notion being mooted is that capital is synonymous with an individual’s ability, and an entrepreneurial ideology is the way forward. As the Göteborg official blurb for the film states: “Good Life reflects on a modern phenomenon, where community has become the product of a company, but which at the same time reminds us of other collectives from a completely different time.”
As one entrepreneur comments: “I think a very interesting thought it gives is that we are all being manufactured to perceive ourselves as enterprises. To brand ourselves through these digital means, inevitably…what does it really mean that all of us see us as brands?”
Another (Gustav) adds: “In a way it is the Marxist dream that has come true. Because the means of production are in everyone’s hands. You are your capital. The human capital. You yourself are the only capital needed to start a business.”
Though with a laugh another replies she is not sure what Marx would make of this analysis. “Alright, probably a good thing he’s dead,” adds Gustav.
Sweden-Lithuania-Finland, 2022, 72mins
Dirs/scr Marta Dauliute, Viktorija Šiaulyte
Production MD.EMC, Just a Moment, Hillstream Pictures
Producers Niklas Kullström, Marta Dauliute, Viktorija Šiaulyte, Dagne Vildžiunaite
Cinematography Elisabeth Marjanovic Cronvall
Editor Niklas Kullström
Music Rasmus Hedlund
