Bullsh*t Security?

The four of us (Tessa Diphoorn, Erella Grassiani, Winifred Poster and Edward Schwarzschild) – two anthropologists, a sociologist, and a fiction writer – were each holding a copy of the late David Graeber’s pivotal book Bullsh*t Jobs. Graeber had led us to think about the possibility of a particular kind of ‘Bullsh*t Job’ that we wanted to call ‘Bullsh*t Security’. We wondered if the notion of Bullsh*t Security might help us to comprehend not only the nature and growing scope of security labour, but also its various impacts on contemporary society.

Bullsh*t Jobs was one of four books we had assigned ourselves to read and discuss, along with Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity; Rachel Hall’s The Transparent Traveler; and Mark Maguire and Setha Low’s Trapped. In addition to anchoring our Theme Group on Re-imagining Security Labour within NIAS’s ethos of slow science, we hoped reading these books together as an interdisciplinary team would deepen our understanding of the individuals in the expanding security labour force around the globe. We contend that it is vital to gain insight into the daily lives, ethical standards, moral judgments, working conditions, and unique struggles of security workers.

While each of us has spent years doing sustained research and writing connected with security labour in places such as South Africa, Kenya, Israel/Palestine, India, and the US, we came together as a group determined to learn more about who these workers are, what sort of responsibilities they are tasked with, and what level of security they have in their own lives, both on and off the job. Although none of these books directly addressed security labour, each of them alluded to different crucial aspects that define this field. So, how can these four books help us to develop and refine our sense of what security labour is and can be? And, how can the notion of Bullsh*t Security be used to capture the ambiguous, contradictory nature of security labour while at the same time showing that the ways we talk about security itself can be an active form of political labour.

One of our first tasks involved defining precisely what we mean by ‘security labour’. More than fifty years ago, in his groundbreaking oral history Working (1972), Studs Terkel noted in a general way the proliferation of security-related labour in the United States. “As some occupations become obsolete,” he wrote, “others come into being. More people are being paid to watch other people than ever before.” Terkel could not have anticipated the post-9/11 exponential expansion of the global security workforce, though one imagines it is a development that would not have pleased him.

For us, “being paid to watch other people” is obviously a form of security labour as are the various standard forms of security labour that dominate popular culture and easily come to mind, such as police officers investigating a murder case, security guards frisking travellers and searching luggage at airports, armed response officers patrolling urban neighbourhoods, bouncers determining access to nightclubs, soldiers monitoring check points, control room operators staring at multiple screens, and security consultants advising commercial and state clients on high-tech products. Around the world, over the last two decades, tens of thousands of people have taken jobs in the private and public sector connected to security. These days, the US Department of Homeland Security alone employs more than 260,000 people (“About DHS”, US Department of Homeland Security, https://www.dhs.gov/about-dhs). Already, some of the largest single employers in the world are in security. In 2014, G4S in the UK ranked second among top employers, right behind Walmart, for publicly traded companies in 2014. At that time, it had 600,000 security employees worldwide. In 2022, after a merger, repositioning its headquarters to the US, and rebranding as Allied Universal, it had 800,000 workers and $18 billion in annual revenues. In addition, according to a 2022 article in The New Yorker, “The number of Americans who possess a security clearance has swelled to more than five million, because classification has swathed in secrecy so many functions of defence and intelligence work.” This is not, of course, simply an American phenomenon. A Guardian study showed already in 2017 that all over the world the numbers of private security workers were rising, often far outnumbering police officers. In the UK there were over 260,000 people employed in private security in 2023, while in India this number was close to 9 million already in 2018. All these numbers were expected to grow exponentially. Alongside this growth, hundreds of security-related institutes, colleges, and industries have sprung into existence, all but guaranteeing the education and training of an even larger new generation of security workers.

Yet security labour is more than the uniformed and formalised workers within clearly recognized career paths. As highlighted by Mark Maguire and Setha Low, security work “is the primary activity of whole branches of governance and entire sectors of the economy”. Across the globe, we can see workers in numerous fields who are compelled to engage in some type of practice that aims to achieve ‘security’, through the insertion of security tasks into otherwise “non-security” jobs. Examples include call centre employees checking watchlists, bankers flagging illicit financial transactions, greeters at big box stores monitoring customers as they enter and exit, and data analysts examining big data sets in governmental surveillance departments. Under this “militarization of everyday life”, as Cynthia Enloe discusses, security is diffusing outside of occupations that are directly tied to the military or state, and into the broader society. Sometimes this happens in a more overt and linear way, through processes of contracting and outsourcing when projects from the state spills over into the private sector. But other times, it is more subtle and discreet. This happens especially in service jobs that involve interacting with the public (what sociologists call “frontline labour”). It is also prevalent in technology fields which involve processing data from the public. These kinds of jobs are intermediaries between the state and its citizens and residents, and become a site for security to be performed.

The growth of both formalised security jobs, as well as the expansion of security tasks in other sectors, has made it almost impossible to separate ideas of security from security labour in our contemporary society. Currently, creating/providing/producing security always seems to involve the direct labour of an ever-increasing group of security workers. What does it mean for societies around the world to have more and more people performing security labour of one kind or another? How do these workers themselves experience and give meaning to what security is?  What does this mean for their complicity, if so many people are participating in the security state through everyday acts of labour? And how does this mounting and diversifying labour impact the ways in which we understand the role of security?

In the preface of his 2018 book, Graeber argues that our society is ‘riddled with useless jobs’. He defines a bullshit job as: ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’. Could security labour match this distinction: are there forms of paid employment carried out in the name of security that can be defined and are experienced as pointless and useless?

Our first-hand experiences over the years suggest that the answers to these questions are, unsurprisingly, complex. Diphoorn shared her experiences with security officers in Kenya, South Africa, and Jamaica, many of whom mentioned the extreme uselessness of their job and the boredom and despair they experienced because of it. Many are acutely aware that, in the potential face of a (violent) crime, they would – especially those unarmed – be incapable of doing anything, let alone provide ‘protection’. Some described themselves as ‘sitting ducks’ or ‘cannon fodder’. Similarly, Schwarzschild recalled an interview in which a former US Marine who went on to work for the Transportation Security Administration talked about the bullsh*t nature of airport security, but it was a critique based on the belief that airport security could be done more effectively. The rules he was forced to follow were bullsh*t, but the enterprise itself was not. The rules had to change, not the job. He believed the job done right would provide society with greater security.

This complex response to the efficacy of security labour resonates with some of the conclusions drawn by Rachel Hall in The Transparent Traveler. In this book, Hall offers an extensive analysis of airport security, which she describes as a ‘cultural performance of risk management’. In examining various procedures, visual documentation, technologies, and aesthetics, Hall shows that there is a tremendous amount of performativity built into the structures and actions of providing security at airports. Hall, however, is not simply interested in equating performativity with “window-dressing” and “empty gestures,” nor is she interested only in the particular spaces of airports. Instead, she believes that “the performance of airport security (…) exercises an enduring influence far beyond the controlled zones of securitized airports”.

Hall’s critique aligns with the observation that “window-dressing” in and around airport checkpoints is a deliberate strategy taught to airport security officials. Before her actual work on the military and private security industry in Israel, Grassiani herself worked in airport security at Schiphol airport, where window dressing was a deliberate strategy. Still, based on her extensive research on security in Israel, Grassiani would argue that security labour is far from Graeber’s definition of a bullsh*t job. While Israel also has bullsh*t security jobs, such as sitting at a shopping mall entrance, labour that is often done by older migrant men from the former USSR, ‘security’ is a concept that is ingrained in every part of one’s life and many jobs that are believed to increase this security and offer protection against terror are (symbolically) highly regarded. Security labour within this category can vary from the development of cybersecurity software to working within a high-level security detail right after being released from military combat duty.

How could this kind of labour be bullsh*t if so many of its practitioners believe in its importance? Similarly, in public discourse, more security is often perceived as a good thing. In general, to be involved in providing security in service of the state and/or community is to be seen as carrying out crucial, honourable, and important work. Indeed, our research in multiple parts of the world shows that this sentiment is prevalent among many security workers, who often describe their work as vital and indispensable, even a noble sacrifice.

This strong sense of commitment and conviction is not a coincidence, as this is also what many security forces and companies across the world want us to believe. The reality is that the security industry is very much a profit-making enterprise and, as a result, they invest millions in trying to persuade us that what they do is absolutely essential to our well-being. In 2023, the global private security market size was valued at $235.37 billion, and it is projected to grow from $247.75 billion in 2024 to $385.32 billion by 2032. It is the goal of this industry to convince us that we must always purchase more of the various services and products they have for sale. As the title of their book suggests, Mark Maguire and Setha Low argue that we are all ‘trapped’ in a world of security capitalism that feeds the security-industrial complex. In their book, the authors provide several “ethnographic portraits of life under security capitalism” and show how the security-industrial complex manifests itself in everyday life across the globe. Similarly, Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity also emphasises the profit-making nature of this enterprise and argues that the manufacture of insecurity across societies requires an entire industry devoted to creating insecurity. These claims seemed to support and directly connect to our sense that the quest for security around the world has produced a massive, ever-expanding industry.

It is important to critically analyse the entire notion and premise of ‘security’. Security is not a neutral or apolitical term. Security entails a process of othering that inherently excludes and includes others, whether these are suspected criminals, migrants, houseless people, or neighbours that do not meet certain socially constructed categories according to race, ethnicity, class, gender, or background. As stressed by Maguire and Low, “security is, by its very nature, antagonistic to equality”. It is important that we keep questioning whether security labour actually creates security and, if so, for whom and at what cost? More importantly, we should focus more on examining how security labour creates insecurity.

When the term security is used, it often raises new precedents and exceptions, often even condoning behaviour and regulations that would otherwise not be tolerated. This was made painfully clear during our five-month residency at NIAS, which is located in a separate wing of the University of Amsterdam’s Oost-Indisch Huis complex (the old headquarters of the Dutch East India Company), leased out to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. While we were working, student demonstrations were put down by the police just a few blocks away. In response to the demonstrations, the UvA occasionally closed the complex for security reasons. Even as we wrote these lines, areas of the building that we were once able to use, remained closed for security reasons. In addition to our own experiences, each of the four books presented here provides many more such cases of how security is and can be instrumentalised.

It is obviously important to make visible this industry that so dominates our lives. One way to do that is to illuminate the lives of those working in it. There are myriad examples of how, in general, descriptions of security labour in the media tend to villainize or heroize the workers, criticising them as lazy and uneducated, or, celebrating them as patriotic and brave. Not enough people understand the incredible reach of the industry, the number of labourers it involves, the kind of labour it involves, and the ramifications of that labour for individual lives. A closer examination of the security industry and its labourers can offer critical insights into how and why “security” is created, for whom and at what cost to others.

Such an examination can also reveal the less obvious ways in which we are all involved in policing ourselves and each other in the name of security. Without making the topic of security labour overly broad, we can still learn more about the ways in which we are all involved in security labour, and how we ourselves are ‘trapped’ in the pervasive paradigm of security capitalism. What’s more, studying security labour in a more global, comparative and interdisciplinary way might provide knowledge and insights that could actually change how the labour is conceived and practised. According to Maguire and Low, security itself is the “highest barrier” to reimagining policing and security, and they provide several suggestions on how to defund security and reimagine a way beyond security capitalism by, for example, opening the gates of communities and fortified enclaves worldwide and doing away with intelligence and homeland security studies.

We think these suggestions should be taken seriously and find further inspiration in Taylor’s suggestion for a more prominent focus on ‘care’. Taylor reminds us that the word security is rooted in the stoic term securitas which derived from sine cura, meaning being without worry, free from care. She goes on to point out the “fundamental contradiction” that “securitas, care’s absence, can only be achieved with effort. That is to say, with care”. One of the most uplifting, hopeful moments in Taylor’s book is when she calls for an economy that isn’t structured around producing insecurity, instead arguing passionately for what she calls a “care economy.” Reading that, we could not help but wonder what would happen if an industry as large and all-encompassing as the security industry was somehow pushed to function more as a “care industry.” What might such an industry look like? Utopian as that sounds, let’s imagine what it might mean… And let’s start from a better understanding of the subject at hand, so that we might call out the bullsh*t of security when we see it.

This essay was edited and published in co-operation with the Dutch Review of Books. For the Dutch version, see here.

Listen to the episode on security labour in which writer Ed Schwarzschild, anthropologists Tessa Diphoorn and Erella Grassiani, and sociologist Winifred Poster (the NIAS Theme Group Re-imagining Security Labour) delve into a wide range of aspects of security work, politics and policies. In putting the lived experiences of security workers front and center, they paint a vivid portrait of the global security enterprise and the way it shapes countless lives.