Channel Surfing

I’d like to note a peculiar absence in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most basic and influential piece of employment-related legislation in the United States, Title VII protects individuals from discrimination based on almost every background characteristic including race, religion, color, gender, and national origin. It does not, however, protect an individual from discrimination based on their educational background. And although it is unlawful to discriminate in the terms and conditions of employment for non-job-related criteria it is almost universally accepted (though often proven otherwise) that education is somehow related to job performance. Thus contextualized, and paradoxically, education has become a key driver of income inequality, but not for the reasons that are generally accepted. It isn’t because people don’t have access to the education they need that they can’t get a job, it’s because job recruiters require education that isn’t needed. The mass credentialization of our society has brought about a situation in which economic and educational minorities, including immigrants with degrees from foreign universities, are denied basic civil rights in terms of employment.

The United States effectively promotes discrimination based on educational background. You’ll find education requirements in almost every single job posting. The effect of these requirements are panoramic. If you want to exclude a class of people (perhaps the very same people that other language in the Act is designed to protect) the company simply has to require a college degree. Education requirements are effectively a loophole in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a means of excluding protected groups without overtly discriminating against them. If you want to discriminate against people according to national origin, for example, just say degrees from foreign universities are illegitimate in the US. According to the US Labor Department, and the US Census Bureau, only about 30% of Americans over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree. It’s legal, and encouraged, for employers to discriminate against two-thirds of the American population based on their educational background. In terms of employment, the Civil Rights Act only “protects” about 30% of the country. Much of the rest are economic refugees. The melancholy truth is that education can’t be thought of as a wholly positive thing anymore. Now it’s a tool for getting around Title VII.

It should be glaringly obvious by now that these hiring practices are not just profoundly unethical, but they signal the demise of culture broadly because they’re inorganic, unnaturally selective, and they limit diversification. When thinking about barrier-free circulation, how people and cultural capital move, it’s worth noting the legal and administrative details (or omissions) that motivate the informal economy to improvisation and contingency. These exclusions are what give rise to subculture, the seed of pretty much anything interesting that ever happens.

We only have to zoom out to a global point of view to understand how big informal economies actually are, and how they are growing according to their own design. One that is based on results—not on licenses or credentials or degrees. According to the journalist Robert Neuwirth the so-called informal sector is worth around $10 trillion dollars. Results from just a cursory Google search suggest that half of the world’s population works off the books, and up to three-fourths of the economy in developing nations is informal. With about five seconds of research we can discover that we’re not talking about a minority. A large swath, if not most of the world economy, is unregulated. The world is in fact totally liquid.

I find the real personal economic consequences of this recruiting tactic troubling, but at the same time its effects are fascinating because of how it redirects creative energy into other channels. If you can’t use your talent at a traditional job (because you’re not allowed to work without a credential) it has to go somewhere. This is how new channels of distribution, new ventures, and new structures are built. The official way of doing things are essentially legacy structures, persisting only because of the size and relative permanence of their original (mostly psychic) investment. As new economic forces crystallize the function of these original structures will be solely as monolithic cover, casting shadows for what are called “cut-outs” in espionage parlance, secure mechanisms that facilitate exchange between agents. Poetry is finding the holes in the structure. Poetry is the cut-out.

Physics and finance are closely related to poetry in that they are about momentum, circulation, energy, force. They are uniquely suited to find the holes in any structure. Think of the pit of a mango as the core product and the meat of the mango as the dollar value of the whole transaction. Now think of the agioteurs, the speculators. These are the people who want to suck off the pit of the mango. They keep sucking at the wet pit never able to reach the core product because it’s not destined for them, and they don’t want it anyway. They don’t want to produce meat, nor do they want to possess the pit. They just want to suck off the juice. This is the act of poetry. So much of poetry culture is about the book, the product, but the book is simply occasional matter, a mere symbol of value. The true experience of poetry is in the skillful sucking of the pit. In order to thrive poetry needs to keep sucking.