Often announced throughout the 20th century as the spectre of ‘technological unemployment’ grew, the end of work has become a common trope with the emergence of new digital technologies and the development of intelligent machines that replace humans in production. This article covers the numerous signs of the end of work (or employment, at least), mainly focusing on the contemporary debate about the ‘crisis of work’, which either acquires a utopian character or draws an apocalyptic scenario.

The dossier included in this edition of Electra looks at two concepts, idleness and leisure, the understanding of which has shifted and turned over their long history. We explore how leisure and idleness are seen today, in the awareness that the current meaning of these formerly opposing ideas cannot be properly understood without looking back to a time we have left behind and can only contemplate from afar. Once radically different from each other, these two concepts tend to overlap in modern society, with only a few slight differences: whilst leisure is understood as a break from our working schedule, idleness points to an existential condition or a psychological characteristic with negative connotations. The former dichotomy has dissolved and been transferred to another pair of ideas, much more relevant to us today: the relationship between work and leisure, the alternation between which underpins life in the society of work.

A few lines before the above quote, which is the focus for this discussion, Woolf wrote a curious sentence: ‘My profession is literature.’ I would certainly never write those words.

Five young people from different backgrounds with different experiences in work and as students talk about themselves and the world on the basis of their own observations. They describe atmospheres and environments and show us some of the affective shades of our age. They also ask to be heard freely and attentively.

‘Time is money’: no one has better expressed the absolute power of this earthly deity that governs even the categories of our experience than Benjamin Franklin, in the opening words of his Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748), cited prominently by Max Weber, who explores the idea in the second chapter of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Youth as a sociological category is a 20th-century invention. Its political significance has been extremely important at certain times (e.g. May 68). Now that this political significance has gone, what is the social and political significance of youth today? The answer in this opening article is that youth has been absorbed by the bio-political mechanisms that govern their bodies and their performance.

Any history of modern contemporary culture in Brazil would not be complete without mentioning the unparalleled Semana de Arte Moderna (São Paulo, 1922). It was at this decisive, controversial and agitated event that Yvonne Daumerie – dancer, choreographer, singer, composer, instrumentalist, declaimer and teacher – performed. Brazilian curator, writer and critic Veronica Stigger speaks to us about this multi-talented artist and her almost forgotten and ignored passage through the world. Bringing to the present the traces of her existence in the past, it is as if Veronica wishes to let us see this ghost and her dance erased by time.