Tower of Sleep

Unlike mortgage or credit-card debt, student debt is premised specifically on the value of the debtor’s body. The exorbitant size of U.S. college debt is justified by the students’ imagined future productivity; if you take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans for school, it’s because the debt will enable you to command enough on the labor market to pay it back. But when lots of workers need jobs, employers need any particular worker much less. In a sick twist, the known size of the general debt keeps wages down and young workers desperate, making their personal debt even harder to pay back, making them even more desperate, and so on until the wage goes literally negative in the form of unpaid internships. Sleeping Beauty dramatizes this debtor relationship: The old men who sleep with her might as well be the banks holding Lucy’s loans, taking payment in time with her flesh.

There’s no such thing as too much discussion of precarious labour, student debt, and unpaid internships.