'South Korean companies are sending employees on "fake funeral" courses to help prevent suicide. The "well-dying craze" has become an integral part of training at Samsung, which has built its own fake funeral centre'

There has been intense discussion of the notion of 'immaterial labour' recently. Initially proposed by Maurizio Lazzarato and famously deployed by Hardt and Negri to describe the liberatory potential of mental and/or affective labour in an 'informatised' mode of production, the immaterial labour thesis implies that new technology is producing non-capitalist labour relations within capitalism. One serious challenger to this view is the American academic Moishe Postone who sees labour as inherently linked to domination.

After summer 2002's bizarre display of jubilee-, sport- and media-fuelled nationalism, replete with bunting, flags, street parties and other nostalgic symptoms of the Po-Mo crisis of belonging, we thought the only possible response was fiction. Here Gwyneth Jones - science fiction writer, critic and author of Bold as Love - converts the psychic trauma of 'UK Summer 2002' into a short story...