Ever since migrating to Berlin from Turkey – where authoritarianism tightens, the economy collapses, and queer, Kurdish, and migrant refugee lives shrink under its weight – I’ve found that here, in Berlin, work was the only certainty. No rest, no pause, no space to digest – just survival. Before migrating from Turkey, I had only observed migrant labor resistance from a distance – reading about the Gorillas workers’ strike and hearing a courier friend in Berlin describe their fight. So, when I arrived in Berlin, I already had an idea of what resistance looked like, but, becoming a courier myself – out of necessity for both paperwork and financial reasons – made me see the strike in a different light. It wasn’t just about wages; it was about making couriers visible in a system that reduced them to data points, where exhaustion was the metric, survival the efficiency, every second tracked, every trip optimized.
To be a migrant worker – especially an ‘ideal’ one – meant being productive but invisible. Efficient, not creative. Work hard, stay in line. These rules weren’t just about labor; they turned even a moment of reflection into inefficiency, making thinking beyond work feel like wasted time. In that job, organizing became more than an idea, in the daily grind of staircases and deliveries. While working at this company, where workers labored like Gorillas couriers packed into hubs, I met an IT worker from the U.S. who had taken this job specifically with the idea of organizing a strike. Within weeks, we planned a Betriebsrat (works council), gathered signatures, mapped the invisible rules that governed us, and found ways to fight back.
At first, organizing felt like a collective effort – until I realized whose voices were missing: BIPOC+ workers' struggles were barely a footnote in the conversation, even though, as migrants, they were at its center. There was a lack of awareness, language facilitation, and significant knowledge disparities about legal processes in the organizing group. In a room full of people fighting for ‘the working class,’ contradictions of privilege were everywhere. Some barely stayed afloat on gig wages, stretching every euro to make rent, while others took frequent vacations or lived comfortably on state support – somehow always finding time for a retreat or an artist residency. For me, this made it clear that organizing wasn’t just about challenging the bosses, it was also about making invisible struggles visible.
Fig. 1
During this process, I felt the need to express myself. My creativity was restless. I thought social media could be a way to be creative. So, I started making memes about politics, organizing, and the migrant experience, using them not just as a tool for activism, but as a creative survival tactic, a way to reclaim visibility on my terms. However, as I became more outspoken, the company began tracking my movements, monitoring my social media, and treating my online expression as a threat. In Turkey, censorship had always been the norm, an ever-present shadow, shaping what could be said and who could say it. Here, I had expected something different: the freedom to speak without fear, to exist online without offline consequences. Instead, I found a new kind of suppression – not through government crackdowns, but through corporate surveillance.
Yet, as this surveillance intensified, the response from the organizing group in the company wasn’t what I had expected. Instead of support, I received instructions: Go offline. Make your account private. No, better yet, delete it. They sent links to digital security guides as if a VPN could shield me from an employer intent on erasing me. No one questioned why I was posting or how it mattered to me as a migrant from Turkey, where gaining internet freedom is already a struggle. The same directive, over and over: Stay invisible. Keep quiet. Go incognito. Disappear. Under surveillance, without support from the organizing group, financially on the edge, and juggling shitty jobs, I felt an even stronger pull to make myself visible online. I had no other platform, no stage in those days. I needed to prove that I existed, that I mattered, that I wouldn’t simply fade into the background. But post too little, and you disappear again. Post too much, and you become a target. Sharing online wasn’t just self-expression, it was a survival tactic, and a risk worth taking.
Memes became a way to cope, to process labor exploitation and the traumas of organizing. Turning pain into a meme became a way to reclaim the narrative – transforming suffering into something digestible, ironic, and shareable – before it consumed me. Like so many precarious creative workers, meme-makers juggle multiple worlds – freelance gigs, service jobs, blue-collar shifts – all while existing in a space of uncertainty. As the meme researcher İdil Galip explores in “The ‘Grotesque’ in Instagram Memes,” meme-making reflects a twofold precarity: first, an inconsistent revenue stream from creative work; secondly, the physical exhaustion of labor-intensive jobs. The workers who go chronically online to shitpost are also the ones pulling doubles at restaurants, cleaning buildings, delivering food, and grinding through multiple jobs just to survive. For them, making memes, creating, and posting are not just forms of catharsis – they are survival tactics, reaching across platforms for resonance, solidarity, and a moment of recognition.
As a precarious worker, a migrant, and an artist, I know what it means to move without resources and support, yet I still dream collectively. That’s why I go chronically online, post unapologetically, and flood every medium I touch. Because devaluation has always been the logic imposed on me, and I’ve learned to weaponize it. Now, I organize cleaning workers on strike, a role I took on right after working as a cleaner myself, and write lyrics that sound like:
Power to the women of the morning shifts. / Power to the hands that create.
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- Image credits
Cover and fig.1: Portrait Zeliha B. Cenkci. Courtesy of the author.
