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It is difficult to separate the resulting work from the eccentric and provocative personality of its author. Graeber began his career as an anthropologist in American academia. After he failed to get tenure at Yale he went into “academic exile”, moving to England and becoming a popular author with a reputation as an anarchical theorist and political activist. All along he apparently considered himself the victim of unspecified persecutions by equally unspecified authorities (in the preface to Pirate Enlightenment he hints at the “machinations of police intelligence” against him); he also decided that active mobilization against the multiple evils of capitalist societies must replace the mere exercise of intellectual criticism. Of the militant causes he supported, the one most broadly publicized has been the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 against economic inequality and the power of money, though it is unclear why taking over Zuccotti Park in Manhattan should be a more effective form of protest than the 1960s marches against the Vietnam War that Graeber dismisses as useless. His successful, if controversial, books – Debt: The first 5000 years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) – are directed against two aspects of mondialized market economies: the governance of private and public debts, and the proliferation of “useless” activities.