CONCEPT
La Perruque
The wig: using the employer's tools, time, and materials for one's own work. De Certeau's paradigm of invisible resistance—not theft, not sabotage, but creative redirection of institutional resources toward personal purposes.
La perruque—literally 'the wig'—is de Certeau's term for the French workplace practice of using company resources for personal projects: the factory worker who builds furniture on company machinery, the secretary who writes her novel on company time, the office worker who uses company stationery for personal correspondence. It is not theft, because the worker does not take the company's products. She takes the company's means of production and redirects them. The practice is tactical—it operates within the employer's territory, during the employer's time, using the employer's tools, but it produces something that belongs to the worker, not the company. It is invisible resistance: the factory still runs, the work still gets done, but the worker has carved out a space of personal agency within institutional control. In AI contexts, la perruque describes using a corporate AI tool for personal projects, repurposing a model for unintended creative purposes, or finding capabilities the platform did not design for.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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