The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

David Graeber (Author), Mike Chamberlain (Narrator), Tantor Audio (Publisher)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 696 ratings
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From the author of the international best-seller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives.

From where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence?

To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber - one of our most important and provocative thinkers - traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice...though he also suggests there may be something perversely appealing - even romantic - about bureaucracy.

Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible.

An essential work for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us - and the better, freer world we should perhaps begin to imagine for ourselves.

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  1. Listening Length
    8 hours
  2. Author
    David Graeber
  3. Narrator
    Mike Chamberlain
  4. Audible release date
    October 23, 2018
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Tantor Audio
  7. ASIN
    B07J5QYKY8
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 8 hours
Author David Graeber
Narrator Mike Chamberlain
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date October 23, 2018
Publisher Tantor Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B07J5QYKY8
Best Sellers Rank #58,922 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#10 in Labor & Industrial Relations (Audible Books & Originals)
#78 in Labor & Industrial Relations (Books)
#109 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
696 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Charles Parselle
5.0 out of 5 stars ANOTHER BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN ORIGINAL WORK
Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2015
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I rather resented having to pay $20.44 for this 227-page book (thinking: where's the $13.99 paperback?) but then I started reading, and now I'm happy to be paying David Graeber's royalty, not so much for the hard cover. Good academic writers are so rare, indeed, good writers generally are so rare. Good writers are pleasure to read, just the way they craft sentences. Then they have to say something worth the effort of reading; this is pretty rare as well, even though we are deluged with writers trying to write as if they were saying something. David Graeber has something to say, really a lot to say. His book Debt was a masterpiece, and this book on Bureaucracy is a revelation, though I'm only just getting into it. He is writing about situations I am living, have lived, and will go on living, but without really noticing, even though so frequently irritated. Graeber stops to take a closer look, and we stop and look with him. The result turns one's head around, changes one's perspective. Terrific book.
13 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Games, Stupid Violence and Freedom
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2022
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I loved this book of essays. Graeber always writes clearly, where you can almost hear him explaining ideas, returning to examples to illustrate his theories and repeating ideas to remind you of something he mentioned before a longer tangent.

The second essay is probably my least favorite of the three, but the third essay resonated with me enough that I would have given it 5 stars even if I disliked the other two essays.

I hope we find playful ways of implementing the ideas discussed here. Rules can be fun to follow when you participate in the creation of them. Nobody likes to follow stupid rules.
3 people found this helpful
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David Swanson
4.0 out of 5 stars The Financialization of Fiction, and Vice Versa
Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2015
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The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber is an engaging riff on the theme of bureaucracy and the BS people think about it.

"De-regulation," of finances, Graeber points out, creates more rules, paperwork, and bureaucrats, apparently because what happens is not the equivalent of firing a bunch of factory safety inspectors, but rather the employment of enough bureaucrats to redirect control of wealth from mid-sized companies to giant conglomerates. Yet, just as people imagine criminals to be mostly black or violent, or war to be philanthropic or necessary, or estate taxes to be about family farms, or voter fraud to be impacting elections, or elections to have any value that could possibly be hurt by voter fraud, or a minimum wage to eliminate jobs, or corporate trade agreements to not eliminate jobs, or guns to make us safer, or prisons to "correct" something, or wealth to trickle down, or small-time foreign thugs to constitute a graver threat than a McDonald's diet, what matters is a fiction well told, not any facts.

Career advancement in a bureaucracy, Graeber writes, is based not so much on merit as on the loyalty exhibited by a willingness to pretend that it's based on merit. If you play along with the collective delusion, you're rewarded.

"Globalization" is not about tearing down borders, but rather trapping people behind militarized borders within which public supports can be denied and workers can be compelled to work for little or nothing -- in other words, a species of bureaucratization. The effort to create a truly borderless and fair world is known as "anti-globalization."

The "free market" means heavier bureaucracy, and an expansion of those areas of life that come under the control of state violence. This was the story of Russia's transition from state to private economics, Graeber writes: more bureaucrats, not fewer.

When police bring law and order, we picture them turning a violent situation non-violent. In fact, they are not involved in most violent crime, and mostly show up to nonviolent situations which they turn violent. You have a much higher chance of being killed by police than by the terrorists they are now mostly imagined as combatting.

When someone tells you to be "realistic" about such supposed fantasies as peace or justice, they are not telling you to recognize how things are, as they and you may imagine they are, but rather they are telling you to acknowledge the violence by which the state can impose its will no matter how stupidly it might choose to do so. "Real" in this usage comes from the Spanish real meaning royal or belonging to the king, not the Latin res or thing. It is the royal usage that created such phrases as "real property" or "real estate." The point is not that a house truly exists, but that the king ultimately owns it. To "be realistic" about violence simply means to be violent about violence. After all, we all know violence exists; some of us choose not to multiply it.

Cutting taxes on "job creators" doesn't create any jobs, just the reverse. With more wealth, they do things like taking their pay in stock options, and then using extra money that could have gone into new hires or raises or research for stock buybacks. The result is a weaker economy inhabited by people convinced it's both a stronger economy and an inevitable economy against which one need not waste any energy struggling for change.

Why don't we have robots doing our factory work and house work? Why don't we have useful technological advances on the scale of previous eras? Graeber writes that the most immediate reason is that 95% of robotics funding has gone through the Pentagon which has no interest in such matters and is more interested in destructive inventions like killer drones.

In addition, robots are understood as job killers rather than time savers because we offer no one a guaranteed income even if they don't need to work. We begin with the requirement that everyone work no matter what, and then figure out stuff they can do to fulfill that requirement -- such as trying all day to get us to switch from one giant phone company to another.

Another problem is innovative corporate culture that kills innovation by investing in only sure things, requiring everyone to invest time in PR, and multiplying bureaucracy.

People are told to cling to the American freedom of private health insurance companies as an act of rebellion against government bureaucracy, even as the insurance corporations create vastly more bureaucracy, paperwork, sickness, and death.

We don't notice bureaucracy, Graeber believes, because it has mushroomed. The average American will spend 6 months of their life waiting for stoplights to change and some larger length of time filling out forms.

We don't notice bureaucracy, think we despise it, and secretly love it, Graeber thinks -- love it because it is the enemy of unpredictable and improvisational play, which we've been conditioned to believe is dangerous. Of course, the opposite is true.

The preceding is a sampling of Graber's book and my thoughts on it, not a summary. I urge you to dive into it yourself. It's a book that intentionally raises many large questions. A couple of small ones stand out as flaws, however: 1) Why in the world does the author keep his money in Bank of America? 2) Why does he imagine that the "War on Terror" has ended? The whole point of a war on terror is that it's not endable, as terror can never be eliminated. Nor of course can it be outdone in terrorizing by anything moreso than war.
92 people found this helpful
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Tergon
5.0 out of 5 stars I like this book very much
Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2015
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I'm still reading the third essay but already like this book a lot. As a researcher working for a state institution, bureaucracy is something I have to fight, avoid or run from every single day in order to be able to produce what I'm supposed to: scientific research. Some time ago I searched the internet and didn't find anything interesting on the topic. But finally, here it is. A collection of excellent essays by David Graeber, which I hope will inspire other writers to pursue and expand the topic. My own contribution is that we should distinguish true management from bureaucracy which is a pathological condition of the first. A kind of cancer that became pervasive in capitalist societies.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Patside
5.0 out of 5 stars Instructive
Reviewed in Canada on March 31, 2024
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I am sad the author passed away. I learned a lot about arbitraryness and culture reading the book. I am glad to fill the review form.
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Arelarez
5.0 out of 5 stars Catártico y entretenido
Reviewed in Mexico on August 1, 2023
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Este libro cuenta de todo: la historia del papeleo, críticas hacia el capitalismo, la decadencia de la academia corporativista, órdenes angelicales y Batman; escrito de una manera sumamente amena.
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Roberto Marsicano
5.0 out of 5 stars Un'analisi profonda dei sistemi burocratici.
Reviewed in Italy on February 14, 2020
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Un libro molto interessante, che va in profondità sul fenomeno burocrazia, senza pre-concetti mentali pro e contro, ma con un'analisi obiettiva del perché serve e di quali sono le ragioni per cui spesso non funziona.
Molto interessante l'analisi delle scontro fra burocrazia tedesca, durante la seconda guerra mondiale, contro quella americana, che per l'autore è stato un fattore vincente per l'efficienza americana nella conduzione della guerra.
2 people found this helpful
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Patricia Finney
5.0 out of 5 stars Middle Earth and form-filling
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2018
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A wonderful book! Graeber manages to write in a relaxed comprehensible - even witty - style about a subject that normally kills anything like that stonedead: bureaucracy. He asks pointed and excellent questions: why has bureaucracy in fact increased exponentially, especially in the USA, UK and Europe, while every right wing commentator is noisily insisting it's going to be reduced? Why has it extended its tentacles from the military and government and corporations to education and the rest of society? Why does bureaucracy make us act so stupidly? Do we actually secretly like bureaucracy, because it makes us feel safe inside a game with rules, even if we don't actually understand the rules?
More seriously he also examines what is the connection between state violence and Batman? And why doesn't Middle Earth have any bureaucracy?
There's one thing I'd like to ask him: have you read any Terry Pratchett? And particularly "Going Postal" and "Making Money", late books where the Wizard of Ankh-Morpork dares to contemplate the irruption of bureaucracy into a fantasy world? Or "Small Gods" one of the finest religious satires ever written, which contains a particularly poisonous example of the perfect bureaucrat?
11 people found this helpful
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André Braga
1.0 out of 5 stars Brainstorming
Reviewed in Brazil on May 27, 2015
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I have been researching about bureaucracy and red tape and reading some books on these topics. That's how I stumbled over "the utopia of rules". The description was promising. But my impression is that this is not a book about bureaucracy and its causes or even something similar. The author follows a certain pattern: he poses an interesting question about red tape and, in the following pages, forgets about it completely and starts talking about some worn out leftist cliches about violence and opression and racism. In between he fills some space writing about vampires, angels, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, role playing games, Egypt...

I bought this book after reading "Cubed", by Nikil Saval, and the contrast couldn't be bigger.
8 people found this helpful
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