The security paradox  densediscovery.com

Living in 2026 consists of fighting with other people on multiple fronts, which has become normalized as “competition.” This applies to everything and always generates a paradoxical effect: the intensification of our private daily wars worsens everyone's lives.

In the latest edition of the Australian newsletter Dense Discovery, Kai drew attention to the book Trapped: Life under security capitalism and how to escape it, by Setha Low and Mark Maguire.

The authors argue that “security has morphed from an inalienable right into a commodity hoarded by those who can afford it,” stimulated by an industry that continues to invent increasingly invasive gadgets and software under a promise that is never fulfilled. This macabre market no longer generates security; it generates fear:

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.

The paradox appears when you take your head out of the ground. The apparatus, delusional in essence, ultimately makes the world worse for everyone:

“[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.

I think about this every time I pass walls with electric fences and barbed wire, affluent residential condos, CCTV cameras, and ostensive policing. This means that I have been thinking a lot, and increasingly, about the subject.