Our unforgettable Thanks are due to David Graeber, the much-praised author of “Debt, the First 5000 Years”, for making a new, old, long-needed term and the associated concept real and debatable: the naming of what already exists in the public domain.

Which also seems to be a problem, because the execution and bloat of his originally very good and imaginative article is probably not due to the usual publisher, hehe, bullshit or unknown vanities and half of the babbling omissions would probably have served the purpose. Or a few Twitter posts and memes.

In fact, the book becomes a self-fulfilling

prophecy

that you could wish for as a common reviewer, freestyle psychologist and conformation bias shaman. Because the brilliant basic idea is itself trampled into the ground by complete lack of science.

Anthropology may always work like this, but to create a pseudoscientific study from a few hundred partially anonymous letters is, like some psychology or medicine studies on twenty patients, an insult to the scientific idea.

However, this is not a polemic or rebuttal; the argument may be based on completely absurd subjectivity, on market research that is as unkind as it is statistically embarrassing, but the timid clarity of what Greaber identifies still remains.

Which actually speaks for the idea, since it can withstand this execution. But maybe this was also a kind of self-irony. And anarchists do strangely exciting things.

However, breaking down bullshit jobs into so many details was bound to go wrong. We're mostly talking about feelings and not enough about ecological or economic perspectives, which is probably also due to the skills of the observer. And the material that the pre-filterers send him.

Unfortunately, when he sets up criteria and starts to torture a reader who is already feverishly babbling, it becomes naughty and a little too neurotic.

I like his activism, his enthusiasm, but both remain unproductive under the cloak of non-fiction and such simplistic analysis.

I have rarely struggled so much to read a book that interested me, and over time, skipping the blabla became almost pathological.

Yes, the world is absurdly full of these bullshit jobs right now, I can think of thousands more without batting an eyelid. Anthropologist, university professor, Occupy Wall Street activist, anarchist, probably the most. Survey statistician. But of course there are delightful individual cases like the procurement cycle of the German army and many others. Which even make for amusing reading.

Each of them would be a useful, grumpy article if addressed directly rather than wallowing in one’s own idea. But that

Don Quixote Efforts of a brave knight of the table more

has also eaten its way into my head and if he's right, then he's right.

The diffuse, unnamed knowledge that we already know is now (a) bullshit (job). And it's probably more than 60 or 70 percent. Except for those that are system-relevant. If one were to admit that it is socially valuable, that would be an even more blatant story.

And this is where Greaber's strengths lie, not in this, if I may say so, bullshit argument based on examples or pseudo-surveys.

When it comes to showing why all these jobs are being created, this occupational therapy. And how we could have developed a relaxed 20-hour week or less worldwide long ago, if there weren't some scheming behind the scenes.

In this area he is much closer to himself than they are in his strained but weak scientific approach.

Packed with far too much data-driven nonsense of unverifiable and unchecked details, the result is a romantic but overly long-winded polemic for another world.

Actually a bullshit book 🙂

But that's probably the case for most people these days, and we come across this topic quite quickly in the discourse on this website, especially in the area of art. And what actually makes collecting stamps less wrong than whatever Graeber's informants think.

When discussing work, one should also take a closer look at leisure time while the world is burning all around us.

However, if we put aside the doubts mentioned here, David Graeber is still a role model, an independent fighter against an establishment that, in its self-confidence, will also cope with this mosquito bite. For now.

People have to discover it within themselves, the windmills are already turning a little slower, the concept of understanding is on its way to the center of society. It is seeping in. But a steady drip is perhaps too ancient.

Bullshit is something that goes much further. And here I sense too little risk. Drawing the consequences from the idea means applying it, but then you would have to give up chambers of appraisal and other things, far beyond the clerks and financial jugglers.

All this will be reshuffled in the coming decades and combined with the

Technically feasible

and

What is all this for?

Cards shuffled, with the unconditional basic income, also subtly interspersed in this book, as a joker.

Personally, I think that this could be completely eliminated because there are simply too many assholes that you can't get to with an eco or ethical score.

But bullshit is a label, something I will happily harvest and expand on. It is at least as unpleasant as the filter bubble nastiness that sweetens my bitter heart in my pants.

This book has a permanent place in the preparatory course for Sherwood Forest. Memorable.