Called into the office, take a seat. "Napoleon" will be with you shortly. The chair beside me is vacant, the light in the windowless room scans at my eyes. I sign away my right to have a fellow member of staff present for the meeting. It’s a formality, they’ll be good to me, just as I’m good to all the authors I plagiarise.

A shock. At the end of my three-month probation period, I’m out of the cultural place, mumbling the wordswork ethicto myself like an item on a foreign menu, wondering if the managers decrypted or traced that email I sent anonymously.

“You can appeal,” says Napoleon.

I throw my hands up in the air. Then leave. Two days later my other job falls through. This is the nightmare of everyday life.

We’re clinging onto a liberalism that will, without doubt, be defeated at the next general election. A recent survey found that attitudes are hardening against the poor, even among young people, usually a more tolerant demographic. Outside the bubble of lefty blogs and comment pieces, we may forget that there is a general approval of what the government is doing. A majority of people, for example, would restrict what can be bought with benefits – this effectively means food stamps. So what’s the point? If you can’t get a table, get a waiting job, right?

My friends who used to be on the dole aren’t anymore. Maybe the government was right after all – there was game to be hunted, we just weren’t hungry enough. Is it a coincidence the promise of the dreaded Work Programme made us all crawl off the dole somehow? Cooking pizzas for cash-in-hand money, labouring on building sites, bumming around on friends’ sofas, applying for postgraduate degrees we’ll never be able to afford, moving in with our boyfriends, making life harder for the ones we love? Some of us would have (re)turned to shoplifting, or slept underneath beds, starving and screaming, but we’d have found something somehow, or we’d have killed ourselves on the drugs that seem to stalk the unemployed and hold their heads under the covers each morning, unable and unwilling to get up and look for work.

The truth is, and not many liberals will say this, but a lot of people don’t want to work. The government is probably right. We are lazy, we are choosy. Because don’t you think you’d really have to be masochistic to activelychoosea lot of the jobs out there? To actuallywantto do this work, given the choice, knowing what we know?

As far as I can tell, the reason we’re elitist and choosy is because work has come to stand for something so much worse than we were promised. Promised by ourselves, the lecturers, the poets, the rock stars, the hand of history itself, which we thought would move forward towards greater equality, more opportunity, less misery – an end to deference, the shattering of glass ceilings. But for the first time since I can remember, history seems to be spinning backwards. And as my friend, the nearly-always-on-the-money Dan Hancox says, not back to the 1980s, but the 1880s. Old hierarchies are being consolidated through new power structures – internships, tuition fees, the pricing us out of cities, the rebranding of social security first as welfare and then as charity.

But wait. Everybody’s an artist! Everybody’s got something to say! Have we been coaxed into thinking we can all work for our own disgusting selves and our crippled ideology, outside of the present reality – become graphic designers and freelance photographers and whatever it is university courses train people to do? Most certainly. Our ambitious have given our masters something they feel they need to slap down, put in its place, remind thatsomebody’s got to serve at the till, tend bar, punch numbers into the database. Of course, they’re right. Somebody got to do it. Nobody ever denied that.

So I can’t ignore the fact that there are better solutions out there if we’d only consider them. Take the idea that the national debt ought to be paid off by the richest in society, which they could handle many times over. A 20% tax on the wealth of the top 10% – less in percentage terms than the cuts to housing benefit – would do the trick. Boom – gone. No more austerity, no more “tough decisions” of the kind that always wind up hammering the young and poor.

It would be great too if workers weren’t treated like disposable pieces of machine; if there was an actual incentive to get a job – if it felt like it meant something, and was worthwhile, as opposed to just another form of coercion. Hancox also has some enlightening things to say about this, too, with relation to what’s happening in the ‘utopia’ of Marinaleda in southern Spain, where the rogue mayorJuan Manuel Snchez Gordilloseems to be restoring some dignity for his people.

This is dreamy stuff, I know. I have under a month until I’m totally out of work again. I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Strength versus fragility; these are the elemental themes of 830 Sign’s Spring/Summer 2013 collection. Art Director Mariavittoria Soldi contrasts her inspirations for this season's range: the fortitude and endurance of architecture by Bauhaus is united with elegant yet powerful performances that date as far back as the 19th century, from women such as Mary Wigman, Pina Bausch and Martha Graham. The range is designed for the today’s hybrid woman who is one of many things: powerful, creative, assertive and elegant.

The shape and purity of the garments become puppets to the body; they travel according to its movements, and subsequently act as a second skin. The body and 830 Sign's clothing are portrayed as one, ‘two separate souls that exist within one body’. Ultimately, the aim is to have a range that will provide as much longevity as the body does, both in terms of quality and style.

TRIBUTE, the series of short films about youth selected and produced by cult rising film directors AG Rojas and Vince Haycock's firm MAINLINE, has been debuting on Dazed for the last two months. Featured so far have been the films of Matt Lambert and Focus Creeps, and debuting this morning is the work of AG himself.

Shot in Taft, California, AG's Cody continues his vein of lyrical, poetic and complex narratives about youth outsiders. This time, though, it's an all too real tale of youth and reticence he documents, and you can watch it exclusivelyabove, and let us know what you think on Youtube.

Interview taken from the February issue of Dazed & Confused:

A mathematician’s son, Ivan Poupyrev left his homeland following the collapse of the Soviet Union and divided his time between Washington and Japan, where he earned a doctorate from Hiroshima University. After an eight-year stint with Sony’s Tokyo labs he moved to Pittsburgh to take up a senior post with Disney Research, where he dreams up the interfaces of the future. Poupyrev works in physical computing, making responsive interfaces out of unexpected objects. His Botanicus Interacticus transforms ordinary house plants into touch-sensitive musical instruments through the magic of Touché sensing technology. Mathematical wizardry enables Touché to add gesture control to any object that conducts electricity – so secret gestures can unlock doorknobs too. Revel was a similarly lo-fi stroke of genius; by manipulating our bodies’ electrostatic fields, it lets our hands feel computer-generated textures. An image of a ball can feel rubbery, sand gritty and pebbles smooth.

What drew you to touch-based technology?

We can completely control data and conjure any image or sound we want from it; there are no limitations to what we can create visually. But the sense of touch is really lacking from these creations. You can’t really feel it, touch its texture, wrap your hands around it. That’s a huge lack – touch is an important part of how we experience life. So my idea is to bring the virtual into the palpable realm. Maybe you can shape soundwaves with your hands, feel light falling on your hands, or grasp objects you can’t normally see with your eyes.

What’s the difference between physical computing and ‘the internet of things’?

They all refer to the same vision of the future but come at it from different angles. The internet of things is focused on objects talking to each other over wi-fi, for example. Whereas I approach this vision of the future by making the world an interface. I did my PhD in virtual reality – I was fascinated by creating completely artificial environments you become immersed in, where anything is possible. Physical computing brings qualities of the computer into physical reality.

If you could only use storytelling or technology to enhance reality, which would you choose?

The original storytelling pretty much used narrative alone. A narrator takes you through the story step-by-step and you are essentially passive. But computer games opened storytelling right up. With video games you are an actor in the story unfolding in front of you. A compelling story will remain really important but technology gives you a greater sense of immersion. Your actions have consequences, and that fosters a far stronger emotional connection.

What other things extend the technology of storytelling?

If you imagine what the ultimate game could be – with no limitations on your imagination – then it would be your own life. If you could live your life, then load it from level one (i.e. your birth), that would be awesome! We can approximate elements of this ultimate game with wearable technology: as you go through your day, it changes your experiences according to a certain narrative, and this narrative becomes part of your real life. This idea of thinking about the ultimate experience first, then stepping back and approximating it with what we have to hand, is how I work.

So what’s the future of entertainment?

Entertainment used to be a confined experience, one-on-one with a book or sat in front of a TV. It was bound to one particular place: the theatre or cinema. Mobile devices changed the game, so the next step is to connect to the real-world environment, and the next step after that is to enhance your real-world environment. I think the next technological revolution will be in merging the physical and the digital. Simplicity is key to this. Back in the 60s, if you wanted to own a car you needed to be a part-time mechanic to maintain it. Now cars just work, they’re simple. I think that same transition needs to happen with the technologies that connect the real world to the digital.

Augmented reality is technology that merges the digital with the physical. Kevin Slavin famously criticised its visual bias and said ‘reality is augmented when it feels different’. Do you agree?

I can see both sides of the argument. Realism, by itself, is boring. When the artist can inject their very personal view of the world, morph the world and objects within it in a way that reflects how they feel about the world, that’s when things become interesting. That’s why cartoons are compelling. The resurgence of 8-bit graphics is also related to this. Bitmapped graphics enable a purity of expression: when you’ve got a limited palette, every pixel matters. Things become interesting when you can create experiences you cannot experience in the real world. That’s what fascinates me.

Brian Eno famously complained about the imprisoning nature of computer interaction. he said, ‘how does one Africanise, or Brazilianise, or otherwise liberate a computer?’

I’m with Brian Eno 100 per cent on that! Liberating yourself from the screen was exactly why I got into virtual reality in the first place. But computers themselves are a culture. For the original supercomputer designers, the idea that you would use a machine of that power to play games on would be outrageous! That way of thinking about computing as a serious tool to do serious business is still very strong. It’s less about west vs east, but it’s a historical legacy of how computers came to be.

Where do you look for inspiration?

I’m always looking at trends. I want to see the seeds of what is happening, not the results. Printed electronics really interest me at the moment. Printing is a very old technology but it’s seeing a reinvention right now. We’re printing things which were not supposed to be printed. The big shift is we’re printing things that can do things themselves. We printed an optical sensor that senses input, using LEDs and light pipes printed inside the object! These technologies will let us create previously impossible things. It’s going to be hugely significant.

Where will the next tech revolution happen?

Well, the revolution happens from all quarters. I think that the enthusiasts are the ones on the forefront but it’s when there’s big business to be had that things accelerate fast. Even with lots of stupid money being wasted on projects during the first dotcom boom, it was that swell that made the big companies wake up to the internet. But the maker community around (open-source tools for creating interactive environments) Arduino and Processing was eye- opening for me. They are tools that lower the entry bar, and the community that’s emerged bucks the trend of passive consumers. When entry barriers are lowered, people get involved. Curiosity is wired into us: the excitement of making and creating something new.