Graeber on the “Gigantic Embarrassment” of Work (RSA Replay)

Source

Lost to the archives are my previous discussions of Graeber or mentions of him at any rate. I don’t recall how many times I’ve talked about Graeber’s infamous article concerning bullshit jobs, but I know I never did any review of the article. But hey, this covers that!

Back in 2018 (approximately a million years ago), Graeber gave an interesting talk based on his then recent book with the RSA (which apparently stands for the Royal Society of Arts?) that I’ve had on my Youtube for a long time now. I’ve decided to get around to taking a look at it, now that I don’t have school and my part-time job is easier than ever thanks(?) to COVID-19.

For starters, it’s a decent lecture though it doesn’t tell anti-work advocates anything they don’t already know. It’s definitely more of a 101 lecture than something anti-capitalist anarchists (like myself or Graeber) would go out of their way to see. But then, that’s the point. It’s a very 101 talk because his audience is a crowd that conceivably flinches at “anarchist” and thinks terrorist.

The talk is split into three sections: A brief lecture section (20 minutes or so), a briefer dialogue section with the host (15 minutes) and the longest section, a Q&A fills out the rest. I took notes on all three of these sections and here’s a list of things that stood out to me:

  1. Graeber looks really haggard, I don’t mean this as an insult; I hope he was getting rest!
  2. Graeber talks a bit too much about how successful he is (especially with Debt)
  3. He loves to envision capitalists with “minions” like a Saturday morning cartoon show
  4. His solutions (UBI) are unpersuasive or vague and his methodology is suspect
  5. He’s certain no one believes in the myths of capitalism, despite them still being parroted
  6. His idea of “everything meaningful as an extension of care-ethic” is an interesting theory
  7. Sadly doesn’t address his own professions BS quality despite doing so in the essay
  8. Not a lot of discussion concerning automation (“robots have already taken our jobs!”)
  9. Has good anti-authoritarian instincts when it comes to the 4-day workweek
  10. Almost no discussion about gender roles in BS jobs, only when a question is asked.

I know a lot of that seems negative, but this is overall a good talk. It’s just unfortunate that Graeber’s biggest issue here is that his methods of talking about the phenomenon of BS jobs is either his Twitter page, an email group or a drunken rant he had done at parties for 10 years. I’m not saying anecdotal evidence is meaningless or that survey can’t be helpful, nor am I suggesting that he is wrong about the existence of BS jobs, just that I wish his methods had more rigor.

Graeber’s an intelligent anthropologist and I’ve read him on anarchism several times to usually pleasing results, but he only seemed to be at his best when he talked less about the symptoms (BS jobs) then the central issue (state-capitalism). Or when he was asked about the 4-Day weekend and noted that surveilling people’s activities would be incredibly costly, difficult and may not even work for his own profession. He’s paid monthly to work “all the time” as he says.

So Graeber admits he’s “suspicious” of calls for the 4-Day workweek, even though he thinks it would help. This is, roughly, where I stand as well and it was such a relief to finally hear and see someone else talk about it. Although, inconsistently and disappointingly he held no such worries for the Universal Basic Income (UBI) even though I’d think they’d equally apply?

I suspect that is because he spoke to a great cultural change (paraphrasing) that we’d need to go under in order for such a policy to happen in the first place. My question is that if we’ve already caused such a cultural shift that UBI becomes palatable then why shouldn’t we aim higher? There’s also another excellent question raised by the host: What about short-term strategies?

UBI may be a decent strategy for the long-term but as Graeber points out it is currently undesirable by politicians despite it gaining more steam in the past 5 years. We’ve seen that especially with US presidential candidates such as Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders. Social democratic ideologies have, in general, become more popular which has lead to the rise of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) gaining momentum. As well, we have publications like Jacobin that have also been steadily increasing in viewership over the years.

Nevertheless anarchism should never be a slightly radicalized social democratic stance. This was (and is) the problem with anarchists like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Colin Ward and others like them. They think of anarchism as a process for improving the state not as abolishing it and replacing its institutions and services with community-based ones.

Now, I understand I’m painting in broad strokes here and I certainly respect the thinkers I’ve just mentioned (Ward’s Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction and Chomsky’s definition of anarchism are both influential) but I think this strain of anarchism doesn’t get enough criticism.

I’m not saying we don’t focus on the short-term benefits such as UBI, 4-Day Workweek, $15 minimum wage, etc. But what I am saying is we need to look carefully at these policy proposals that depend on the ruling class suddenly turning around after hundreds of years (and much more) of oppressing others and suddenly treating us kindly. Yes, there have been some wins such as the unionist victories in the 1930s in the US but those were notoriously reformist and ended up weakening the unionist movement in the US in the long-haul. Even the IWW isn’t near where it used to be and neither are most other unions that fought for worker’s rights back then.

As the title suggest, one of the best parts of this talk is at the beginning when Graeber mentions that work is a kind of “embarrassment”. Everyone implicitly recognizes what they’re doing is BS but no one has a solution. Or if they do, it’s often discounted as “communism” or as Graeber said “it’s us or North Korea!” Any solution to our current problems would only make it worse, so why bother? Or it’s just an excuse for bad and lazy (let’s be honest: it’s the same in capitalism) people to get out of their debts, which, of course, Graeber wrote a whole book on and has responses to.

As for BS Jobs themselves, I have an interesting mix because I take care of living beings (dogs) but 90% of the time I’m doing nothing these days. And even before COVID, I still had hours and hours where I was on my phone or playing video games or doing something else. These days it’s just hilarious how much of my job is just sitting around and looking at screens. The pretense is someone needs to be there in case the place burned down (why would it?) and more crucially because the dogs need their bowls refilled and to be taken out once in a while (more sensible).

But in essence, most of my job feels like BS. Like, it’s amazing to me I get paid to just sit and read , play video games, watch wrestling videos on Youtube or whatever I want, really. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. I technically have a list of responsibility but due to COVID no one cares and even before that, so few people want to do overnight shifts that they often can’t make mountains out of molehills when much of the cleaning asked for is minor. The major cleaning to the facility happens throughout the day so even when we were busier there were periods of hours where, as an evening worker or an overnight one, I had hours where I did nothing or even napped.

Another interesting aspect of this lecture/dialogue is that Graeber briefly mentions how we sacrificed our leisure time for our commodity time. Instead of having more time with our friends or families we are spending more time with our smartphones. It’s worth asking: Can we have both? Is it possible to have a life full of commodity-based pleasures and enjoy bountiful time with our loved ones? Graeber doesn’t provide any answers to this question (nor does he even ask it) but I think if we abolished state-capitalism we could certainly get much closer.

Maybe Graeber believes that as well, I don’t know for sure. In any case, the benefits of technology can be dispersed and widespread instead of concentrated into the hands of the rich and powerful.

So, why do BS jobs exist?

Graeber has some answers:

  1. Making up jobs to suit those in power
  2. To keep people off the street (despite abandoned homes)
  3. The poor must pay their debts and the rich must provide them those opportunities
  4. If you don’t want to work you’re a bad person!
  5. Much easier to believe you think you’re doing something and aren’t.
  6. If you’re a manager you need 5-6 flunkies/minions or you’re not important
  7. Duck tapers: People who apologize for the lack of solutions
  8. Box Tickets: Efficiency designers who aren’t listened to
  9. Goons: PR, Marketing, Telemarketer(!)
  10. Taskmasters: Supervising people who don’t need it (Middle-Managers)

In addition, many of these industries (as Graeber points out) feed off themselves and the people Graeber heard from admitted this to him. From corporate lawyers, people within the financial industry Graeber concludes in this discussion that even if half of the current jobs were eliminated it likely would not impact anything materially.

Perhaps we are seeing this currently with the COVID-19 Pandemic, most of the job currently are “essential” ones that are (at least in my profession) an extension of the care-ethic, as Graeber puts it. Providing dogs care as well as other essential services like getting food to people reliably, nurses and hospitals are all extensions of the care-ethic, as Graeber would say.

On the other hand, society has never seemed so chaotic and disorganized. There’s a discomfort in the air wherever I go. I either have this gnawing feeling that there are too few people outside or making noise (e.g. a ghost town) or way too many and this isn’t safe and oh Glob I should really be home and not Here. I fluctuate between these two gnawing feelings but then, to his credit, Graeber didn’t have a pandemic in mind when he wanted corporate lawyers gone.

But what is the opposite of corporate lawyers? For Graeber it seems to be nurses, teachers (which he himself is one), tube workers (more on that in a second) and people whose jobs bear some actual value for the society around them. But what does that value look like and how is it best harnessed within a given society? Graeber doesn’t give us much besides the care-ethic I’ve now mentioned a few times, which I think is interesting but may not be enough on its own.

The discussion about tube workers was interesting. For those non-UK natives/folks unaware of the UK term the “tube” means subways tunnels for us Americans. Why would these folks be so tied to the care-ethic if the trains can mostly run themselves at this point and most folks know where they are going? Well, some people don’t for starters (hi, it’s me!), plus sometimes women are harassed by drunk men, sometimes people lose their laptops or even their children. So yeah, you could definitely argue (as some tube workers did on Twitter) that they’re very much essential.

BS jobs plague our lives, Graeber is no doubt right about that, but his evidence for that needs a bit more rigor for someone who says he’s more of an anthropologist than an anarchist on his Twitter bio. There’s also the curious incidents of people loving their job they know is a lie. Graeber reasons this could be because they’re just glad to be away from home (bad home life/hate their families) and within Graeber’s survey it was a measly 6% at any rate.

But for most of us, we’re all too aware of the bullshit we’ve got to endure within our jobs. The anti-work movement is forever benefited from Graeber’s insightful essay. Maybe we should let more academics publish their drunken rants from parties they’ve been crafting for 10 years?

The world might be a better place for it.


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How Work turns our Brains Off (And then Blames us for It!)

It’s Not the Best Choice, It’s [Amazon’s] Choice! Source: http://www.carlybird.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Bored_At_Work.jpg
Another video on my Youtube Watch Later list is on the docket and only a couple left! This time we’re talking about the last Big Think video I saved before I unsubscribed to them however many months later. Part of the issue with Big Think is that they’ll have some interesting videos done by cool folks. But then they’ll also have videos by assholes or they’ll try to get “all perspectives” on a given topic, which, just so happens to include right-wing folks. The comments section is also a pretty big cesspool, especially when anything even marginally left-wing is posted.

I once posted that liberals are not leftists (from an anarchist perspective but they didn’t know that) and it got hundreds of likes quickly because people thought I was insulting leftists!

Anyways, this is a fun and interesting video. I don’t think it tells us much we didn’t already know about work but there are some concepts in it that I was unfamiliar with such as the “seeking system” in brains that often get turned off during work. Many people try to keep these systems within our brain active with podcasts, the ones that help with curiosity and discovery. There’s a technical term for this system which psychologist Dan Cable identifies as the ventral striatum but I’ll just call it the “seeking system” for the sake of spellcheck and my sanity.

This seeking system can’t only be held aloft by podcasts, but they do get us thinking and concentrated on something else besides the menial and repetitive work we’re doing. I know when I’m listening to the NeoScum Podcast (a Shadowrun podcast) it helps me laugh, get myself out of my own head a little and make me think about a far away land. But it also doesn’t replace what’s going on in front of me with something better. It doesn’t take that mop out of my hand and give me a wand or make what I’m doing not menial, just a little more bearable.

These seeking systems are important because they help us learn and as a result, when they are minimized or even turned off we can get bored easier. Our brains are trying to tell us something, that it isn’t us but the work we feel as if we need to, as Cable puts it (paraphrasing), “…get through to make it to the weekend”. After all work is where we typically cannot be with our family, friends, loved ones, beloved hobbies or have the time to do as we please and go on a relaxing walk and explore what’s around us. Cable goes so far as to call this experience an “epidemic” and a “humanistic sickness” which tends to drive us to utter boredom.

One thing that frustrates me about his analysis though is that it focuses in not only on how this harms the workers but the organizations they’re a part of. He notes that this streak of boredom can result in a “lackluster performance” from workers but who cares? Shouldn’t the bosses get lackluster performances when they’re giving us lackluster work?

It’s like that saying goes, “Minimum effort for minimum wage!”

Cable traces back the origin of this boredom to the way work has been scaled up in the past few hundred years. Especially through supposed visionaries and industrialists like Henry Ford who, as Cable denotes, saw curiosity as a problem and a bug, not a feature of the workplace he wanted to build and thrive under capitalism. This kind of workplace breaks work into many small tasks which means that individual workers and even groups of them are all cut off from each other.

This likely reflects a capitalist’s dream of making it much harder for workers to communicate easier about their shared issues and then potentially forming a union and striking. This also led to the punishment/reward systems we tend to see these days in modern workplaces. The employee of the year for a punishment and a firm “talking to” or “notice” for valuing our own autonomy.

Generally, tedious and repetitive tasks are going to tend to drive you to listen to podcasts, music, the whirring of the ceiling fan above you that makes your office just a little bit too cold. It’s going to get your brain starved for things to think about, to process, to understand and discover. And through that starvation you’ll often be told that you are the problem in some way. Why don’t you get another job? Why don’t you go back to school? Why don’t you switch departments or talk to your boss? Anything but try to address the issue: Work itself.

Now, Cable claims that smaller companies tend to do better at increasing curiosity because the people involved are more likely to be engaged with their work. If there are only 50 people as opposed to 50,000 you won’t have the corporate decree of “stay[ing] in your lane” as much. And that seems plausible to some extent.

But even smaller businesses can fall into capitalist traps that punish workers for trying to flex their own autonomy in even the most basic ways. In fact, it can often lead to even worse micromanagement because the firm is much smaller and therefore the employees are much more legible to their bosses. And while Cable is surely right that the cultural expectations of a given company matter more than any given standard, those expectations are driven by economic ones.

Ultimately, tackling our cultural expectations around work, the way we victim-blame workers and laud bosses for making work as menial as possible, means tackling capitalism and work itself. Either through worker organizing, worker-owned organizations, individual slow-downs to preserve our own cranial integrity or maybe, just maybe, a revolution someday.


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Plans for 2020 / Play on Purpose

Happy New Year!

Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

Uh, Happy New Year?

Yeah, the news lately has been bad, no doubt about that. I hope everyone who reads this site in Australia is taking care of themselves and those they love. And that those of us in the US think hard about what we can do to resist future war efforts against Iran or anyone else. My heart also goes out to the Iranian people, should a war start, no doubt they will (and likely have) suffered because of terrible leaders many there may not feel represent them.

As far as this site goes, which feels infinitesimal compared to the world on fire, drowning or a (low though it may be) potential for nuclear war, I wanted to update everyone. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to start over. Mostly for my sanity because republishing everything would be a nightmare of an effort. It’s not even something I’d pay someone to do unless we’re talking in the hundreds of dollars cause it’d likely take a long time for that person and it’d be menial.

At the same time, I don’t want to say goodbye to those posts I loved. The book reviews I published, the movie reviews I wrote, those feature articles that were a labor of love and much more. So I’ll be gradually filling the site with Throwback Thursday and Flashback Friday re-posts of “older’ content going back to 2014 once I’m in school (1/21/20). Until then, expect some new content made up of overdue article commentaries, Youtube video commentaries and even a movie review if I get far enough!

For the older content, I’ll be focusing on popular content or content that I feel defines the site. Sadly, I will not be republishing any guest content as I want this new version of this site to focus on my own personal writings. I’ve also had a personal falling out with a few former guest writers which makes reaching out awkward and seem unnecessary in comparison to their peace of mind.

Therefore, I see this as a fresh new start and opportunity for me to begin again and focus on what I love doing, AKA writing and writing on my own terms. My lovely Patrons make it possible to pay for the Digital Ocean server every month which helps a ton, so thank you! If you’d like to give me a small monthly donation every month it (and I can’t stress this enough) literally helps. I’m a part-time worker and full-time student who gets by on food banks and generous help from her partner, friends and family from time to time. So every dollar really helps!

I’m also making it a personal goal to read more this year and use social media less. I find social media tends to dictate my mood far too much on a daily basis, it eats up too much of my time and I often get far too invested in it. Specifically this is the case with Twitter and I should re-invest that energy into things like reading, video games, writing, my personal life, exercise, literally anything else (even moderating the awesome antiwork subreddit which has reached over 80K Idlers recently!) because it’ll likely be better for me and my mental health!

That said, I didn’t just want to come back and tell y’all what I’ve been doing (school, D&D, dog-sitting, playing video games, my job, going to the gym, loving my wonderful partner, seeing friends and family, occasionally reading, watching Green Eggs and Ham which was surprisingly good?) and what I plan to do (write some kick ass content for y’all!) I wanted to show you as well.


Source: http://www.playonpurposeinc.org/freedom-schools.html

So here’s my first new article, it’s about a great video called Play on Purpose:

This is one of those videos I was talking about earlier, it’s been languishing on my “Watch Later” list on Youtube. Okay but hold up, let’s stop for a second to appreciate how great the invention of the Water Later list is! It’s helped me keep track of those videos I don’t have time to watch right now but I’d love to get around to…some day. A lot of these new posts for the next few weeks (before I go into school) will be stemming from my Youtube Watch Later list so I can finally cull it a bit and make it full of the things I plan to get to more readily than say…months?

Anyways, we’re starting off in a fairly moderate way this year (politically speaking) but don’t worry, we’ll get more radical as we go, probably. This time around we have an Ignite talk. I did one of these once (it’s under my deadname, so ignore that)! They’re cool 5 minute talks that you do on a topic of your choice that you love. Jenny Sauer-Klein discusses in her talk why she loves play.

If I had my articles on play I’d link those but that’ll have to be later. So maybe if you’re reading this in the future there’ll be some links after this sentence!

For now, play is a powerful part of human existence and Sauer-Klein calls it a “medicine” for our daily lives. I’d definitely agree given many of the times I’ve engaged in play, whether it’s playing games with my partner, playing video games by myself, playing board games with friends, or something else, it felt healing in a small way. It didn’t remove all of my problems or undo trauma I’ve undergone, but it tends to make life more bearable and it gives me things to look forward to. That’s part of why I’ve reinvested myself into video games in the past few years.

Sauer-Klein wisely states that it is not only helpful for our mental health but that it can enhance trust, build connections and help motivate ourselves. As I just said, it helps me motivate myself to, you know, keep living, so that’s nice. It isn’t just play that I live for but it’s a big part of what makes my life essential. If I didn’t have play then I’d have very little to look forward to!

But OK, what is play? Sauer-Klein defines it as an action we undertake “…for the pure enjoyment of it”. Ever heard the expression, “It’s not the destination, it’s the process”? Or the journey matters more than the destination? Play helps us articulate those sayings and make them more practical in our day to day lives. When you are playing a game and having fun, sure winning or losing matter but honestly, you should be playing for the fun of it. That’s why a lot of disappointment comes from sore losers and winners who lack grace. They are treating play like work.

Unfortunately, as Sauer-Klein notes, this is what makes play difficult for some to wrap their heads around. All this amounts to for some adults is that an interest in play is childish (what’s so bad about kids?) and “frivolous” as Sauer-Klein specifically says in her presentation. But sometimes it’s OK to watch non-serialized shows where the stakes are low. It’s OK that Tom and Jerry never seriously hurt each other in their episodes because then it’d just be sad and horrible.

It’s OK to not have consequences to given things, it has its place in the universe. That doesn’t mean everything should be without consequences or that we shouldn’t take care in how we play with each other. But it also doesn’t mean that emulating kids is always a bad things, especially their curiosity concerning how the world is formed and our premises based on that. Such as unhelpful concepts and abusive or nonsensical power dynamics. Letting ourselves become more curious, playful and flexible allows us to tackle the world is new and exciting ways!

That said, for all of the positives I can list with this presentation, Sauer-Klein comes from a rather privileged background. She’s a successful businesswoman who lauds the integration of mindfulness into capitalism and how work and play can be complimentary. I actually agree in a sense but it isn’t that sense that Sauer-Klein is talking within. I see play as something that can supersede work, whereas Sauer-Klein is talking about work tolerating play.

She’s right that the level of disengagement of workers is high, but merely introducing play, mindfulness and other liberal strategies isn’t enough. It’s not enough to tweak the system, we need to come up with alternatives where truly playful ideas can flourish. Seeing play as an “extended state of mindfulness + fun” seems like a decent way to define it (though, as I’ll link in the future, there are better ways) but it leaves a lot of room to define or insert mindfulness and fun where it simply won’t be allowed as much as Sauer-Klein thinks it will be.

That said, I’m all for play when it “levels hierarchy” and turns strangers into community (if that’s what everyone wants, introverts unite!). It’s also true and fair to point out that Einstein loved play and so did George Bernard Shaw who said, and I’ll let this close this article just as Sauer-Klein has it close out her presentation:

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.