This year’s Center for 21st Century Studies conference, Insecurity, left me rattled. While I was not expecting to be uplifted, I was not prepared for the despair that would set in during the days following the conference. In the current moment in both the United States and around the world, insecurity has become a way of life. Contrary to the American stance that with more surveillance and more military we have become safer, the precarity of daily life overwhelms any overarching sense of security. While I did not see every talk at the conference, the plenaries and panels I saw caused me to think about the different ways in which capitalist extraction have affected labor in places both close and far, from within the academy to far beyond it.

            I am a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, finishing the third year of a PhD program in the English Department. I think about insecurity often. I am lucky. I have peers who think about it more often than I do. I have a summer job lined up; I am able to pay my rent. However, I am surrounded by doubt about the future. Job insecurity for graduate students and adjunct instructors is worsening at many universities, including Marquette in downtown Milwaukee. At the Insecurity conference, one of the attendees commented that usually the first thing to get neglected when college students, and especially grad students, are financially insecure is mental health, especially their access to medication. I am lucky enough to have access to health insurance as a TA; otherwise I would struggle with this expense myself. May is mental health awareness month, but being aware is only half the battle. When we are continually questioned, stigmatized, and financially unable to access care, what is the path toward a secure future? 

            Security and insecurity are often determined by numbers, as I learned from Dr. Saskia Sassen in her plenary on Friday afternoon. It doesn’t take a mathematician or even an economist to understand why extractive logics are destructive; for example the housing crisis that resulted in over 60 million sub-prime mortgage contracts. This type of predatory lending is extractive because it benefits the lenders while increasing financial precarity among those under contract who struggle to pay the high interest rates typical of subprime mortgages. It takes attentiveness to understand why it is difficult to see insecurity creeping up. In hindsight things are clear, and Sassen also accounted for why this is so: “Our eyes and the materialities in play are less likely to be able to tell us what they’re about than they were able to in the past. We lose [the] capacity to see and understand certain dynamics compared to a less advanced technological time.” Simply put, processes of extraction are intentionally obfuscated, and are more advanced than in past eras. While events like the financial crisis of 2008 are later talked about as though no one knew what was happening, small pockets of insiders knew about the harm being done.The increase in financial privatization since the mid 1970’s, in conjunction with networked technology, has made hiding predatory extraction within these “dark pools of finance” (Sassen) easier than ever.

            The economic insecurity perpetuated by neoliberal economic policies means that there are millions of people around the world who don’t have the means to live a viable life. While neoliberal economics are claimed as efficient, rooted in free trade and the power of the market, this financial model is extractive. Neoliberal economic policies enable the finance industry, CEOs and other elites to extract value from vulnerable groups to benefit the wealthy, rather than evenly distributing wealth as neoliberal theory alleges. In her plenary address, Dr. Naomi Paik explained the problem of military outsourcing, or the process of contracting labor from third-party nationals to work for the United States military. Her talk centered around the case of 13 Nepalese men who were told they would be travelling to another country to work at a luxury hotel. On the way to this alleged destination, they discovered this was false, and that they were contracted to work on a US airbase in Iraq. On the way to the base, 12 of the men were murdered. The sole survivor worked on the base for 15 months. This is just one example of the private military industry’s insecuritization of precarious labor. This employment chain leads to the extraction of labor from the poorest and most vulnerable of people.  

            Labor was at the heart of C21’s conference this year, and Dr. Annie McClanahan’s plenary address investigated the neoliberal phenomena of tip-work and microwork by analyzing a variety of output from the Amazon-owned platform Mechanical Turk. Yet another source of outsourcing, Mechanical Turk contracts people to perform human intelligence tasks, or work that can’t be done by a computer (yet) for extremely low pay. McClanahan’s argument centered upon the idea that even these platforms that ostensibly provide human employment (against the tide of automation) are training computers to understand the tasks so that they may finally stop paying people to do them, even if the pay is immaterial. And academics are complicit: 36% of the jobs on Mechanical Turk are posted by academics seeking help with menial lab work such as coding, survey-taking or, more ominously, artworks intended to illuminate the labor insecurity inherent to the platform. Ultimately McClanahan expressed that her ideal economic model would value human life over extraction—but how do we get there from here? Her mention of libertarian politics and universal basic income was juxtaposed with the championing of the human laborer, which is at odds with a system automated enough to allow for people to earn wages without work. 

            After the lectures about labor and exploitation on Friday, the tone turned more personal Saturday morning. Dr. Jennifer Doyle’s talk with the intriguing title “Letting Go” focused on a stalking incident she endured and the emotional and professional fallout she experienced during and afterward. While her talk was more like a personal narrative than an academic presentation, it was the most intense of the bunch. Her talk struck a balance between addressing issues at the university surrounding its Title IV office’s approach to effectively deal with insecure individuals, and the intense toll these events take on every aspect on someone’s life, both on and off campus. As she put it, the biggest fear of stalking victims is not that their stalker may inflict violence upon them, but that there will be no end to the stalking. While her experience was intensely personal, I can’t help but see this this as a useful way of thinking about insecurity as a whole. Doyle’s talk highlighted the insecurity of life on a college campus, even for a tenured professor. As a young person, my greatest fear is not what violence may be inflicted upon me, but that the threat of social and political violence is always there, and that peace seems impossible to experience. 

The exposure of myriad insecurities, on a college campus no less, reveals the cracks in the façade of university life, suggesting that this place of learning is riddled with political rupture and exploitation. In the shadows of the towering ideal that is the academy, what insecurities await us?