Astra Taylor's age of insecurity

0:19Hey guys, it's Andrea Dominic here. Along with Emily Friedlander. And you are listening to The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. In case you're tuning in to us for the first time, we're two longtime journalists and friends from opposite ends of the country who are obsessed with uncovering the shadowy and powerful forces lurking beneath the surface of culture and the media. Which is sort of just a conspiratorial way of saying that we look at how technology and financial incentives are quietly shaping everything from the music we listen to, to the shows we watch, to the news we consume, and how these forces impact us as independent culture producers and fans.

1:02We're back after a season break with a fresh batch of episodes and bonus content. So buckle up. To kick things off, we're exploring a topic that feels particularly acute at this moment in history, which is insecurity. It's not just high prices and the difficulty so many people are having trying to find a stable job. It's not just worrying about the election. And it's not just how social media makes us feel like our skin isn't smooth enough and our attention spans aren't long enough. Whether you're financially stressed, worried about climate change, or all of the above, everyone feels insecure right now.

1:38Even those folks who seem to have it all. Something about the status quo just isn't working. Why do we always feel so anxious and uncertain about what tomorrow will bring? And what can we do about it? In her new book, The Age of Insecurity, Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, the writer, filmmaker, and organizer Astrid Taylor answers just that. Through a mix of social critique, memoir, political analysis, and history, Astrid looks at how insecurity, both as an emotional phenomenon and a material one, can help us make sense of the myriad stressors and challenges of modern life. She shows us how insecurity is not only an unpleasant byproduct of modern capitalism, but the very motor that powers it, convincing us that we are to blame for our own shortcomings and setbacks in life, not decades of neoliberal austerity and the winnowing away of the social safety net.

2:35And spoiler alert, the results actually leave us feeling pretty hopeful and at ease. So, Astra joins us to talk about how insecurity is different from inequality, and why examining the emotional dimension of precarity is a really important missing piece when trying to make sense of why things feel so hard for so many people right now. We also get into the story of the enclosure of the commons in feudal England, and how that paved the way for our current insecure status quo, and how returning to this ancient idea of the right to the commons offers a potential path forward. You know, like health care as a human right or public education as a human right.

3:17Astra also tells us about her work as a co-founder of the Debt Collective, the first ever union for debtors, and how understanding how capitalism functions as an insecurity generating machine is the first step to banding together with others and doing something about it. We'll be right back with Astra just after the break.

3:40So insecure. That's what you are. That's what you are. That's what you are. That's what you are. Forever. The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners, which makes it all the more special that we just marked our fourth anniversary. To celebrate the milestone, we're offering a 50 % discount on paid subscriptions for the next two weeks. That's just$30 a year, or$2.50 a month, to get everything we put out. That includes access to our Discord community, the Cujoplex, bonus episodes, and more goodies. Our bonus steps are where we get personal and experimental.

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4:55Hey guys, we are back with Astra Taylor. Astra, thanks so much for coming on. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the nuts and bolts. How did you end up writing a book about this idea of insecurity? This is a book that's born of invitation. So the original seed of the idea that became the book was actually an essay that I published in this magazine called Logic, which is a great kind of progressive magazine of tech criticism. And in 2019, the editor of that magazine called me and said they were doing a special issue on security. And we were just chatting and suddenly I found myself saying that I actually wanted to do something on insecurity and on how technology was exacerbating people's overall sense of insecurity, precarity, anxiety.

5:47And I did the essay. It came out literally, I think, the month COVID hit and was one of those things that I felt was kind of unfinished, that there was more there to explore. But I stuck it in my mental file for a rainy day. And that rainy day appeared a couple of years later when I got a call from the coordinators of the CBC Massey Lectures asking me if I wanted to give the 2023 Massey Lectures, which at that point were pretty imminent. They were less than a year away. and the condition would be that I would have to write a book. And did I have any ideas? So I sort of shuffled through that mental drawer and said, I have one, I have one right here.

6:26I want to write about insecurity and how it's a key feature of our social, economic, and political systems, not just a kind of spontaneous emotion or a pathology that we should personalize. One of the kind of defining points of the book and one of my favorite ideas in it is that you started off by differentiating between insecurity and inequality. How do you define insecurity and how is that different from inequality? Well, I mean, just most obviously or even most intuitively, insecurity has an emotional component, right? I mean, that's sort of the first definition of the term is a kind of emotional state, an affect.

7:05You know, we talk about being insecure, feeling insecure. But insecurity is also a term used by social scientists to describe objective material conditions. So policymakers will talk about housing insecurity, job insecurity, even climate insecurity. That's something that I go back to throughout the book is that it occupies those double and very deeply intertwined registers, so the emotional and the material. So that aspect, I think, distinguishes it from inequality. I mean, I really think that to have an effective politics, we need to think about both. We need to think about insecurity and inequality together.

7:44And inequality had really been at the forefront of my mind. I mean, for the last, the years just keep ticking up. But I guess now, a dozen years, really since the Occupy Wall Street movement, I've been writing and thinking a lot about inequality, as have so many others. I mean, inequality is such a key feature of our moment. It just feels like there are more and more billionaires. They are more and more completely out there and horrible. Wealth is concentrating. You know, people's day to day economic lives, you know, improve or decline at the margins. But we're not really seeing a deep structural change.

8:18So we're still living in this new gilded age. And it's really important to talk about inequality because inequality is bad on so many levels. I mean, most fundamentally, I just think it's anathema to democracy. You cannot have anything resembling a democratic society when a handful of people control all the wealth because that wealth enables them to buy power and buy influence. But inequality on its own, I mean, it doesn't really get to that emotional element, right? You know, inequality, as I write in the book, it provides a kind of snapshot in time. So you can picture a graph of inequality with, you know, the billionaires on one side and people with less than zero with debt on the other side.

8:56Yeah, it feels quite static. Yes, it's static, right? It's a snapshot of a moment in time. Whereas insecurity has two other dimensions. One, it speaks to that emotional aspect. So, you know, how the dots on the graph might be feeling as they're hanging in space without a safety net below them. But also insecurity always looks forward. You know, part of why we're insecure today is because we don't know what's going to happen to us tomorrow. So you're exactly right. Inequality is static and insecurity is it's in time in this way that I think makes it much more accurate because that's what we are.

9:31Right. We're beings living our lives, thinking about what tomorrow will bring. And there are so many things on the horizon that make us feel increasingly insecure. I mean, the fact that our politics are in eternal crisis, the fact that we all are scrambling and trying to figure out how to make ends meet, but also climate change, which is the ultimate thing that's sort of hanging over us. Why did talking about insecurity or highlighting this as a kind of partner concept to inequality feel like such an important missing piece when trying to make sense of why things feel so hard for so many people right now?

10:05I think there's a lot to that. I mean, one is I spend a lot of my time organizing with people. And when you're organizing with folks, you know, it's not just about reading those numbers off the spreadsheet, right? It's not just about giving those static statistics. It really is about talking and opening up about folks' day-to-day struggles, their anxieties. and you know I work as an organizer on issues of inequality on issues of indebtedness mass indebtedness in the United States and you know financial matters are always connect to our feelings you know just the deep anxieties people feel not just in the United States but increasingly in Canada so that was part of why I thought it was really important and in general I think I'm quite interested in just the the emotional life of politics I mean politics is it's never just about policy, there's always a deeper, we could call it psychoanalytic dimension.

10:58And that's always really intrigued me. You know, what are the sort of unconscious drives or the things that aren't being said that are motivating us? And I think people on the progressive and left side of the spectrum are not as adept at talking about emotions as they need to be. And it's especially urgent because the right really taps into people's insecurities, really taps into people's fears and anxieties and then misdirects them, right? It says, oh, you're feeling insecure because of immigrants and trans kids and, you know, woke feminists and people protesting for the lives of folks in Gaza, right?

11:35And, you know, is always looking for a kind of victim to blame and is always stirring up people's fears and people's emotions. And the response to that isn't just to try to have some politics that somehow, you know, quote unquote, rational or something like that, or bloodless and disembodied, because that's just not what we are. We're embodied creatures who have these fears, who are inherently insecure and vulnerable and anxious. And we need to address that in a way that's constructive and ultimately, I think, in a way that helps build solidarity among vulnerable people. Yeah, that's so true. And I feel like it's interesting because insecurity is both a symptom of inequality.

12:11And, you know, as you very much illustrate in your book, it's also something that further drives inequality. So it's both produced by it and it maintains it. Yeah, 100 percent. The classic example, you know, that I and I begin with it because I think it's top of people's minds. You know, again, when we talk about insecurity, we picture something very personal, right? Like I'm insecure about my embodiment. I'm insecure about the way I look. And it's not a trivial example because it actually gives us insight into the way a capitalist economy works. I mean, I'm on the Internet all day and I am targeted with all sorts of ads that are trying to make me feel bad about myself or trying to make me feel like I don't have my shit together in some way or another.

12:55And so one thing I write is just that, you know, no advertisement will ever tell you you're OK and that it's the world that needs changing. And that's because insecure customers are better customers in the eyes of corporations. And again, I think it's not a trivial example because that logic actually extends and reverberates through all sorts of industries, all sorts of key components of contemporary economic and political life. And that's what I call manufactured insecurity. It's kind of insecurity that is exactly, as you say, used as a kind of feedback loop. It's generated by a capitalist economic system in order to fuel economic growth.

13:35Economic growth that is, of course, always very unequal, increased consumption, and to keep us scrambling and striving and motivated according to a very specific kind of accumulative logic. Totally. And you make the really strong point, I think, in the book that insecurity is something that you can say that like everybody is affected by. It's not just like people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, but even the people who are causing these conditions in a way like everyone is sort of caught up in it. Yeah, I mean, I think as someone who spent a lot of time organizing and again, I organize around debt.

14:13So I organize with people who have less than zero, who are indebted, who have negative net wealth. So it might strike people as a little odd that, you know, a good part of the book actually talks about how insecurity hounds everybody, no matter where we are on that inequality graph. Right. And in a way, it's me trying to articulate the kind of classic Marxist critique of capitalism, but in new language. Right. Because the point of having a critique of capitalism is to understand the way that a capitalist economy compels growth. I mean, a capitalist economy cannot rest. It must grow. This is why we are forced to worship at the altar of GDP, a gross domestic product, which must always go up, right?

14:53This is why we always need to be adding new jobs. This is why we always need the stock market to be reaching newly inflated valuations, because that's what the economic system demands. Otherwise, we're in a crisis. Otherwise, we're in a depression or a recession or some kind of crisis point. And so what the book is trying to say is that insecurity is actually really key to that whole process, that for capitalism to function, you know, we all have to be made insecure to some degree or another. And this affects not just poor people, but middle class people and upper class people. So I talk about a concept that comes from economics, which I think is really useful, and it's called fractal inequality.

15:32And it's the fact that there's all sorts of research that shows this, that no matter where you are, how much you have, you know, in a society where there is sort of no social safety net and also no ceiling on how much wealth you can amass, you know, people always look upwards. So, you know, people with debt look to people who are just at zero. People who are at zero look to folks who have some savings. People who have some modest savings look at people who have half a million bucks. Look at people who have a million bucks. Look at people who have tens of millions. Look at people who have billions.

15:58You know, until you get to the very top where you have what you have today, which is this small cabal of billionaire guys who are all just obsessed with becoming the first trillionaire and who are just, you know, at least from their social media presences, like pathologically insecure. And that's, I mean, they are flawed. I would say those individuals actually are personally flawed, but they are also trapped in a system that sort of compels that of them. And I think it's important to appreciate the structural forces because that's how we're going to change things. It's not just by saying, oh, that person's exceptionally greedy or, you know, exceptionally ambitious, but to say, what is it about the system that makes it so nobody can ever rest, that nobody ever feels that they have in us or are in us?

16:41Totally. So according to the book, part of the story actually begins in feudal England. Can you tell us the story about the enclosure of the commons? I know it was like many hundreds of years, but how that inciting event or series of events kind of paved our way for our insecure status quo? Yeah, the history of capitalism is really interesting because, of course, like anything, capitalism didn't just emerge all of a sudden out of the ether. It slowly came into being, in this case, over centuries as markets became more central. So human beings, and I think it's fair for me to say this, even though I'm not an anthropologist and archaeologist, but human beings have long engaged in market exchange, have long traded and created markets of all kinds.

17:34Capitalism, it takes that mode of engagement and makes it dominant so that you have societies where markets rule rather than markets just being a feature. And that shift happened over the course of centuries through what historians call the enclosure movement. And the enclosure movement is what it sounds like. It literally was a period when common lands, thousands and thousands of acres in England, were enclosed and privatized, literally enclosed with fences and hedges. And these were lands that under feudalism, which we don't need to romanticize, but it has some interesting characteristics. Under feudalism, these were lands that peasants or commoners had customary rights to.

18:13So if you were a peasant, you had by longstanding agreement rights to graze your animals, rights to glean for kindling and medicines and food, right to access the streams, the right to pick fruit. And these were key to you being able to sustain yourself and your family. And they provided, even in the language of the day, a modicum of a security. This is how it was occasionally discussed. And the enclosure movement disrupted these customary rights. People fought back. So again, we're condensing centuries into a really quick narrative here. But as these lands were enclosed through thousands of acts of parliament and people were pushed off the lands and weren't able to sustain themselves anymore, what happened was that peasants became the proletariat.

18:59People left their villages and moved into cities which were industrializing. And because they no longer had the right to live off the land, they had to sell their labor. So this story has been told many, many times before. But what I emphasize in it is that insecurity is right there at the very beginning, at the origin of capitalism, because these peasants had to be made literally insecure, cut off from the security provided by those longstanding rights of the commons before they could be made into, you know, main subjects, right? Workers, people who have nothing to sell but their labor. So it wasn't just about the accumulation of property or wealth.

19:37It really was about the manufacture of insecurity on a mass scale. And right there, too, again, because this is something that was very consciously done by landowners, by ruling class people, we can also see in the historical record what their motivations were. And they were very clear that they wanted the peasants to have to work harder for them, you know, because they were overly supported by their rights to the land. So, you know, landowners recommended, for example, enclosing fields with trees that did not bear fruit because then people wouldn't be able to eat for free. And their point was that by privatizing land, they would be improving public morality by forcing people to, you know, work harder.

20:21And so this theme of motivation, this idea that we actually need folks to be insecure in order to get the most out of them is something that I take issue with throughout the book. Because I think there are all sorts of ways to motivate people that do not just depend on, you know, the stick of precarity and insecurity. I think we can motivate people because they want to be collaborative, creative, because they care about each other, because we're, you know, inherently communal beings. But a motif going back to the earliest days of capitalist economics is that you actually, you know, the best way to motivate people, especially poor people, not rich people, is by essentially, you know, making them hungry and desperate and insecure.

20:59It's interesting because as you look in this history, you see the very like top down way that this is kind of imposed. Moving forward to the present and what we're experiencing today, at least in the United States and Canada, how did the economic upheavals of the pandemic and the post pandemic years sort of illustrate this top down imposition of insecurity? Right now, you know, a lot of people seem very caught between a rock and a hard place. between inflation, high interest rates, a kind of weird, choppy job market. To what extent is what American workers are experiencing right now exemplary of a kind of insecurity that is some ways manufactured by, you know, political and economic power, even sometimes as like a matter of what we understand like smart economic policy to be?

21:51Yeah, I think, I mean, I think a lot of your answer is in the question, which was really well stated. But the reason I go back and tell this history is because, I mean, it's interesting. It's interesting to know how the economic system we live with and evolve, but also because it resonates. I mean, we still live under capitalism. So a lot of that logic that you see in those early days of the enclosure movement are still operative. The pandemic, I think, is a really good example of employers and the politicians who kind of our in their employ in some ways, you know, echoing those feudal landlords, you know, from centuries ago, because one thing that made them balk during the pandemic was that income supports were enabling ordinary people to be choosier about what jobs they took.

22:40I tell the story of my younger sister in the book just briefly, you know, and she's one of the many, many, I would say millions and millions of workers who benefited from extended income and unemployment benefits. And then as things were easing up and she began to go out into the labor force again, you know, use that cushion to be a little bit more discerning about what kind of job she took. And, you know, we're talking about food service jobs here, but it was like, maybe I'll fold out and get 22 bucks an hour instead of, you know, 19. Or maybe I'll hold out and find a place where I'm treated with respect.

23:15And I don't feel emotionally just worn out at the end of the day because my manager is actually decent. Right. I mean, just like very basic things. And the employer class responded by, I mean, as people remember, you know, going on and on about quiet quitting and talking about how people were, you know, like too arrogant to take these jobs. And, you know, basically they, you know, colluded with government officials and rolled back a lot of that pandemic supports, not because they didn't work, but because they didn't work according to their logic, right? They made the working class folks more secure.

23:53That security bought them some breathing room, allowed them to be marginally less exploitable. And so that was a threat to, you know, the status quo. And so centuries after the fact, we definitely are still experiencing the basic dynamics of the enclosure movement. And now, you know, they call it disruption or, Or, you know, it's like kind of can be wrapped in a kind of techie logic, right, of we're just like eliminating old industries with our innovative prowess or something like that. But at the end of the day, it's basically, you know, the same thing, which is make people precarious so that people at the top, the shareholders, the investors, the owners make more money, you know.

24:36So it's always old wine, new bottle. And to understand it, I really do think we need that historical perspective. Yeah, for sure. And we even see it in like like inflation is obviously like a big topic in this election. But the conversation, well, I guess maybe it is to a degree with Kamala with her price gouging thing. But the conversation is rarely about like, oh, corporate profits went up alongside of this inflation. And like the official explanation or like sort of the, you know, accepted textbook explanation of why inflation happens is connected to wages becoming too high and that they became too high during the pandemic.

25:16Right. And then the thing to do next is to, you know, raise interest rates, the Fed raising interest rates. And then it's literally like, oh, the thing you have to do is like deliberately inflict economic pain, you know, on people so that their wages go down. Right. 100 percent. Yeah. And it felt like there's a whole class of pundits and politicians who, you know, loved having high inflation as a cudgel for exactly that purpose. Right. Because they could hide behind it while also hiding their corporate price gouging in there to boot. And so I do think you're right. We're seeing a slight shift of the discourse in a good direction with some mainstream Democrats talking about the fact that price gouging is a problem.

25:58The corporate greed is part of what's driving the inflationary environment. But I think a deeper conversation would be about what are we actually structuring our economy to accomplish? And is creating a kind of bedrock of material security a priority? Or is that something that we're willing to sacrifice just to keep interest rates down? Or for some mythic and highly dubious idea of what a competitive marketplace is? If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day.

26:48We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas. You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. In what specific areas of life do things feel more insecure than ever maybe compared with past generations? How do we see this showing up in this election? and especially in the super polarized nature of the discourse.