ralentina reviewed Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Five-star, life-changing book
5 stars
I loved this book so much! I found it entertaining and inspiring, personally (yes, I don't want to be stuck in a bullshit job, I want to think about what it's valuable and why and try to do it; see [*]), politically (hell yes, this system is fucked up, and all the moralising about work is very convenient for some) as well as professionally (I want to write like this about non-bullshit research).
The theory in a nutshell is that a larger and larger proportion of jobs, and especially white-collar jobs, are bullshit because they contribute nothing to society: they don't even make companies richer, but are simply the product of apathia or vanity. On a larger scale, this has happened because we are no longer living in a classic capitalist system, where capitalists 'control the means of production', but rather in a neo-feudal system, where political and economic elites …
I loved this book so much! I found it entertaining and inspiring, personally (yes, I don't want to be stuck in a bullshit job, I want to think about what it's valuable and why and try to do it; see [*]), politically (hell yes, this system is fucked up, and all the moralising about work is very convenient for some) as well as professionally (I want to write like this about non-bullshit research).
The theory in a nutshell is that a larger and larger proportion of jobs, and especially white-collar jobs, are bullshit because they contribute nothing to society: they don't even make companies richer, but are simply the product of apathia or vanity. On a larger scale, this has happened because we are no longer living in a classic capitalist system, where capitalists 'control the means of production', but rather in a neo-feudal system, where political and economic elites coincide: people get richer by appropriating, distributing and controlling resources (i.e. politics in its classical definition), not by producing.
