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335 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2018
Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.
What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science-fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. (xxi)
Writing this book also serves a political purpose.
I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. (xxvi)
In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong.
We're not working harder because we're spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment.
Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of --as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it--"a life," and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. [...]
Since at least the Great Depression, we've been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work--Keynes at the time coined the term "technological unemployment," and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come--and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case.
They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment.
We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up [Graeber cites Obama justifying keeping the inefficient private health insurance system for the (bullshit) jobs]. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent.
But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.
A big corporation recently hired several cannibals in the interest of cultural diversity. "You are all part of our team now," said the HR rep during the welcoming briefing. "You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the cafeteria for something to eat, but please don't eat any of the other employees."Well, it seems that the person who coined this joke had a point.
The cannibals promised they would not. Four weeks later, their boss remarked, "You're all working very hard and I'm satisfied with you. However, one of our shipping clerks has disappeared. Do any of you know what happened to her?" The cannibals all shook their heads no.
After the boss left, the leader of the cannibals said to the others, "Which one of you idiots ate the shipping clerk ?" A hand rose hesitantly, to which the leader of the cannibals continued, "You fool --- for 4 weeks we've been eating managers and no one noticed anything. But NOOOO, you had to go and eat someone who actually does something!"
There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound.Again, why?
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. —George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and LondonThink about it. It makes sense. Most of the youth in our modern world is fed with the concept of the sanctity of work ("work is worship") from their primary school onwards: and that too, working to earn a livelihood, not enjoy and fulfill yourself. (In fact, work which one does as a passion is often unpaid or low-paid, and people who follow their dreams without thinking of monetary benefits are often derided.) So work becomes this mind-numbing drudge, a cross which one has to bear to keep body and soul together, and all creativity is killed; thus producing the moronic mob that Orwell is talking about.
One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.
About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. “You aren’t going to catch many fish that way,” said the businessman. “You should be working rather than lying on the beach!”
The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, “And what will my reward be?”
“Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!” was the businessman’s answer.
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman, still smiling.
The businessman replied, “You will make money and you’ll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!”
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman again.
The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman’s questions. “You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!” he said.
“And then what will my reward be?” repeated the fisherman.
The businessman was getting angry. “Don’t you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!”
Once again the fisherman asked, “And then what will my reward be?”
The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, “Don’t you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won’t have a care in the world!”
The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “And what do you think I’m doing right now?”
As Rutger Bergman likes to point out, in 1970 there was a six-month bank strike in Ireland; rather than the economy grinding to a halt as the organisers had anticipated, most people simply continued to write cheques, which began to circulate as a form of currency, but otherwise carried on as before. Two days before, when garbage collectors had gone on strike for a mere ten days in New York, the city caved into their demands because it become uninhabitable.
Pablo: Where two decades ago, companies dismissed open source software and developed core technologies in-house, nowadays companies rely heavily upon open source and employ software developers almost entirely to apply duct tape on core technologies they get for free.
In the end, you can see people doing the nongratifying duct-taping work during office hours and then doing gratifying work on core technologies during the night.
This leads to an interesting vicious circle: given that people choose to work on core technologies for free, no company is investing in those technologies. This underinvestment means that the core technologies are often unfinished, lacking quality, have a lot of rough edges, bugs, etc. This, in turn, creates the need for a lot of duct tape and thus proliferation of duct-taping jobs.