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Title: The Bullshit-Job Boom
Author: Nathan Heller
Date: 2018
Language: en
Topics: bullshit jobs, anti-work, David Graeber, book review
Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom

Nathan Heller

The Bullshit-Job Boom

Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the

inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these?

Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be

not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including

their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this

nonsense. Those people were wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about

“consumer intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose hands?); and the new

expense-reporting software, which requires that all receipts be mounted

on paper, scanned, and uploaded to a server that rejects them, since you

failed to pre-file the crucial post-travel form. If you’re lucky,

bullshit of this genre consumes only a few hours of your normal

workweek. If you’re among the millions of less fortunate Americans, it

is the basis of your entire career.

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. Soon after the essay appeared, in a small

journal, readers translated it into a dozen languages, and hundreds of

people, Graeber reports, contributed their own stories of work within

the bullshit sphere.

Those stories give his new book an ad-hoc empiricism. YouGov, a

data-analytics firm, polled British people, in 2015, about whether they

thought that their jobs made a meaningful contribution to the world.

Thirty-seven per cent said no, and thirteen per cent were unsure—a high

proportion, but one that was echoed elsewhere. (In the functional and

well-adjusted Netherlands, forty per cent of respondents believed their

jobs had no reason to exist.) And yet poll numbers may be less revealing

than reports from the bullshit trenches. Here is Hannibal, one of

Graeber’s contacts:

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.

A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.” Hannibal, and

many other of the bullshittiest employees, are well compensated, with

expanses of unclaimed time. Yet they’re unhappy. Graeber thinks that a

sense of uselessness gnaws at everything that makes them human. This

observation leads him to define bullshit work as “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.”

In the course of Graeber’s diagnosis, he inaugurates five phyla of

bullshit work. “Flunkies,” he says, are those paid to hang around and

make their superiors feel important: doormen, useless assistants,

receptionists with silent phones, and so on. “Goons” are gratuitous or

arms-race muscle; Graeber points to Oxford University’s P.R. staff,

whose task appears to be to convince the public that Oxford is a good

school. “Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that

their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. (This is the

woman at the airline desk whose duty is to assuage angry passengers when

bags don’t arrive.) “Box tickers” go through various motions, often

using paperwork or serious-looking reports, to suggest that things are

happening when things aren’t. (Hannibal is a box ticker.) Last are

“taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who

manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose

job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.

Such jobs are endemic even to creative industries. Content curators,

creatives—these and other intermediary non-roles crop up in everything

from journalism to art. 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.” None of these shows ever came close to airing. Oscar, a

screenwriter, spent his time working on pitch précis—sixty-page

versions, fifteen-page versions—and recapping them at meetings where

executives offered self-cancelling suggestions and obscure, koan-like

counsel. “They’ll say, ‘I’m not saying you should do X, but maybe you

should do X,’ ” Oscar recalled. “The more you press for details, the

blurrier it gets.”

The epidemiology of the problem—how and why things got this way—is

pretty blurry, too. Graber believes that bullshit helps explain why

certain large-scale economic predictions have been wrong. 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. Graeber blames, in part, the jobs

we have. (Politically, he describes himself as an anarchist, but he is

the mild-mannered kind, and his thinking is generally well-shaded: he’s

equally impatient with free-market hard-liners and the sorts of people

who rage at “capitalism” as if it were a chosen conceptual system rather

than a name stuck on the socioeconomic fabric woven centuries ago.)

Instead of reaping the rewards of our labor in the mid-century style, we

now split them among shareholders and growth for growth’s sake. The

spoils of prosperity are fed back into the system to fund new and,

perhaps, functionally unnecessary jobs. And, though there’s plenty of

make-work nonsense in government (a while ago, a Spanish civil servant

stopped showing up at the office, which was noticed only six years

later, when someone tried to give him a medal for his long service),

Graeber locates a tremendous lode of bullshit employment in the private

sector. “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,” he writes.

That is strange. Market competition is supposed to slough off

inefficiencies and waste. Is Graeber being naïve about contemporary

business? Some argue that bullshit jobs only look bullshitty; in truth,

they are disaggregated, the white-collar version of the guy on the

factory floor who makes a single metal rivet for an airplane. Graeber

doesn’t buy it. The field he knows best, academia, had as much of a

staffing explosion as any, and yet the work of teaching and research is

no more complex or scaled-up than it was decades ago. The hordes of new

employees must be doing something else.

Graeber comes to believe that the governing logic for such expansion

isn’t efficiency but something nearer to feudalism: a complex tangle of

economics, organizational politics, tithes, and redistributions, which

is motivated by the will to competitive status and local power. (Why do

people employ doormen? Not because they’re cost-effective.) The

difference between true feudalism and whatever is going on

now—“managerial feudalism” is Graeber’s uncatchy phrase—is that, under

true feudalism, professionals were responsible for their own schedules

and methods.

Left to their own devices, Graeber points out, people tend to do work

like students at exam time, alternately cramming and slacking. Possibly,

they work this way because it is the most productive way to work. Most

of us would assume that a farmer who started farming at 9 A.M. and

stopped at 5 P.M. five days a week was strange, and probably not a very

good farmer. Through the better part of human history, jobs from warrior

to fisherperson to novelist had a cram-and-slack rhythm, in part because

these jobs were shaped by actual productive needs, not arbitrary working

clocks and managerial oversight. Graeber laments a situation in which

it’s “perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to

rent themselves out in this way, or for a boss to become indignant if

employees are not working every moment of ‘his’ time.” Still, it’s

likely that he overstates the pleasures of the freelance life.

Is it possible that bullshit jobs are useful? In Graeber’s view, they

simply reinforce their premises. “We have invented a bizarre

sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is

the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and,

at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and

more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as

Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—‘a life,’ ” he writes. His own idea

of a life, which includes “sitting around in cafés all day arguing about

politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love

affairs,” may not be everyone’s. He also may misidentify the degree to

which most people fret about the nature of their productive output; for

some, work is the least important and defining of life’s commitments.

But his point is that the bullshit economy feeds itself. Workers cram in

Netflix binges, online purchases, takeout meals, and yoga classes as

rewards for yet another day of the demoralizing bullshit work that

sustains such life styles. (Graeber’s frame is mostly urban and educated

middle-class, which seems unobjectionable, since, one suspects, his

readers are, too.) Acculturation happens early. A college student,

Brendan, complains of bullshit jobs on campus:

A lot of these student work jobs have us doing some sort of bullshit

task like scanning IDs, or monitoring empty rooms, or cleaning

already-clean tables.... I’m not altogether familiar with how the whole

thing works, but a lot of this work is funded by the Feds and tied to

our student loans. It’s part of a whole federal system designed to

assign students a lot of debt—thereby promising to coerce them into

labor in the future, as student debts are so hard to get rid

of—accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train and

prepare us for our future bullshit jobs.

Brendan seems to be describing the Federal Work-Study Program, the point

of which is to help students offset debt with wages earned on campus.

Many of those jobs are plainly bullshitty. My own Federal Work-Study gig

was in the basement of a campus research center, and the main task, as I

recall it, was to produce a monthly calendar of local events. I would

compile listings, mostly from Google, and lay them out in

desktop-publishing software. I have no idea how many people received the

pamphlet, or whether any read it. Still, I felt lucky: I loved the

people there, and I could get free coffee from the center’s kitchenette.

If anything, it seemed remarkable to me then that I was somehow dodging

debt by sitting in a basement doing basic tasks on a computer.

In Graeber’s eyes, make-work student jobs educate the young into lives

of bullshit. Without such demands on their time, he writes, they could

be “rehearsing for plays, playing in a band,” and the like. The binary

is misleading—it is possible to hold a mind-numbing job and be the

singer in a band—and anybody who has read much student fiction or seen

many campus plays will wonder whether the bullshit quotient is much

lessened there. Young people may be asked to do inconsequential work as

part of an insidious acculturation scheme. Or they may be asked because

their higher-order skills are not honed, and there’s benefit—for

everyone—in forcing them to attain their lives’ endeavors by intent, not

by default.

On one of his many feudalism jags, Graeber makes a digression into youth

work in medieval Europe. Back then, he points out, everybody—rich or

poor, powerful or powerless—undertook service in early adulthood.

Aspiring knights were pages; noblewomen worked as ladies in waiting. The

goal was to break young people into the world before they launched as

self-governed professionals. And yet, to the extent that nobody really

needs an assistant to scrape mud off their boots or move a tray from one

room to another, medieval youth employments were, in large part,

bullshit jobs. Certain work, in this sense, may be fine, and even

helpful on the road to a self-realized life. The bullshit that destroys

us is the bullshit that endures.

To account for that persistence, Graeber quotes President Barack Obama

on the topic of privatized health care. “Everybody who supports

single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be

saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ” the former President noted.

“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.

By most criteria for market efficiency and workplace happiness, that is

bad. Yet it leads to a realization that Graeber circles but never

articulates, which is that bullshit employment has come to serve in

places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of

the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class.

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.

It’s not, perhaps, a life well-lived. But it’s not the terror of penury,

either.

Or maybe she does something even more ambitious. Graeber claims that

it’s “unusual” for workers to use nonsense jobs as fronts for more

rewarding work. Yet people do write music, poetry, and more at the

bullshit desk. George Saunders composed the stories in “CivilWarLand in

Bad Decline” while ostensibly doing technical writing for an engineering

company. Jeffrey Eugenides wrote much of “The Virgin Suicides” during

his employment as a secretary. Those are good books. The bullshit

paychecks that their authors received were practically Guggenheims. None

of us entirely avoids the bullshit. But a few people, in the end, make

it work.