In Tunisia, the post-revolution government is using the popular PiratePad collaborative, open-source text editor to help construct their constitution. The idea appears to have originated with Slim Amamou, a blogger with deep roots in the hacker community who’s ascended into the upper echelons of Tunisian politics to become a Tunisian cabinet member.

This is my slowly disintegrating computer. It’s bursting apart into gadgets and modules, each one good for what it does, but none a full experience. Sometimes when I go out, I carry the screen and the speakers but not the keyboard. Other times, I don’t bother with the speakers but want the keyboard and the screen.

The far side of this seems so obvious that it feels inevitable: Computers made of ad hoc clusters of devices that are as interchangeable and compatible as an ad hoc cluster of pens, pencils, scrap paper, and notebooks. I see stacks of thinscreens as cheap and shareable as office supplies. Bits of computers as semi-communal possessions, the way that re-useable shopping bags or tupperware containers are.

It’s the latest neologism in economic theory, a combination of precarious and proletariat, defining the desideratum of the new model disaster capitalism in which employees are transformed into spare parts, to be used as needed, then discarded.

The precariat has long existed at the margins of the economy in the pieceworkers, temps, and flextimers who scrambled for fleeting employment. But now it’s growing, as jobs once given to full-time employees are instead parsed out to contracting firms, which slice off a hefty portion of worker pay, and as jobs are reduced to temporary “just in time” positions and workers are hired for brief spans as “independent contractors.”