Radical Worker
The Fight for Self-Determined Work
1st Edition
Published on 24. July 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
310 pages
978-3-8192-6826-7 (ISBN)
Description
Timothy Speed - neurodivergent artist, poverty theorist, and relentless disruptor - throws himself between assembly line, boardroom, and bureaucratic frontline. As a Radical Worker, he refuses the paycheck as measure of worth, working instead by moral coherence, ecological resonance, and existential sense. Whether infiltrating corporations undercover or applying to run Germany's state TV, Speed exposes the deep protocols of a system that converts dignity into obedience and creativity into currency.
For the Artistic Research community, this book proves that art isn't commentary - it's infrastructure. Research happens in real-time, in real life.
For Critical Autism Studies, it's a rare inside-out account: autistic intensity, rule clarity and focused resistance sharpen into a tool that cuts through institutional myth.
For anyone forced to work - or forced not to - this is a living roadmap: self-determined labour, basic income, and the politics of commoning are not just imagined here - they're practiced, tested, lived.
Speed flips the script: poverty is not a lack, but a refusal to play by a broken game. Forced labour is social exclusion. And the true metric of wealth? The time left untouched by the system's noise. Radical Worker is manifesto, fieldwork, and survival guide - a call not to adapt, but to remake the world from the bottom up.
For the Artistic Research community, this book proves that art isn't commentary - it's infrastructure. Research happens in real-time, in real life.
For Critical Autism Studies, it's a rare inside-out account: autistic intensity, rule clarity and focused resistance sharpen into a tool that cuts through institutional myth.
For anyone forced to work - or forced not to - this is a living roadmap: self-determined labour, basic income, and the politics of commoning are not just imagined here - they're practiced, tested, lived.
Speed flips the script: poverty is not a lack, but a refusal to play by a broken game. Forced labour is social exclusion. And the true metric of wealth? The time left untouched by the system's noise. Radical Worker is manifesto, fieldwork, and survival guide - a call not to adapt, but to remake the world from the bottom up.
More details
Person
Author
Timothy Speed (b. 1973, England) is an artist, activist, and neurodivergent theorist. As an autistic person with ADHD, he lives what he writes about - in poverty, in conflict with institutions, and with a way of thinking that runs against the mainstream. His research is provocative and profound: for physics, for philosophy, for society.
Through self-experiments, institutional investigations, and radically embodied theory, Speed develops a new perspective on consciousness, reality, and power. At its core stands the MNO theory - a model that derives nonlocality, subjectivity, and social order from a structural gap. From the exception to the rule.
Speed does not research the world from the outside - he folds himself into it, lives in it as if in an open laboratory. His texts are the imprint of this practice: wild, precise, unsettling.