I wrote a new essay called “Very Mercenary” for the newest issue of Slanted, devoted to Stockholm, Sweden. The essay is about Stockholm Syndrome and how graphic designers often develop a variation of this condition when working with clients. The intro:

It had been a real homewrecker of a day.

I was holed up in my garret on Svartesgatan, looking down on Södermalm splayed out below me, calculating my next steps. I had the tools. I had the optics. I had everything I needed… except for that one particular, very, very tricky piece: a target.

Clients had been easy to come by the past few decades, but then things got weird—the clients started outsourcing their hits to cheaper labor elsewhere. It didn’t matter that I had a perfect kill rate, not to mention that my “Hotness” rating online was 4 out of 5 chili peppers. For the clients, it was all about what they were spending… good clean hits were out. Working alongside the elite culled from the best of the best was out. No jungle action. No desert heat… No stormed embassies… No ghost platoons…

Given the context of this essay, it is obvious that I am writing about freelance graphic design, though if we turned the clocks back a few decades, this would’ve been a pitch-perfect introduction to one of your typical super-shitty novels about a mercenary.

Get Slanted 39 here: https://www.slanted.de/product/slanted-magazine-39-stockholm/