Highlights from all books

Why did Keynes' promised utopia -- still being eagerly awaited in the sixties -- never materialize? The standard line today is that he didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's reflection shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the twenties, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ''the market'' reflects what *they* think is useful or important, not anybody else).

The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities -- usually under the orders of a person we dislike -- is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disasterous state of affairs. I wish it to end.

A bullshit job is 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.

It would appear to be a general truth that the more harm a category of powerful people do in the world, the more yes-men and propagandits will tend to accumulate around them, coming up with reasons why they are really doing good -- and the more likely it is that at least some of those powerful people will believe them.

Another distinction is between jobs that are pointless and jobs that are merely bad. I will refer to the latter as 'shit jobs', since people often do. These are two profoundly different forms of oppression. I certainly wouldn't want to equate them. Few people I know would trade in a pointless middle-management position for a job as a ditchdigger, even if htey knew that the ditches really did need to be dug. All I wish to emphasize is that each is indeed oppressive in its own way.

The usual complaint about capitalism is that it's *too* efficient, with private workplaces endlessly hounding employees with constant speed-ups, quotas, and surveillance. Obviously, I'm not going to deny that the latter is often the case. In fact, the pressure on corporations to downsize and increase efficiency has redoubled since the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 1980s. But this pressure has been directed almost exclusively at the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the ones who are actually making, maintaining, fixing, or transporting things. Anyone forced to wear a uniform in the exercise of his daily labors, for instance, is likely to be hard-pressed.

There is a very thin line between extreme luxury and total crap. (There's a reason why indreams, gold is often symbolized by excrement, and vice versa.)

While I was conducting research, a number of women wrote to me or told me about their time as pole dancers, Playboy Club bunnies, frequenters of "Sugar Daddy" websites, and the like, and suggested that such occupations should be mentioned in my book. The most compelling argument to this effect was from a former exotic dancer, now professor, who made a case that most sex work should be considered a bullshit job because, while she acknowledged sex work clearly did answer a genuine consumer demand, something was terribly, terribly wrong with any society that effectively tells the vast majority of its female population they are worth more dancing on boxes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five than they will be at any subsequent point in their lives, whatever their talents or accomplishments. If the same woman can make five times as much money stripping as she could teaching as a world-recognized scholar, could not the stripping job be considered bullshit simply on that basis? The only objection I could really raise here is that her argument might not go far enough. It's not so much that stripper is a bullshit job, perhaps, but that this situation shows us to be living in a bullshit society.

Supply has far outpaced demand in most industries, so now it is demand that is manufactured.

Tom didn't consider his job bullshit because he objected to consumer culture in itself. He objected because he saw his 'beauty work', as he called it, as inherently coercive and manipulative. He was drawing a distinction between what might be called honest illusions and dishonest ones. When you make dinosaurs attack spaceships, no one actually thinks that's real. Much as with a stage magician, half the fun is that everyone knows a trick is being played. When you subtly enhance the appearance of celebrities, in contrast, you are trying to change viewers' unconscious assumptions about what every reality *ought* to be like, so as to create an uncomfortable feeling that their lived reality is itself an inadequete substitute for the real thing.

On some level, all bureaucracies work on this principle: once you introduce formal measures of success, "reality" -- for the organization -- becomes that which exists on paper, and that human reality that lies behind it is a secondary consideration at best.

Mark is a Senior Quality and Performance Officer ina local council in the United Kingdom: "Most of what I do -- especially since moving away from frontline customer-facing roles -- involves ticking boxes, pretending things are great to senior managers, and generally "feeding the beast" with meaningless numbers that give the illusion of control. None of which helps the citizens of that council in the slightest."

It is not capitalism per se that produces the bullshit. It is mangerialist ideologies put into practice in complex organizations.

To present a parable version: Imagine you are a feudal lord again. You acquire a gardener. After twenty years of faithful service, the gardener develops a serious drinking problem. You keep finding him curled up in flowerbeds, while dandelions sprout everywhere and the sedge begins to die. But the gardener is well connected, and getting rid of him would offend people you don't feel it would be wise to offend. So you acquire a new servant, ostensibly to polish the doorknobs or perform some other meaningless task. In fact, you make sure the person you get as doorknob polisher is actually an experienced gardener. So far, so good. The problem is, in a corporate environment, you can't summon a new servant, make up an impressive-sounding title for him, and tell him his real job is to take over when the gardener is drunk. You have to come up with an elaborate fake description of what a doorknob polisher would, in fact, do; coach your new gardener in how to pretend he's the best doorknob polisher in the kingdom; and then use the description of his duties as the basis of periodic box-ticking performance reviews. And if the gardener sobers up and doesn't want some young punk messing with his business -- now you have a full time doorknob polisher on your hands. This, according to Tania, is just one of the many ways that taskmasters end up creating bullshit jobs.

Just about everyone does see such meaningless as something to be endured -- despite the fact that we are all trained, in one way or another, to assume that human beings should be perfectly delighted to find themselves in his situation of beign paid good money not to work.

Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists' model is correct. People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don't actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs. The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they'd take it.

Even in those prisons where inmates are provided free food and shelter and are not actually required to work, denying them the right to press shirts in the prison laundry, clean latrines in the prison gym, or package computers for Microsoft in the prison workshop is used as a form of punishment -- and this is true even where the work doesn't pay or where prisoners have access to other income.

Experiments have also shown that if one first allows a child to discover and experience the delight in being able to cause a certain effect, and then suddenly denies it to them, the results are dramatic; first rage, refusal to engage, and then a catatonic folding in on oneself and withdrawing from the world entirely. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Francis Broucek called this the 'trauma of failed influence' and suspected that such traumatic experiences might lie behind many mental health issues later in life. If this is so, hten it begins to give us a sense of why being trapped in a job where one is treated as if one were usefully employed, and has to play along with the pretense that one is usefully employed, but at the same time, is keenly aware one is not usefully employed, would have devastating effects. It's not just an assualt on the person's sense of self importance, but also a direct attack on the foundations of the sense that one even *is* a self. A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.

If make-believe play is the purest expression of human freedom, make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom.

Most people who have ever existed have assumed that normal human work patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again toward another intense bout. This is what farming is like, but even daily tasks, or projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast, tend to take roughly this form. In other words, the traditional student’s pattern of lackadaisical study leading up to intense cramming before exams and then slacking off again -- I like to refer to it as "Punctuated hysteria" -- is typical of how human beings have always tended to go about necessary tasks if no one forces them to act otherwise.

In most human societies, men tend to try, and usually succeed, to monopolize the most exciting, dramatic kinds of work. One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.

'Idle fingers knit fingers for the devil', my great grandmother used to warn her daughter back in Poland. But this kind of traditional moralizing is actually quite different from the modern 'If you have time to lean, you have time to clean' because it's underlying message is not that you *should* be working but that you *shouldn't* be doing anything else. The modern morality of 'You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around' is very different. It is the indignity of a man who feels he's being robbed. A worker's time is not his own. It belongs to the person who bought it.

(On Moses Finlay) If an ancient Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter -- slavery was a familiar institution in the ancient world. But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter's *time*. The closest he would have likely been able to come would be the idea of renting the potter as a slave for a certain limited time period. But for this very reason, he would probably find it impossible to locate a potter willing to enter into such an arrangement. To be a slave, to be forced to surrender one's free will and become the mere instrument of another, even temporarily, was considered the most degrading thing that could possibly befall a human being. As a result, the overwhelming majority of examples of wage labor that we do encounter in the ancient world are of people who are already slaves.

(On E.P. Thompson, "Time Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism") The dissemination of domestic clocks and then pocket watches, coinciding largely with the advent of the industrial revolution beginning in the late 1700s, allowed for similar attitudes to diffuse among the middle classes more generally. Sidereal time, the absolute time of the heavens, had to come to earth and began to regulate even the most intimate daily affairs. But time was simultaneously a fixed grid, and a possession. Everyone was encouraged to see time as did the medieval merchant; as a finite property to be carefully budgeted and disposed of, much like money. What's more, the new technologies also allowed any person's fixed time on earth to be chopped up into uniform units that could be bought and sold for money. Once time was money, it became possible to speak of "spending time" rather than just "passing" it-also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the "husbandry of time" proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.

Meanwhile, workers rebelling against oppressive conditions began adopting the same language. Many early factories didn't allow workers to bring their own timepieces, since the owner regularly played fast and loose with the factory clock. Before long, however, workers were arguing with employers about hourly rates, demanding fixed-hour contracts, overtime, time and a half, the twelve-hour day, and then the eight-hour day. But the very act of demanding "free time;' however understandable under the circumstances, had the effect of subtly reinforcing the idea that when a worker was "on the clock;' his time truly did belong to the person who had bought it-a concept that would have seemed perverse and outrageous to their great-grandparents, as, indeed, to most people who have ever lived.

Dutiful submission even to meaningless work under another's authority is a form of moral self-discipline that makes your a better person. This, of course, is a modern variant of Puritanism.

The morality of "You're on my time" has become so naturalized that most of us have learned to see the world from the point of view of the restaurant owner-to the extent that even members of the public are encouraged to see themselves as bosses and to feel indignant if public servants (say, transit workers) seem to be working in a casual or dilatory fashion, let alone just lounging around. Wendy, who sent me a long history of her most pointless jobs, reflected that many of them seem to come about because employers can't accep the idea that they're really paying someone to be on call in case they're needed.

Psychologists sometimes refer to the kind of dilemmas described in this section as 'scriptlessness'. Psychological studies, for instance, find that men or women who had experienced unrequited love during adolescence were in most cases eventually able to come to terms with the experience and showed few permanent emotional scars. But for those who had been the objects of unrequited love, it was quite another matter. Many still struggled with guilt and confusion. One major reason, researchers concluded, was precisely the lack of cultural models. Anyone who falls in love with someone who does not return their affections has thousands of years' worth of romantic literature to tell them exactly how they are supposed to feel; however, while this literature provides detailed insight on the experience of being Cyrano, it generally tells you very little about how you are supposed to feel-let alone what you're supposed to do-if you're Roxane.

One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet-which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement-might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter); basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs. As we've seen, the specific conditions vary considerably from one bullshit job to another. Some workers are supervised relentlessly; others are expected to do some token task but are otherwise left more or less alone. Most are somewhere in between. Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others-all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock 'n' roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there's nothing for them to do, they still can't admit it openly.

Much of the confusion that surrounds debate about social issues in general can be traced back to the fact that people will regularly take these different explanations as alternatives rather than seeing them as factors at all operate at the same time. For example, people sometimes tell me that any attempt to explain bullshit jobs in political terms is wrongheaded; such jobs, they insist, exist because people need the money-as if this consideration had somehow never occurred to me before. Looking at the subjective motives of those who take such jobs is then treated as an alternative to asking why so many people find themselves in a position where the only way they can get money is by taking such jobs to begin with. It's even worse on the cultural-political level. It's even worse on the cultural-political level. There has come to be a tacit understanding in polite circles that you can ascribe motives to people only when speaking about the individual level. Therefore, any suggestion that powerful people ever do anything they don't say they're doing, or even do what they can be publicly observed to be doing for reasons other than what they say, is immediately denounced as a "paranoid conspiracy theory" to be rejected instantly. Thus, to suggest that some "law and order" politicians or social service providers might not feel it's in their best interest to do much about the underlying causes of homelessness, is treated as equivalent to saying homelessness itself exists only because of the machinations of a secret cabal. Or that the banking system is run by lizards.

It remains true that "More Jobs" is the one political slogan that both Left and Right can always agree on. They differ only about the most expedient means to produce the jobs. Banners held aloft at a union march calling for jobs never also specify that those jobs should serve some useful purpose. It's just assumed that they will-which, of course, means that often they won't. Similarly, when right-wing politicians call for tax cuts to put more money in the hands of "job creators;' they never specify whether those jobs will be good for anything; it's simply assumed that if the market produced them, they will be.

Capitalism is not a single totalizing system that shapes and embraces every aspect of our existence. It's not even clear it makes sense to speak of"capitalism" at all (Marx, for instance, never really did), implying as it does that"capitalism" is a set of abstract ideas that have somehow come to take material form in factories and offices. The world is more complicated and messy than that. Historically, the factories and offices emerged first, long before anyone knew quite what to call them, and to this day, they operate on multiple contradictory logics and purposes. Similarly, value itself is a constant political argument. No one is ever quite sure what it is.

(Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics) We may define labor as any exertion of mind or body undergone partly or wholly with a view to some good other than the pleasure derived from the work.

As many feminist economists have pointed out, all labor can be seen as caring labor, since-to turn to an example from the beginning of the chapter-even if one builds a bridge, it's ultimately because one cares about people who might wish to cross the river. As the examples I cited at the time make clear, people do really think in these terms when they reflect on the "social value" of their jobs. To think of labor as valuable primarily because it is "productive;' and productive labor as typified by the factory worker, effecting that magic transformation by which cars or teabags or pharmaceutical products are "produced" out of factories allows one to make all this disappear. It also makes it maximally easy for the factory owner to insist that no, actually, workers are really no different from the machines they operate.

Most economists nowadays see the labor theory of value as a curiosity from the formative days of the discipline; and it's probably true that, if one's primary interest is to understand patterns of price formation, there are better tools available. But for the worker's movement-and arguably, for revolutionaries like Karl Marx-that was never the real point. The real point is philosophical. It is a recognition that the world we inhabit is something we made, collectively, as a society, and therefore, that we could also have made differently.

(John Holloway, Stop Making Capitalism) "even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it's really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn't be capitalism anymore. There would be something else."

Even if we don't like what the world looks like, the fact remains that the conscious aim of most of our actions, productive or otherwise, is to do well by others; often, very specific others. Our actions are caught up in relations of caring. But most caring relations require we leave the world more or less as we found it. Love for others-people, animals, landscapes-regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despise.

Within a community of do-gooders, anyone who exemplifies shared values in too exemplary a way is seen as a threat; ostentatiously good behavior ("virtue signaling" is the new catchword) is often perceived as a moral challenge; it doesn't matter if the person in question is entirely humble and unassuming-in fact, that can even make it worse, since humility can be seen as itself a moral challenge to those who secretly feel they aren't humble enough.

Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite.

A case could be made that the great historical difference between what we call the Left and the Right largely turns on the relation between "value" and "values?' The Left has always been about trying to collapse the gulf between the domain dominated by pure self-interest and the domain traditionally dominated by high-minded principles; the Right has always been about prising them even farther apart, and then claiming ownership of both. They stand for both greed and charity. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable alliance in the Republican Party between the free market libertarians and the "values voters" of the Christian Right. What this comes down to in practice has usually been the political equivalent of a strategy of good-cop-bad-cop; first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilize lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority of church and fatherhood against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.

Work, as we know it, will less and less resemble what we think of as "productive" labor, and more and more resemble "caring" labor-since, after all, caring consists mainly of the sorts of things most of us would least like to see done by a machine.

I have yet to see one suggest that the basic functions that capitalists are supposed to perform, which mainly consist of figuring out the optimal way to invest resources in order to answer current or potential future consumer demand, could possibly be performed by a machine. Why not? One could easily make a case that the main reason the Soviet economy worked so badly was because they never were able to develop computer technology efficient enough to coordinate such large amounts of data automatically. But the Soviet Union only made it to the 1980s. Now it would be easy. Yet no one dares suggest this. The famous Oxford study by engineer Michael Osborne and economist Carl Frey, which sizes up 702 different professions in terms of their susceptibility for being replaced by robots, for instance, considers hydrologists, makeup artists, and travel guides, but makes no mention whatsoever of the possibility of automated entrepreneurs, investors, or financiers.

Lem's story, and others like it, still assume that "work" means factory work, or, anyway, "productive" work, and ignore what most working-class jobs actually consist of-for instance, the fact noted in the last chapter, that workers in "ticket offices" in the London Underground aren't there to take tickets but to find lost children and talk down drunks.

Much of the bullshitization of real jobs, I would say, and much of the reason for the expansion of the bullshit sector more generally, is a direct result of the desire to quantify the unquantifiable.

As Karl Marx once pointed out; prior to the industrial revolution, it never seems to have occurred to anyone to write a book asking what conditions would create the most overall wealth. Many, however, wrote books about what conditions would create the best people - that is, how should society be best arranged to produce the sort of human beings one would like to have around, as friends, lovers, neighbors, relatives, or fellow citizens? This is the kind of question that concerned Aristotle, Confucius, and Ibn Khaldun, and in the final analysis it's still the only really important one. Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another; even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows; and "the economy" is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so.

Finance works its way into everything, from car loans to credit cards, but it's significant that the principal cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and the principal force drawing young people into bullshit jobs is the need to pay student loans.

If nurses were to rebel against the fact that they have to spend the bulk of their shifts doing paperwork, they would have to rebel against their own union leaders, who are firmly allied with the Clintonite Democratic Party, whose core support comes from the hospital administrators responsible for imposing the paperwork on them to begin with. If teachers were to rebel they'd have to rebel against school administrators who are actually represented, in many cases, by the exact same union. If they protest too loudly, they will simply be told they have no choice but to accept bullshitization, because the only alternative is to surrender to the racist barbarians of the populist Right.

Policy implies the existence of an elite group-government officials, typically-that gets to decide on something ("a policy") that they then arrange to be imposed on everybody else. There's a little mental trick we often play on ourselves when discussing such matters. We say, for instance, "What are we going to do about the problem of X?" as if "we" were society as a whole, somehow acting on our­ selves, but, in fact, unless we happen to be pad of that roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of the population whose views actually do affect policy makers, this is all a game of make-believe; we are identifying with our rulers when, in fact, we're the ones being ruled.

(On Basic Income) Domestic violence goes way down. (This makes sense because I think some 80 percent of domestic disputes that lead to violence turn out to be about money.) But the main thing is, it starts to make social inequalities dissolve. You start by giving everyone an equal amount of money. That in itself is important, because money has a certain symbolic power; it's something that's the same for everyone, and when you give everyone, men, women, old, young, high caste, low caste, exactly the same amount, those differences start to dissolve.This happened in the Indian pilot where they observed that the girls were given the same amount of food as boys unlike before, disabled people were more accepted in village activities, and young women dropped the social convention that said they were supposed to be shy and modest and started hanging around in public like boys ...Girls started participating in public life.

Most people would prefer not to spend their days sitting around watching TV and the handful who really are inclined to be total parasites are not going to be a significant burden on society, since the total amount of work required to maintain people in comfort and security is not that formidable. The compulsive workaholics who insist on doing far more than they really have to would more than compensate for the occasional slackers.

How do we create only games that we actually feel like playing, because we can opt out at any time? In the economic field, at least, the answer is obvious. All of the gratuitous sadism of workplace politics depends on one's inability to say "I quit" and feel no economic consequences.If Annie's boss knew Annie's income would be unaffected even if she did walk offin disgust at being called out yet again for a problem she'd fixed months ago, she would know better than to call her into the office to begin with.Basic Income in this sense would, indeed, give workers the power to say "orange" to their boss.

If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?

The things we remember are moments like any other, only later do they make themselves known by their scars - La Jetee

The reduction of things to raw numbers becomes a form of control that allows complete abdication of responsibility.

Artists don't 'make' classics. Artists leave classics unfinished. Time does the rest of the work.

Machine learning is metal-beating. Brilliant people have done remarkable things with it. But the idea that if we just get better at statistical inference, consciousness will fall out of it is wishful thinking. It's premise for a science fiction novel, not a plan for the future. I don't see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) 'machine learning' field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine.

The problem with the marketplace of ideas, as with the commercial marketplace of classical and neoclassical economics on which it is modelled, is that it treats each participant in the marketplace as de facto engaging in exchange on equal terms. There is a dangerous childlikeness in its insistence that anyone can come and argue, and everything will be considered from scratch, treating everyone as equals.

Activists need to appreciate that resistance in periods of reaction is perhaps even more difficult and important than participating in the high points, the moments when revolution seems just around the corner... the struggle is going to take all of our lives, not just a few exciting, hectic years.

Any array of objects is always an extremely fragmentary presentation of the true life of a people. For this reason, any attempt to present ecological data or a systematic classification of specimens will not only be artificial, but will be entirely misleading.

Radical politics is about the abstract because it's trying to draft a world that's not yet quite real - a future world, a fairer world, a better world, a different world.

No one is going to save this stuff but all of us. There is no path in the capitalist system to preserve games in a way that will please the legal fetishists.