The Age of Insecurity
Hello, friends, it’s been a while! I’ve been busy, tearing around doing much too much at once and thinking about lots of things all at the same time. It’s a bad habit I have, one I’ve had varying degrees of control over at certain points in my life, one that leads me to do lots of things not necessarily that well because my attention is scattered. Multi-tasking can look a lot like efficiency. But it can also be the opposite, for example, the day this week when I left my wallet at a seminar, the chain fell off my bike, I took a wrong turning in Farringdon, was late for a class, realised too late my WiFi wasn’t working, felt like crying in the middle of Liverpool Street, et cetera. It was one of those days (weeks) where all the illusions of control were pulled back, and the precarities of my working life were entirely exposed.
Last year I read an incredibly interesting book, The Age of Insecurity, by Canadian writer and activist, Astra Taylor. The central argument sits around a fairly familiar idea, that capitalism produces insecurity as a means of increasing productivity. She goes back to the enclosure movement, a series of legislations beginning in the 12th century that privatised common land in England and which, in the process, took from peasants their rights to hunt and fish or to have their own livestock. The commons were broken up into privately owned land upon which peasants now worked. In it, she quotes a landlord at the beginning of the 19th century recommending fencing with hedges that did not bear fruit, so that workers would not be tempted to eat for free: “the idle among the poor are already too prone to depredation, and would still be less inclined to work, if every hedge furnished the means of support.”
The position adopted here depends upon a fairly cynical view of humanity and of course a prejudicial view of the poor: that, by and large, humans, and the less wealthy humans in particular, are generally more inclined to laziness to productivity, that we don’t derive satisfaction from doing and producing and having purpose, and that, without the economic stick that is abjection and poverty, we’d pretty much all be sitting in hedges eating fruit. What position you take will depend on your life experiences, how much you like your own work, what you’ve been exposed to politically and culturally and socially.
I tend to believe — and this is Astra Taylor’s view — that with security, people tend to work better. Perhaps not always so productively, but with less panic and less frantically. But the stick has stuck, and insecurity has proliferated, not just economically and environmentally but also emotionally (see: social media), and it matters that they are connected. Much as we like to package economics as a science, money is charged with emotion: the anxiety when a bill arrives, the thrill of payday, the compulsions of overspending, the depression that results from extended periods of insecurity. All of this keeps us busy and distracted and thinking about how to assuage emotions short-term instead of addressing them at their root cause, all of which, says Taylor, is by design: “insecurity is a feature and not a bug of capitalism.”
The real kicker is that we’re primed to think of ourselves as barons (or barons-in-waiting) and not commoners: that one break, that one job, that one investment that will propel you to a level of security where you’re the one pulling in the profits rather than picking the fruit. Of course, plenty of people will become barons. But then, even when you get to baron-level and get your baron-badge, you start looking sideways and then up at the other barons, the wealthier barons, and the kings, and in fact your feelings of insecurity take a new hold, because why aren’t you that wealthy, or that successful, or that productive?
The answer, for Astra Taylor, is not to flee insecurity by means of harder, more frantic working practices (you lose your wallet, your chain falls off) but instead to accept that insecurity, though reproduced on mass scale by capitalism, is part of the deal, when it comes to being human. We all know that we could get sick, that we could lose our jobs, lose our livelihoods, our houses could flood or go up in flames, that eventually we will die. The point is to recognise that this same insecurity applies to everybody else as well, and that security is not necessarily a zero-sum game. What makes the difference is knowing that, if your house does flood or burn (I hope it doesn’t), you can call your neighbour or somebody down the road and ask for help, because you have a relationship, because you’ve been putting energy into the kind of security that has to do with connection and solidarity and not just the hustle.
If this sounds hopelessly idealistic and unattainable, what I am suggesting really really is starting small. In recent years, the biggest transformation I’ve experienced is that I’ve got better at sharing information. As a freelancer, but I think this applies in different ways to more “stable” work too, I’m primed to be atomistic and individualised, to work solitarily and not necessarily to make the time to find out how it’s going for other people. Sharing information — about working rates, about particular employers or contractors, whether they treat their workers well, whether they treat women and minorities well, about opportunities, and good, smart ways of finding more stability — has really changed the way I feel about my work, it’s made it easier for me to find other options when things aren’t working for me, and it’s given rise to a different kind of security than the kind of atomised and competitive, protective working practices that the “hustle” really engenders. I really try to pay attention and take note every time something good comes out of this more generous approach to security, and the acknowledgement of chronic insecurity. It’s a learned behaviour, and it really is necessary to start small but to keep going and going that anything — small at first, and eventually, if we do it right, something big — actually changes.
With love, Rosie xxx