Students as a Byproduct: How Meritocracy and Data became the Teeth of the Cannibal

Nancy Fraser (2022) defines capitalism as a society where designated actors are allowed to “devour the non-economized wealth of everyone else”. And yet, the social construction of wealth, its monetarization and its accumulation remain the necessary stages of this digestive process. For reality to be translated into swallowable units, all these stages need to be replicated, over and over again. The teeth of the cannibal, to borrow Faster’s metaphor, sink into the fibers of society, tear them apart, chew them, mash them into a homogeneous mouthful and spit the rest. Indeed, while extremely voracious, the cannibal seems to have a delicate stomach: it’s the teeth that do the job. Expanding on Fraser’s conclusions, this contribution will argue that the pandemic crisis has been exploited to stabilize the main tenets of the global capitalist project. More precisely, it will discuss how two concepts, that of data governance and meritocracy, concur to the construction of a new epistemology with hegemonic vocation. On the one hand, data governance relies on the existence of an almost unmediated relationship between metrics and reality while, on the other hand, meritocracy affirms the possibility to rank such metrics. By systematically translating reality into rankable data, these two concepts enable economic actors to extract and trade knowledge on a global level. In these terms, the teeth of the cannibal sink particularly deep into Higher Education institutions, now tasked by the global market to maximize the possibility of extraction. Rephrasing Zuboff’s (2019) famous statement, students are not the product of Higher Education anymore. The product is the surplus that will be ripped from their lives, the tradable knowledge that can be mined from their bodies. Students, in the eyes of cannibal capitalism, are just a byproduct of the process of extraction. References Fraser, N. (2022) Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet and What Can We Do About It, London and New York: Verso Zuboff, S., (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, London: Profile Books.