Abstract
Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet “preppers,” a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state. By repositioning the prepper as an amplifier of conditions of the present, what emerges is an emblematic and anticipatory figure who troubles the cracks in the security state's governing logics, exposing its social differentiation and rehearsing the inevitability of its future failures. Drawing on qualitative research on UK prepping cultures, I define prepping across three constellations of imaginative‐material practices, concerning “value,” “temporalities,” and “crisis.” I argue that prepping exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside the networked dependencies and restricted agency felt within late modernity, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection. Living with profound crisis attunement, preppers nevertheless recuperate pleasure in material potentiality and skilful practice, in thoughtful engagement with temporalities, and in the vitality of community and meaning formed in the times and spaces in, and around, crisis.
Highlights
How to survive the end of the future: Preppers, pathology, and the everyday crisis of insecurity
Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet “preppers,” a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal
Preppers respond through a range of material practices including stockpiling food, medicine, and equipment to shelter in place (“bugging‐in”), by packing a range of mobile carries to facilitate quick escapes and enable survival on the move (“bugging‐out”), by developing survival skills, and, in some cases, by learning self‐sufficiency skills to adapt to an imagined post‐collapse environment
Summary
Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet “preppers,” a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. Preppers respond through a range of material practices including stockpiling food, medicine, and equipment to shelter in place (“bugging‐in”), by packing a range of mobile carries to facilitate quick escapes and enable survival on the move (“bugging‐out”), by developing survival skills, and, in some cases, by learning self‐sufficiency skills to adapt to an imagined post‐collapse environment Their stockpiles are often hidden to guard from future theft by security forces or by the unprepared “hoards” in imaginations of future crisis. The recent media coupling of prepping to political anxiety over Brexit and ecological anxiety over climate change – politically fraught but more socially accepted crisis concerns – has temporarily recalibrated the coordinates of difference between rational and irrational, condoned and pathological anticipatory subjectivities This provides an opening to raise the question of why, in the face of contemporary politics supposedly geared towards securing uncertain futures, particular modes of anticipating crisis remain pathologised. I consider how prepping responds to inequalities and scarcity in the realm of anticipatory governance, where questions of who is protected, who can secure their own resources, who can anticipate, and who survives mirrors and projects inequalities in the capitalist system
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