David Graeber, on jobs and bureaucracy

From “Idle Hands”, an essay by Jonathan Malesic in America, 2018 Fall, pp. 34f.

David […]Graeber, an anthropologist and the author of the rollicking mega-narrative Debt: The First 5,000 Years, guesses that about half the jobs in advanced economies are pointless, and the workers know it but feel they need to pretend they’re doing something useful. They’re doing “bullshit jobs.”

People with useless jobs include flunkies (who make higher-ups feel important), goons (the lawyers and P.R. flacks who battle counterparts at other companies), duct tapers (who fix systemic problems through ad hoc means), box tickers (who signal, often to regulators, that work is being done, even when it’s not) and taskmasters (who assign useless work to other people). None of these roles answers a real human need. The work is symbolic and ideological, not useful. Graeber’s point, in calling out useless jobs, isn’t to put these workers out on the street in the name of corporate efficiency, though. It’s to liberate them.

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According to Graeber, we devalued work once we began to believe that capital, not labor, creates all wealth. We’ve built a system of “managerial feudalism” in which the worker’s time belongs to the boss, regardless of whether that time is productive.

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The reality of most coding work, however, is that it is drudgery. “The most important computer commands for the ninja to master were Copy and Paste,” Pein writes.

A lot of what tech companies do is break up other people’s satisfying, decently paid work and offer it to the lowest bidder. Uber allows anyone to be a cabdriver; Spotify lets you be your own D.J. and record-store clerk. With Yelp, you get to be a restaurant critic. The key innovation has to do with labor, not technology. By creating ever more freelancers, these companies do, in a sense, cut out considerable useless work. But at the same time, “Most of the startups pitched as ‘Uber for X’ boiled down to ‘cheaper labor for X,’” Pein writes.

Pein thinks the whole tech industry is a scam, concentrating wealth in a few hands while destroying value nationwide. Traditional media is collapsing, for instance, yet online advertisers aren’t even getting what they pay for. The eyeballs that view web-based ads might be automated software, or else they’re humans working in “click farms” on the other side of the world, earning a penny per click.

Pein compares Silicon Valley today to the California Gold Rush of the 1840s and ’50s. In those days, most prospectors went bust. The smart investment was to capitalize on their foolish hopes: “Sell shovels to all the suckers who think they’ll get rich digging for gold.” Pein sees landlords who operate what amount to Airbnb tenements as shovel merchants. Likewise conferences where developers with half-baked ideas pay to pitch to bored venture capitalists.

If the technology sector is a grift, then it’s hardly alone. A decade ago, the “innovations” of subprime lending and collateralized debt obligations ruined our economy. Now the wellness industry hawks charcoal and coffee enemas as cures to made-up afflictions.

The contradiction in the U.S. regarding work is that the same society that believes you need to labor for wages in order to have dignity also believes in getting rich quick. The proliferation of useless jobs may signal that faith in the moral value of work is ebbing away. That’s not necessarily a problem. After all, work isn’t really what gives human beings dignity. But some people still believe in work, and they’re at risk of exploitation by those whose only creed is acquisition. The challenge of social ethics is to elevate the former and rein in the latter.

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From “In Regulation Nation”, an essay by David Graeber in Harper’s, 2015 March, pp. 11-16.  The essay is from Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules published 2015 February.

The idea that the market is somehow opposed to and independent of government has been used at least since the nineteenth century to justify laissez-faire economic policies, but such policies never actually have the effect of lessening the role of government. In late-nineteenth-century England, for instance, an increasingly liberal society did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy but the opposite: an endlessly mushrooming array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials — the very people who made possible the liberal dream of a world of free contract between autonomous individuals. It turned out that maintaining a free-market economy required considerably more paperwork than a Louis XIV–style absolutist monarchy. The same effect could be seen in America during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, or in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, where, from 1994 to 2002, the number of civil servants jumped by some quarter million.

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Working-class Americans now generally believe government to comprise two sorts of people: “politicians,” who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and “bureaucrats,” who are condescending elitists and almost impossible to uproot. The right-wing argument tends to assume a kind of tacit alliance between a parasitic poor (in America usually pictured in overtly racist terms) and equally parasitic self-righteous officials who subsidize the poor using other people’s money. Even the mainstream left now offers little more than a watered-down version of this language. Bill Clinton, for instance, spent so much of his career bashing civil servants that after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, he felt he had to remind Americans that public servants were human beings, too.

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Americans often seem embarrassed by the fact that, on the whole, we’re really quite good at bureaucracy. It doesn’t fit our American self-image. We’re supposed to be self-reliant individualists. But it’s impossible to deny that for well over a century the United States has been a profoundly bureaucratic society. When taking over the reins of the global economic and political order from Great Britain after World War II, for instance, the United States was particularly concerned with creating structures of international administration. Right away it set up the world’s first thoroughly planetary bureaucratic institutions: the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). The British Empire had never attempted anything like this. Even when Britain created large corporations like the East India Company, its goal was either to facilitate trade with other nations or to conquer them. The Americans attempted to administer everything and everyone.

 

“Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness”

Source:  Stephen Marche, in The Atlantic, pp. 68f.

We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline.

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And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

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The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most compelling critics of Facebook—neither of them a Luddite—concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

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Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity.

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Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.

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What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

French cultural perspectives of Americans

From Harper’s, 2009 May, p24f:

OBJECTIF LUNE

By Charles Dantzig, from “Liste des Américains,” in his Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien, published in France last winter by Grasset & Fasquelle. The encyclopedia explains the world in a series of 800 lists. Dantzig is the author of the Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française. Translated from the French by Lorin Stein.

Americans consider themselves polite, but they stick their hands in their pockets, drink from the bottle, speak in raised voices. Someone ought to train them how to behave in museums. Not only do they converse as if they were in their own houses; they do so in order to give educational lectures. With all their terrible goodwill, they wish to learn and to make all things serve this purpose. It is an American vice to believe that a work of art must teach something. In the same way, they were persuaded to drink red wine because they were told that wine was good for them, without consideration of pleasure. Their passion for learning is naive and honorable.

One thing about Americans that I always forget and that always strikes me when I arrive in their country—or, rather, step onto the airplane—is the bad cut of their jeans. And also their taste for muscle. Whether this is one practical manifestation of a taste for brute force I cannot say. Also the soft drinks, which come in bottles twice as big as anywhere else, and the power lines, which instead of being buried underground encumber the edges of the sky. And that it’s a country of blonds. And their obsession with the weather, forever plastered on the screen by NY1 and printed at the bottom of the back page of the New York Times along with the temperature, humidity level, and wind speed. In the end, what we forget about countries is everything banal that we want to call characteristic. Isn’t this what goes by the name of sociology?

They are overly fond of brown.

They eat all the time. What anguish must be theirs!

Charles Olson—or was it Melville?—said that America has replaced history with geography. What makes for boredom, which in America can be so violent, is the unfilled urban space. In contrast to Europe or Asia, which are stuffed to overflowing, in the United States the population density per square kilometer is very low. Whence those depressing suburbs, depressing because one can always find a parking place. In America one feels not solitude but isolations.

They are a people without balconies. Yet they cannot help interfering in other people’s business, according to the Protestant custom. And on courthouse steps one sees people brandishing signs that say, as if they knew, GOD HATES ABORTIONISTS. It is a country fascinated by lust.

Americans spend less time arguing over things than over the right to speak about those things.

It is also one of the only countries where rights count. Everyone has the right to question whatever he chooses, starting with things laid down by law. In most other countries, rights are, by comparison, a laughing matter. And there are not many places on earth where people spend their lives fighting injustices committed against the weak.

They go to court over everything. This is a way of making money, of course, and of causing trouble for one’s neighbor, but more deeply it points to the fact that, for them, nothing follows from itself. One good quality of the United States is that here common sense is never taken for an established thing. These litigious people believe more in reason than in fatalism.

Thanks to their lamentable admiration for brute force, they are described as fascist, but they lack one essential trait that makes a fascist: the admiration for death.

It is the only country in the world where no one remains a foreigner. A person can go by the name of Zgrabenalidongsteinloff and no one will raise an eyebrow. “In New York there are no impossible names,” as I was told by a novelist whose name raised the eyebrows of elegant racists in Paris. This is what makes everything possible. They walked on the moon because they are the moon. One admires their courtesy.

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