by Anton Jäger | External link

“The citation—sensitively different from Kant’s—is a fitting opener to Graeber’s pamphlet. Bullshit Jobs is bent on debunking the contemporary cult of work and kick over the idols of our work-craved society, a world in which man is nothing and work is everything.”

“…Graeber has no real explanation as to why his ‘bullshit jobs’ exist in the first place. Nor does he really tell us why they persist. How did they survive the aggressive automation of the 1950s and 1960s? If Sahlinites talked about the “beach under the cobblestones” in 1968, why haven’t we got there yet? At its most emphatic, Bullshit Jobs simply paints a conspiracy imposed from above, a corporate plot—an attempt to halt the inevitable elimination of labor occurring in the cybernetic age by recreating a “cult of work” that tied  a stigma to worklessness.”