The Precariat

I ran into this neologism a few days ago listening to an episode of Eric Weinstein's Portal podcast, I think. The Wiktionary definition is:

(sociology) People suffering from precarity, especially as a social class; people living a precarious existence, without security or predictability, especially job security.

Wikipedia goes on to explain that it's a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat. That feels about right, to describe my situation since losing my tenure-track university professorship in May. I definitely feel a combination of anxiety at the idea I'm not really sure what I'll be doing to pay my rent after this academic year and a feeling that my university didn't consider me as any type of partner in their mission, but only as an interchangeable worker on their production line. I'm not sure whether the precariousness or the proletarian message is more damaging in the long run; or will elicit the greater response from me and others who find themselves in this position.

Some social commentators have suggested the shifting of a lot of employment into gig work, adjuncting, and other typically insecure employment may cause problems for social stability. A British economist named Guy Standing has recently published The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Here's a link to Standing talking about the book for about a half hour at Conway Hall in London a couple of years ago (the timing explains the introductory remarks about Trump, I think). I have a lot of experience in my past careers, being a salesman whose job security was only based on my monthly production. I'm familiar with "at-will employment", from the perspective of a manager as well as an "individual contributor". I have always thought faculty, departments, programs such as the Humanities, and even entire colleges and universities have been too complacent for too long; which means they have not felt an urgent need to define or even understand their value-add, and then be able to articulate it to their institutions and their potential customers.

In another Portal episode, Eric spoke with author Bret Easton Ellis (Less than Zero, American Psycho, etc.). The conversation was mostly about Los Angeles, which didn't interest me all that much. But it included an interesting riff about generations. The gist was that a lot of the social and economic experiences of American generations such as Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials have been based on macroeconomic causes. The suits who were able to take three-martini lunches and succeed in business in the Mad Men era were not really all that brilliant. They were exactly the idiots they seemed to be, but "the stream was running very fast", in Eric's words, and now it has turned into "a dry creek bed". It's possible to be brilliant in a "dry" moment and get nowhere, just as it's possible to be an idiot and be carried along by a flood. I suspect a similar dynamic applies to institutions. Universities succeeded during the baby boom and the GI Bill era because there was almost no way to fail. Today, we're standing in a dry creek bed.

All that macro perspective is well and good. But what are we to do right now? Personally, I think for learners it means taking responsibility for our own educations. For former professors like myself, it means hustling to line up new gigs when the ones I'm currently doing are over. It means being very clear about what I have to offer. And increasingly I think it means offering my services and content directly to the world at large. Decades ago, when I worked at the global tech distributor Arrow Electronics, the CEO (who had recently been a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Business School) got very excited about the concept of "disintermediation". This was the idea that new technologies like the web were making it possible for manufacturers to offer their products directly to end-users, which he feared might challenge the roles of retailers and distributors such as Arrow. I've always thought industries where the main product is information have always been much more endangered by this type of disruption. Now it has arrived.

In light of all this, I'm going to continue focusing my attention toward the end-users who might be interested in my products. All my books beside Peppermint Kings, which was published by the Yale University Press so I could claim it as my "tenure book", have been offered directly to readers with the minimum of intermediaries. This allows me to keep the cost down and still get some support for my efforts. And I am going to offer my courses directly to the world. I've not been able to keep up with my plan of a chapter a week during the past month or so, because I've had a lot to deal with, away from the computer. But I'm about a week away from putting myself in a situation where that will be the main focus of my days. So you'll begin to see posts containing course content for contributing subscribers, which will culminate in full-on courses I'll offer to learners everywhere. Occasionally I'll make some of this material available to followers or "free" subscribers, as a sort of teaser. But my hope is that I'll find a readership that wants to become "members" in this effort and values it enough to throw me the equivalent of a "Venti Mocha" each month. If that's you, the time is now. Thanks! --Dan