Interchange – Selling Me, Inc.: Part Three of The Way of Neoliberalism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:50 — 36.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

First corporations became people. Now people are becoming businesses. That’s the logic of the marketplace applied to employment. Tonight, the third episode in our series “The Way of Neoliberalism”: Selling Me, Inc.

In our last two episodes we spoke with Wendy Brown and Philip Mirowski to get a sense of where Neoliberal ideas came from, and how they’ve crept into our imaginations of democracy and politics.

Tonight, we move away from the abstract to take a look at neoliberalism’s transformation of a concrete subject that affects all of our lives: work.

Ilana Gershon, IU Associate Professor of Anthropology, is our guest. She has a forthcoming book of “anti-advice” for job seekers – Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today. In it she distills her interviews with jobseekers, recruitment counselors, and other cogs in the new neoliberal employment market — where now even white collar work is temporary—to demonstrate a change in the metaphor of work, from labor as rental contract to that of the human as a business of one. In today’s economy, you can’t just be an employee looking to get hired—you have to market yourself as a business, one that can help another business achieve its goals.

SEGMENT ONE
Job seekers are told to network through social media, build and maintain a consistent personal brand, and always be on the lookout for a better gig to jump to. But in a technologically-driven market-dominated world where everyone lives in a metaphor of being their own little business and we’re supposedly freed from having a boss, what is actually gained? And more importantly, what are we losing in the process?

SEGMENT TWO
We return to questions of social media’s place in our new employment landscape, and how workers — as CEOs of their own little businesses — don’t actually experience the freedom and equality that a transformation of traditional employment into a business-to-business contract supposedly creates. In fact, in the desperation one often experiences looking for work, job seekers feel compelled to use social media and networking, whether they want to or not.

SEGMENT THREE
We see how the marketplace and technological logic of the new frenetic neoliberal employment model, “Selling Me, Inc.” in which everyone is an independent contractor constantly circulating through different temporary gigs, can destroy the boundary between work and life.

GUEST
Ilana Gershon, Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work investigates how new media affects highly charged social tasks, such as breaking up or hiring in the United States. She has written about how people use new media to end romantic relationships in her book The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Her current research addresses how new media affects hiring in the contemporary US workplace and will be published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2017 as Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (Or Don’t Find) Work.

RELATED
Don’t Post So Close To Me by Ilana Gershon
Lived Theories: Hayek’s Neoliberalism and #Pragmatism by Ilana Gershon

THE WAY OF NEOLIBERALISM
Selling Democracy: Part One of The Way of Neoliberalism
Selling Ignorance: Part Two of the Way of Neoliberalism

MUSIC
“Get A Job” by The Silhouettes
“Opportunities” by the Pet Shop Boys
“Busy Earnin’” by Jungle.
“I’ve Been Workin'” by Van Morrison

UP NEXT
Selling Censorship
A special Election Night program on Free Speech. Our guest will be David Bromwich, Yale Sterling Professor of English, author of “What Are We Allowed To Say?” in the London Review of Books.

“Free speech is an aberration – it is best to begin by admitting that. In most societies throughout history and in all societies some of the time, censorship has been the means by which a ruling group or a visible majority cleanses the channels of communication to ensure that certain conventional practices will go on operating undisturbed.” 

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford