Bullshit Jobs is really just the DOGE ethos leftishly ("if I can't understand what your job means, then its useless")
Reposted from
ae
it absolutely is just libertarianism in disguise, because most of the jobs that the book targets have to do with social coordination or glue functions
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DOGE and Graeber share the view that for every job, there's someone whose understanding of it determines whether it's useless. For Graeber, that someone is the person who does it. For DOGE, it's Musk.
But Musk doubtless also has his list "agencies & jobs I have personal or financial reasons to dislike" that's much more objective than "agencies & jobs whose function I don't really understand, even though I thought about them for several minutes" and they'll overlap a lot.
But "Bullshit Tasks" is a much less catchy title than "Bullshit Jobs."
https://www.routledge.com/Business-Bullshit/Spicer/p/book/9781138911673?srsltid=AfmBOoopmoof83js-yTEkAOQKfBXiVOewZtMcOyK5OSAkfGYw42YVkbV
These people are so unserious they’d almost always immediately respond “if I haven’t heard of it then it must not be so critical.”
Graeber's definition of a bullshit job requires the person working the job to think its bullshit.
God I hate that fucking book and it’s smug proponents
(this is not to imply that bureaucracy is a good thing that produces useful or desirable results!)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053951716665128
The most common ones I’m aware of involve, essentially, supporting products or services that purport to provide objectivity or precision where none can exist
But that’s not mostly what Graber meant I think
and I too can hedge to prevent skis overrun, I just called graeber’s work pretty after all
It just has a lot less to say about the experience of most people or economies in the rest of the world.
Some of us have been SCREAMING about this for a few months lol.