Hello discoverers!

Early after moving into our new apartment building here in Melbourne, we kept getting hit by burglars who stole bikes and ransacked storage cages. The response was predictable: we spent hours reviewing CCTV footage, filing police reports and reinforcing gates. As anxiety rose, many of us demanded more security measures, even private guards.

Looking back, I can see our default response was to turn to what anthropologists Mark Maguire and Setha Low call ‘security capitalism’. (I featured their latest book Trapped back in DD326, but only really discovered their work through a discussion in a recent podcast.)

Maguire and Low argue that security has morphed from an inalienable right into a commodity hoarded by those who can afford it. The central mechanism is pretty insidious: those with resources create ‘interior worlds’ – gated communities, securitised enclaves, fortified homes – and in doing so, they don’t just protect themselves, they actively make everyone else less safe.

One of my main take-aways: security, by its very nature, is antagonistic to equality. The risk doesn’t disappear – it just gets offloaded onto those without the means to purchase protection.

What fuels this system is an entire gadget- and service-slinging industry ready to profit from our fear:

“Just as middle and upper middle classes, and especially the wealthy, are becoming more risk averse and have the power to pay for that, there’s a giant sector that’s feeding that, that is more than willing to sell you some gadgetry. The more of it there is, the more it becomes ubiquitous. And it also feeds into status anxiety.”

Inside these spaces, security becomes the dominant lens through which to view the world. The more people invest in security, the more threats they begin to identify: workers you let in, teenagers gathering, a person in a hoodie, someone walking too slowly – suddenly there are red flags everywhere.

“The more you securitise your life, the more those walls and gates and guards make your life all about fear rather than less about fear. And so, as the fear grows, then you want more security, you buy more gadgets, you support all kinds of policing initiatives.”

Importantly, this dynamic extends into public space. When a park gets heavily securitised – police presence, cameras, controlled access – it becomes exclusionary:

“That means that young people of colour will probably not go because they don’t hang around where the police are. It means that people who don’t have a place to sleep probably won’t go there either. And suddenly, you have this homogenised space.”

In our time of intense uncertainty, the impulse to buy our way to safety is entirely understandable. But security capitalism offers only the illusion of protection while accelerating the societal breakdown we fear. This creates “a self-fulfilling prophecy of fearful people wanting more security, the state and private sector producing it, only to make the world more fearful for some and poorly protected for others”.

The alternative – rebuilding social connections, investing in genuine public space, fostering mutual aid – sounds almost quaint. What makes it so difficult is that we’re chasing something that doesn’t actually exist: there is no security in nature, only the management of inevitable risk. We know the walls we’re erecting aren’t freedom, but the illusion of safety feels more tangible than the difficult, incremental work of building trust and community.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai