Offline Matters: The Less-Digital Guide to Creative Work

Offline Matters is a handbook for anybody experiencing digital overload in their lives and creative work.

"For any creative who has had to cater to corporate dimwits in order support their art, here's a terrific guide to bringing your best work into the commercial sphere without selling out or compromising your craft. This is a book about how to break free from the data-driven expectations of your client's spreadsheet, and retrieve the true novelty that makes you valuable in the first place." – Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human

"Offline Matters is a much needed take-down of the whole 'cult of creativity' from the inside. This rattle gun attack on the perniciousness of the creative digital work will leave you aghast and amused in equal measure." – Oli Mould, author of Against Creativity

When did creative work become so boring?
How did 'digital-first' come to dominate everything?
...and why is nobody talking about it?

Part insider exposé, part worker-manual, this book is for any creative seeking help on:

• Navigating the possibility of offline alternatives
• Countering overwork culture, exploitation, and dulled-down ideas
• Recovering what you loved about your creative calling

...away from the confines of our screens. We are dreaming of offline. Not as a romanticised past, a punishment, a quick detox, or a WiFi-free café. Offline is not a lifestyle. It's a space of opportunity.

By the end of Offline Matters, you'll have a new perspective on the dry digitality that defines creative work today - and a set of strategies for going beyond it.

Jess Henderson (pseud.) is a writer, theorist, and creative strategist. Aged just 26, in 2017 they founded Outsider – an insider-activist platform within the creative industries. Beginning as a subversive email newsletter, Outsider has grown to garner a cult-following around the world with their anonymous writings, research, publications, experimental workshops and offline-only events.

Henderson is a fellow of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, and speaks about offline creativity around the world – including at NYCxDesign week, Parson's Strategic Design Conference, the DuPho Awards, and Us by Night Festival.