The original article was published on June 7, 2018 in The New Yorker magazine.With more and more people, work becomes meaningless. Is there any benefit from the monotonous routine?
In his new book, anthropologist David Graber is looking for a diagnosis and epidemiology of what he calls "useless works that no one wants to talk about." Illustration: Martina PaukovaCrazy work as paper waste accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports ... What is this? Nobody knows. And yet they accumulate around, warmed up by a copier, so that no one reads them. Best Practice Papers? Nobody has a clue, not even the authors. Someone thought that electronic document management would save us from this nonsense. He made a mistake. Now all day you get emails about “proximity to the consumer” (oh, god); “Our team” (
whose team?); Also, new expense reporting software requires that all receipts be kept on paper, scanned and uploaded to a server that rejects them, because you could not preload an important form after the fact. If you are lucky, such nonsense takes only a few hours of the usual working week. But if you are among millions of less fortunate Americans, then this is the essence of all your work activity.
In
Bullshit Jobs , Simon & Schuster, anthropologist David Greber, now working at the London School of Economics, is looking for a diagnosis and epidemiology of what he calls "useless works that no one wants to talk about." He thinks that such works surround us everywhere. Judging by all signs, it is. His clever and charismatic book was created after a
popular essay he wrote in 2013, where he told about such activities. In his opinion, some of them are superfluous in nature: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappear en masse, even customers will not miss them. Others are meaningless in less obvious ways. Shortly after the publication of the essay in a small journal, readers translated it into dozens of languages, and hundreds of people, according to Graber, sent their own stories of work in the field of absurdity.
These stories give the book a special empiricism. In 2015, the analytical company YouGov conducted a survey of the British, whether they believe that their work makes a significant contribution to the world. 37% said no, and 13% were not sure. Such numbers are repeated in other countries. (In the well-off and balanced Netherlands, 40% of respondents believe that their work has no reason to exist). Yet the survey figures are not as indicative as the letters from the trenches of the absurd. Here is Hannibal, one of Graber's respondents:
“I am engaged in digital consulting for the marketing departments of global pharmaceutical companies. I often work with global PR agencies and write reports with names, for example, “How to improve the interaction between key players in digital health” . This is pure, pure garbage, and serves no purpose other than checkboxes in marketing departments ... I recently received about twelve thousand pounds for a two-page report for a pharmaceutical company. He was planned to be shown at a global strategy meeting. As a result, the report was not needed, because they never reached this agenda item. ”
Senseless work is not what Graber calls “shitty work.” Many employees of the meaningless kingdom receive good compensation in the form of a mass of free time. And yet they are unhappy. Greber believes that they are gnawed by a sense of worthlessness. It undermines all human qualities. This observation leads the author to define bulshit work as "a form of paid employment that is so meaningless, unnecessary or pernicious, that even an employee cannot justify its existence, although under the terms of the contract he feels obliged to pretend that this is not so."
Graber's analysis reveals five types of meaningless work.
Footmen are those who are paid to hang out and make their bosses feel important: doormen, useless assistants, administrators with quiet phones, and so on.
Thugs are unnecessary muscles of the arms race; Greber points to the staff of the PR department at Oxford University, whose task is to convince the public that Oxford is a good university.
Hole tapes are hired to correct or eliminate major flaws that the authorities are lazy or do not know how to fix them systematically. (This is a woman at an airline booking office whose job is to soothe angry passengers when luggage has not arrived).
Pedants take different actions, often using documents and serious reports to create the appearance of some kind of activity that does not exist (like Hannibal from the example above). The last class is taskmasters, which are divided into two subtypes:
unnecessary supervisors who manage people who do not need to be managed, and
nonsense generators , whose job is to create and assign more nonsense to others.
Such jobs are characteristic even for creative professions. Content curators, creatives - these and other mediating roles arise everywhere, from journalism to art. Hollywood is known for blowing the state, which Greber considers almost pure bulshit. He met with the developer Apollonia, who participated in the creation of a reality show with titles such as Transsexual Housewives and Too Fat to Fuck (Too Fat to Fuck). None of them came close to going on the air. Oscar's screenwriter worked on reducing the 60-page scripts to 15 pages and retelling them at meetings, where managers put forward inter-related suggestions and gave vague advice. “They will say:“ I’m not saying what to do with X, but perhaps it’s worth making X, ”Oscar recalled. “The more you show the details, the more blurry everything becomes.”
The epidemiology of the problem - how and why everything turned out this way - is also quite blurred. Greber believes that large-scale economic forecasts have not come true because of bulshit. In a
famous essay , a draft of which was prepared in 1928, John Maynard Keynes predicted that after a century, technological efficiency in Europe and the United States would become so great, and prosperity so stable that it would be difficult for people not to go crazy with idleness and boredom. Maybe Keynes wrote, it makes sense to save three hours of work per day, just to make people feel useful.
Now we are almost in 2028, and technology has really dramatically increased labor productivity. As Keynes expected, the number of jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, and mining has plummeted. However, employment in other areas - management, maintenance - is growing, and people still spend their lives on earning a living. Graber blames in particular the existing employment structure. (Politically, he describes himself as an anarchist, but of a soft type, and his own views are usually well hidden: he equally criticizes hard supporters of the free market, and people who oppose “capitalism” as if it were a specially chosen conceptual system, not just a name glued to the socio-economic fabric woven centuries ago).
Instead of reaping the fruits of our labor, as in the middle of a century, we now divide them between shareholders and growth for growth. Prosperity trophies are returned to the system to finance new and possibly functionally unnecessary jobs. And although a lot of frivolous nonsense is present in the public sector (some time ago, a Spanish civil servant stopped appearing in the office, which was noticed only six years later, when someone tried to give him a medal for long service), but Graber finds a rich vein of meaningless employment in the private sector: “It’s as if the enterprises endlessly cut the production hall, and with the money saved they hired even more unnecessary workers in the office upstairs,” he writes.
This is strange. It is assumed that market competition does not encourage inefficiency and waste. Maybe Graber too naively represents modern business? Some argue that mindless jobs just
look so; supposedly these are pinholes, the office version of that guy in the factory who makes the only metal rivet for the plane. Greber does not agree. In the most familiar to him academic field, there is the same explosive over-blowing of states as in any other industry, although teaching and research work has not become more complex or large-scale than decades ago. Scores of new employees must be doing something else.
Greber comes to the conclusion that the driving logic of such expansion is not efficiency, but something closer to feudalism: a complex mix of economics, organizational politics, oprichnina and redistribution, which is fueled by a desire for competitive status and local government. (Why do people hire guards? Not because they are cost-effective). The difference between true feudalism and what is happening now - “feudalism of managers,” as Graber says, is that under true feudalism, the professionals themselves were responsible for their schedule and methods of work.
Left alone, Graber notes, people usually work like students before an exam: alternate cramming and rest. They may work in this way for a reason, but because this is the most productive way to work. Most of us would agree that if a farmer plows his land from 9 am to 5 pm five days a week, then this is some kind of strange and probably not very good farmer. For most of human history, all professionals from warriors and fishermen to writers worked in cram-and-slack mode (hard work is interspersed with rest), in part because these jobs were shaped by actual production needs, and not by arbitrary work schedules and supervision by managers. Greber complains of a situation in which "it is quite natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent themselves, and for a boss to resent normally if an employee does not work every moment of his own time." However, he probably exaggerates the joys of a freelancer’s life.
Is there any benefit from meaningless work? According to Graber, such work is necessary just to protect our existence: “We invented a bizarre BDSM dialectic for self-suggestion that pain in the workplace is the only possible excuse for secret consumer pleasures in life. But work eats up an increasing part of our waking existence, with the result that we don’t have that luxury, ”Katie Wicks concisely remarked,“ like life ”,” he writes. His own view of life, which includes “sitting in a cafe all day, arguing about politics or gossiping about the complicated love affairs of our friends,” may not all share. It may also incorrectly determine the extent to which most people worry about the results of their work; for some, work is the least important and defining of all life obligations. But the bottom line is that the economy of shit feeds on itself.
Workers are immersed in watching TV shows, online shopping, takeaway and yoga classes as a reward for another day of demoralizing, meaningless work that supports this lifestyle. (Graber speaks mostly about the urban and educated middle class, which seems logical, since there are suspicions that such are his readers). Attachment to this lifestyle, that is, acculturation occurs early. College student Brtndan complains about mindless work already on campus:
“Many of these student jobs require some kind of bullshit, for example, to scan IDs or check empty rooms, or clean tables that are already clean ... I don’t quite know how it all works, but most of the work is funded by the feds and is related to our students loans. This is part of a whole federal system designed to secure large debts for students - and thus forcing them to work in the future, because it is so difficult to get rid of student debts. This is accompanied by a meaningless educational program designed to educate and prepare us for our future meaningless work. ”
It seems that Brendan describes the Federal Work-Study Program (Federal Work-Study Program), which aims to help students compensate for arrears in wages earned on campus. Many of these jobs are clearly meaningless. I myself participated in this program, working in the basement of the campus research center, and the main task, as I recall, was to draw up a monthly calendar of local events. It was necessary to make lists, mainly from Google, and put them in the program. I have no idea how many people got these brochures and read them. Nevertheless, I was lucky: I liked the people who worked there, and I could take free coffee from the kitchen. In any case, it seemed to me wonderful that I somehow evaded duty, sitting in the basement and performing the simplest tasks on the computer.
From the point of view of Graber, these works prepare young people in life in a meaningless style. With free time instead, he writes, students could “rehearse plays, play in a group,” and the like. Such binary logic is misleading - you can engage in stupefying work
and still be a singer - and anyone who has read many student essays or listened to the game of student groups, is unlikely to agree that there is much less bullshit. Young people may be asked to do unimportant work as part of a cunning acculturation program. Or they may be asked, because their skills of the highest order have not yet been honed and there is a benefit - for everyone - to push them to achieve their life aspirations at will, and not from the stick.
In one of the many digressions about feudalism, Greber gives an excursion into the labor classes of young people in medieval Europe. He points out that then everyone — rich and poor, omnipotent and powerless — served in youth in their youth. Ambitious knights became pages, and noblewomen worked as freelines. The goal was to introduce young people into the world before releasing them as self-governing professionals. And yet, since no one
really needs an assistant to scrape the mud off his shoes or move the tray from one room to another, medieval youth activities were, to a large extent, meaningless. Meaningful work in youth can be excellent and even useful on the way to self-realization. Nonsense that destroys us - this is nonsense, with which we cope with life.
To explain this consistency, Graber quotes President Barack Obama on the topic of private health care: “Those who advocate full payment of services to the public say:“ See how much we save by refusing insurance and bureaucracy. ” But that’s one million, two million, three million jobs. ” Greber characterizes this comment as a “smoking gun” of bulding, “This is the most influential person in the world publicly reflecting on his legislative achievement - and insists that the preservation of unnecessary jobs was the most important factor,” he writes. Politicians are so obsessed with creating jobs, he believes that no one wonders what jobs are created or whether they are needed. Unnecessary employment can be one of the main legacies of recent public-private partnerships.
This is bad by most criteria of market efficiency and job satisfaction. But this leads to the realization that Graber describes, but does not formulate directly: that meaningless employment in countries such as the United States and Great Britain is intended to serve as a disguised, immature version of unemployment benefits - only sharpened specifically for a large, reputable middle class. With a different social model, a young woman who could not find work could receive a check from the government. Now, instead, she gets a meaningless job, say, at a medical company, spends half of each morning making unhelpful reports, and the rest of the time playing Klondike solitaire or exploring products in an online store for camping. Perhaps this is not a good life. But this is not the horror of poverty.
Or she can do something more ambitious. Greber argues that it’s "unusual" for workers to use meaningless jobs as a front for more useful work. Nevertheless, people write music, poems and more, sitting on worthless work. George Saunders
wrote the stories of the Civil War In Bad Decline collection, allegedly doing the work of a technical writer for an engineering company. Jeffrey Eugenides
wrote most of the Virgin Suicide Bitch novel while working as a secretary. These are good books. Salaries for the meaningless work of the authors have practically become patrons of the arts to create works. None of us can escape shitty work. But some still benefit from it.
On this topic:
Hell Project (IT)
Tim O'Reilly "Work that matters: basic principles"Best comment ( F376 ): I’ll say a terrible thing , I don’t like the risk.
... My thoughts have led to the fact that by and large, the work of modern programmers, developers, too, is meaningless. It has a “meaning” in a very short time interval. It is like a service. We constantly do the same thing all the time, and we don’t notice it.
Where are all those wonderful programs of the 80s and 90s? Where are all the great frameworks? Libraries? (They read “Design Patterns” - a book from the 90s? Noted how many beautiful frameworks are mentioned there? Dozens ...) Where are the wonderful code of the Opera browser? Continents OS / 2? Tons of Amiga or Mac software? Who remembers the list of 3D engines list with a list of 643 projects? cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html Where are the code bases for tens of thousands of games? And how many site engines or in-office bases went to the dustbin of history? Imagine scary. And still only ahead - in the last 5-7 years there was a strong fragmentation. How much code is being written in scripting, interpreted and dynamic JS, Go, Python, Ruby, PHP, Erlang ... Dozens of languages. No, I do not pessimize, it is clear that the information sphere is ephemeral and strictly speaking, abstract. But when the results of human labor live for 3-5 years, and even are intended for entertainment, to flicker and forget - something really goes wrong ... Have you ever thought about it?