"The Bullshit-Job Boom/For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?"

By Nathan Heller at The New Yorker.

In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster), David Graeber, an anthropologist now at the London School of Economics, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” He thinks these jobs are everywhere. By all the evidence, they are. His book, which has the virtue of being both clever and charismatic, follows a much circulated essay that he wrote, in 2013, to call out such occupations. Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them. Others were pointless in opaque ways....

Corporate lawyers? That doesn't sound right! How is a corporation supposed to stay on the right side of all the law? It would make more sense to say the law is bullshit. But I can see how a corporate lawyer might feel that the tasks he's stuck doing are bullshit, that his is not a spiritually rewarding way of life, but Heller wrote that the clients wouldn't miss their lawyers if they all suddenly "disappeared." Wishing mass death on lawyers is an old tradition, replete with Shakespeare quote. And it's common to think this murderous ideation is cute.

By the way, the oft-trotted-out Shakespeare quote is almost always misunderstood:

Shakespeare's exact line ''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,'' was stated by Dick the Butcher in ''Henry VI,'' Part II, act IV, Scene II, Line 73. Dick the Butcher was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who thought that if he disturbed law and order, he could become king. Shakespeare meant it as a compliment to attorneys and judges who instill justice in society.

Shakespeare quotes are often presented as if Shakespeare were not a playwright and the ideas expressed were Shakespeare's own opinions. The lines are spoken by characters, who can be evil, stupid, deceitful, or badly mistaken.

Back to Heller:

I do digital consultancy for global pharmaceutical companies’ marketing departments. I often work with global PR agencies on this, and write reports with titles like How to Improve Engagement Among Key Digital Health Care Stakeholders. It is pure, unadulterated bullshit, and serves no purpose beyond ticking boxes for marketing departments. . . . I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting. The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point.

Hmm. That reminds me. One of the reasons I chose to retire is that the bullshit work spiraled upward over the years. When I started in the 80s, there was hardly any committee work and some of the required paperwork — e.g., progress reports on pre-tenure professors — wasn't even done at all. Toward the end, there were so many large committees taking themselves very seriously, producing reports and reporting orally on reports at faculty meetings that dragged on for hours. There was always another "self-study" report to be laboriously cranked out, and you couldn't even say: Come on, we know this is bullshit... can't we just admit it and get it done as efficiently as possible? No, we had to perform in the Theater of Utmost Seriosity in the production of mindnumbing paperwork. If it had been a committee of 3 or 4 tenured professors, we'd have laughed about the stupidity and done it as fast as possible. But in later years, it would be a much larger, much more inclusive group, and you'd seem like an obstructionist if you rankled at bureaucracy and insane if you cracked a joke.

A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.”... [B]ullshit work [is] “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Ugh! The pretense is part of the work.

Hollywood is notoriously mired in development, an endeavor that Graeber believes to be almost pure bullshit. One developer he meets, Apollonia, had been kept busy working over reality shows with titles such as “Transsexual Housewives” and “Too Fat to Fuck.”...

To be fair, those shows do sound interesting. But what is bullshit is working on them without believing that there's a chance they will become real shows.

In a famous essay drafted in 1928, John Maynard Keynes projected that, a century on, technological efficiency in Europe and in the U.S. would be so great, and prosperity so assured, that people would be at pains to avoid going crazy from leisure and boredom. Maybe, Keynes wrote, they could plan to retain three hours of work a day, just to feel useful.

Here we are nearly in 2028, and technology has indeed produced dazzling efficiencies. As Keynes anticipated, too, the number of jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, and mining has plummeted. Yet employment in other fields—management, service—grows, and people still spend their lives working to finance basic stuff.... “It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the office upstairs,” [Graeber] writes.

Maybe the reason we don't have single-payer health care is that we need to preserve the bullshit jobs!

“Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ” [President Obama once said]. “That represents one million, two million, three million jobs.” Graeber describes this comment as a “smoking gun” of bullshittization. “Here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs,” he writes. Politicians are so fixated on job creation, he thinks, that no one wonders which jobs are created, and whether they are necessary. Unnecessary employment may be one of the great legacies of recent public-private collaboration.

Ugh! But look where this line of thinking goes, for Heller at least:

Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online....