The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
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From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives. Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber-one of our most important and provocative thinkers-traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate show more to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice . . . though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing-even romantic-about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us-and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves. show lessTags
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Sonu gelmeyen kurallara, düzenlemelere, prosedürlere ve bürokrasiye duyduğumuz arzunun kaynağı nedir? Nasıl oldu da internet çağında bile form doldurmaktan başımızı kaldıramaz hale geldik? Yoksa devlet şiddeti denen olgunun kaynağı burada mı?
Antropolog, düşünür ve aktivist David Graeber bu sorulara yanıt ararken günümüz bürokrasisinin güdümlediği tekinsiz ve şaşırtıcı ilişki türlerini inceleyip bunların biz farkına varmadan hayatımızı nasıl şekillendirdiğini gözler önüne seriyor. Gelgelelim oldukça riskli bir iddia ortaya atarak bürokraside sapkınca çekici –ve hatta romantik– bir unsur olabileceği görüşünü de irdeliyor.
Sağ kanat ekonomi siyasetinin yükselişinden show more Sherlock Holmes ve Batman gibi kahramanların iç dünyamızda bulduğu karşılığa kadar birçok güncel konuyu ele alan Kuralların Ütopyası, Foucault’nun, Marx’ın geleneğini sürdüren güçlü bir sosyal teori çalışması. Ancak popüler kültüre yönelik çarpıcı ve zeki analizleriyle de Žižek’i aratmıyor.
Daha iyi, daha özgür bir yaşam hayal etmek arayışıyla çağımızın en temel sorunlarını ele alan Kuralların Ütopyası, resmi belgeler yığını altında ezildiğimiz günümüzde, örtük şiddet tehdidi altında boyun eğdiğimiz kurumlara, müesseselere yönelik ciddi bir sorgulama başlatıyor.
“David Graeber parlak ve son derece özgün bir siyaset düşünürü.”
Rebecca SolnIt
“Kapitalizmin bürokrasiyle yaşadığı aşk macerasına karşı ince, canlı, ters bir taarruz.” show less
Antropolog, düşünür ve aktivist David Graeber bu sorulara yanıt ararken günümüz bürokrasisinin güdümlediği tekinsiz ve şaşırtıcı ilişki türlerini inceleyip bunların biz farkına varmadan hayatımızı nasıl şekillendirdiğini gözler önüne seriyor. Gelgelelim oldukça riskli bir iddia ortaya atarak bürokraside sapkınca çekici –ve hatta romantik– bir unsur olabileceği görüşünü de irdeliyor.
Sağ kanat ekonomi siyasetinin yükselişinden show more Sherlock Holmes ve Batman gibi kahramanların iç dünyamızda bulduğu karşılığa kadar birçok güncel konuyu ele alan Kuralların Ütopyası, Foucault’nun, Marx’ın geleneğini sürdüren güçlü bir sosyal teori çalışması. Ancak popüler kültüre yönelik çarpıcı ve zeki analizleriyle de Žižek’i aratmıyor.
Daha iyi, daha özgür bir yaşam hayal etmek arayışıyla çağımızın en temel sorunlarını ele alan Kuralların Ütopyası, resmi belgeler yığını altında ezildiğimiz günümüzde, örtük şiddet tehdidi altında boyun eğdiğimiz kurumlara, müesseselere yönelik ciddi bir sorgulama başlatıyor.
“David Graeber parlak ve son derece özgün bir siyaset düşünürü.”
Rebecca SolnIt
“Kapitalizmin bürokrasiyle yaşadığı aşk macerasına karşı ince, canlı, ters bir taarruz.” show less
As always, Graeber manages to observe the world we live in and describe how it is utterly bizarre. Whether or not you agree with Graeber's analysis, he will make you think differently about our society.
This book has four essays focusing on various aspects of bureaucracy and how we hate it but how afraid we are of a world without it.
This book has four essays focusing on various aspects of bureaucracy and how we hate it but how afraid we are of a world without it.
I was gripped and absolutely fascinated by this book. It is one of those pieces of writing that examines matters that I’ve read quite a lot about (the structural flaws of capitalism, why we can’t imagine a better world, what X popular cultural artifact tells us about society) yet from what feels like a fresh perspective. Moreover, this fresh perspective illuminates certain other things I’ve read recently and forges fresh connections between existing bits of knowledge in my head. Reading it was thus an excellent, enlightening experience. David Graeber is an anthropologist with a knack for discussing theoretical concepts in a clear and intelligible way. At no point did I feel like I was drowning in Hegel, or a similar verbal show more quagmire.
‘The Utopia of Rules’ contains three extended essays and a critical review of ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (which I agree was a terrible disappointment and a stunningly incoherent, reactionary film). Each of the three essays considers bureaucracy from a different angle. Graeber is at pains to point out from the start that we lack suitable language to discuss bureaucracy. The term has become associated with politicians bemoaning wastage in the public sector and blaming it for all sorts of unlikely ills. In reality, the forms of complex, opaque, rule-driven procedures that we term ‘bureaucracy’ are corporate in nature. The culture of constant evaluation, audit, and measurable outcome has infected the public sector from big business. Bureaucracy transcends the public/private divide, allowing a simulated conflict between the two to dominate political discussion. This is an awkward over-simplification of Graeber’s elegantly expressed points, of course.
I found this approach a novel and enlightening way to critique the current manifestation of capitalism, which uses bureaucracy to enforce vast inequalities. For example, it is common knowledge that in the UK that the very rich do not pay tax in the same way as the less wealthy. If you have a low income, you must fill in your complicated tax return and comply with all of HMRC’s rules. If you are rich enough, you can come to some personal agreement as to how much tax you are willing to pay. This is elided by the fiction that the rules are the same for everybody - patently they are not, but neither the government nor the rich will admit it.
In the second essay, Graeber applies his critique of bureaucracy to technological change, arguing that true innovation is stifled by a risk-averse, shareholder-return-maximising corporate culture. He is seeking to answer this question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? This involves an intriguing discussion of trends in science fiction, including something I have noticed myself. Science fiction novels written in the 21st century are very rarely set in a specific year. Part of the fun of reading 60s, 70s, and 80s sci-fi (which I spent much of my teenage years doing) was comparing the vision of 1993, or whenever it was, with the actual reality. These days writers seem much warier of assuming that new technologies, like a Mars base or antigravity device, will eventuate in the next fifty years. To generalise, contemporary sci-fi tends to depict a future so far away as to have no perceptible link with the world today (for example, [b:Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)|Ann Leckie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg|24064628] and [b:The Quantum Thief|7562764|The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1)|Hannu Rajaniemi|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327950631s/7562764.jpg|9886333]) or a near-future marked largely by catastrophe (for example, [b:Memory of Water|18505844|Memory of Water|Emmi Itäranta|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389990493s/18505844.jpg|18908129], [b:Station Eleven|20170404|Station Eleven|Emily St. John Mandel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451446835s/20170404.jpg|28098716], [b:The Bone Clocks|20819685|The Bone Clocks|David Mitchell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398205538s/20819685.jpg|26959610], etc ). There are of course exceptions ([b:Blue Remembered Earth|9424053|Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon's Children, #1)|Alastair Reynolds|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1318599915s/9424053.jpg|14308470] springs to mind), but the tendency seems strong enough to reflect wider cultural expectations of the future.
Reviewing ‘The Utopia of Rules’ book is frustrating, though, because I am not as articulate as Graeber so struggle to explain why I found book so intellectually satisfying. The whole thing bristles with neat insights, but I’ve arbitrarily picked out a few parts that especially struck me:
I don’t want to give the impression that I agree with everything in ‘The Utopia of Rules’, rather that it gave me a lot to think about, on subjects such as why there are so many crime procedurals on TV and the difference between play and a game. If you wonder about the political malaise and structural problems of capitalism in the 21st century, it might give you something interesting to think about too.
(This is my 400th review! Wow, I have kept this up longer than I expected to.) show less
‘The Utopia of Rules’ contains three extended essays and a critical review of ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (which I agree was a terrible disappointment and a stunningly incoherent, reactionary film). Each of the three essays considers bureaucracy from a different angle. Graeber is at pains to point out from the start that we lack suitable language to discuss bureaucracy. The term has become associated with politicians bemoaning wastage in the public sector and blaming it for all sorts of unlikely ills. In reality, the forms of complex, opaque, rule-driven procedures that we term ‘bureaucracy’ are corporate in nature. The culture of constant evaluation, audit, and measurable outcome has infected the public sector from big business. Bureaucracy transcends the public/private divide, allowing a simulated conflict between the two to dominate political discussion. This is an awkward over-simplification of Graeber’s elegantly expressed points, of course.
I found this approach a novel and enlightening way to critique the current manifestation of capitalism, which uses bureaucracy to enforce vast inequalities. For example, it is common knowledge that in the UK that the very rich do not pay tax in the same way as the less wealthy. If you have a low income, you must fill in your complicated tax return and comply with all of HMRC’s rules. If you are rich enough, you can come to some personal agreement as to how much tax you are willing to pay. This is elided by the fiction that the rules are the same for everybody - patently they are not, but neither the government nor the rich will admit it.
In the second essay, Graeber applies his critique of bureaucracy to technological change, arguing that true innovation is stifled by a risk-averse, shareholder-return-maximising corporate culture. He is seeking to answer this question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? This involves an intriguing discussion of trends in science fiction, including something I have noticed myself. Science fiction novels written in the 21st century are very rarely set in a specific year. Part of the fun of reading 60s, 70s, and 80s sci-fi (which I spent much of my teenage years doing) was comparing the vision of 1993, or whenever it was, with the actual reality. These days writers seem much warier of assuming that new technologies, like a Mars base or antigravity device, will eventuate in the next fifty years. To generalise, contemporary sci-fi tends to depict a future so far away as to have no perceptible link with the world today (for example, [b:Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)|Ann Leckie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg|24064628] and [b:The Quantum Thief|7562764|The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1)|Hannu Rajaniemi|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327950631s/7562764.jpg|9886333]) or a near-future marked largely by catastrophe (for example, [b:Memory of Water|18505844|Memory of Water|Emmi Itäranta|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389990493s/18505844.jpg|18908129], [b:Station Eleven|20170404|Station Eleven|Emily St. John Mandel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451446835s/20170404.jpg|28098716], [b:The Bone Clocks|20819685|The Bone Clocks|David Mitchell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398205538s/20819685.jpg|26959610], etc ). There are of course exceptions ([b:Blue Remembered Earth|9424053|Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon's Children, #1)|Alastair Reynolds|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1318599915s/9424053.jpg|14308470] springs to mind), but the tendency seems strong enough to reflect wider cultural expectations of the future.
Reviewing ‘The Utopia of Rules’ book is frustrating, though, because I am not as articulate as Graeber so struggle to explain why I found book so intellectually satisfying. The whole thing bristles with neat insights, but I’ve arbitrarily picked out a few parts that especially struck me:
In other words, talking about rational efficiency becomes a way of avoiding talking about what the efficiency is actually for; that is, the ultimately irrational aims that are assumed to be the ultimate ends of human behaviour. Here is another place where markets and bureaucracies ultimately speak the same language. Both claim to be acting largely in the name of individual freedom, and individual self-realisation through consumption. [...]
The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers are simply overwhelmed, and are forced, without realising it, to plot out their existence entirely. The result is that while those at the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those at the top, it almost never happens the other way around. [...]
Power makes you lazy. [...] While those in situations of power and privilege often feel it is a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratise this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalised laziness. Revolutionary change may involve the exhilaration of throwing off imaginary shackles, of suddenly realising that impossible things are not impossible after all, but it also means most people will have to get over some of this deeply habitual laziness and start engaging in interpretive (imaginative) labour for a very long time to make those realities stick.
I don’t want to give the impression that I agree with everything in ‘The Utopia of Rules’, rather that it gave me a lot to think about, on subjects such as why there are so many crime procedurals on TV and the difference between play and a game. If you wonder about the political malaise and structural problems of capitalism in the 21st century, it might give you something interesting to think about too.
(This is my 400th review! Wow, I have kept this up longer than I expected to.) show less
Well written, logical, persuasive, and interesting set of three (and 1/3) essays, purportedly about bureaucracy, its appeal, its powers, its flaws, and its dangers, but mostly about why you can't fight the system within the system. An anthropologist and a participant in Occupy Wall Street, Graeber combines the rigor of the trained academic writer with a knack for a pungent and articulate put-down: "Bureaucracies public and private appear . . . to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as affected," for instance. (48) He references Marx and Weber, of course, but also Descartes and LeGuin, and he talks about the "grand cosmic hirarchies of late Antiquity, show more with their archons, planets, and gods" as well as about what made the movie The Dark Knight Rises so bad.
I don't buy his argument that high fantasy is a mechanism for reinforcing bureaucracy, but his notion is interesting that games are a "utopia of rules," and therefore bureaucratic in nature, while play is opposed to bureaucracy. He does a lovely job of pointing out that the Star Trek universe is "an Americanized vision of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union, and above all, one that actually 'worked.'" But it is his comparison of the post office (once such a successful model that "postalization" was an ideal and the Soviets modeled their organization on the German postal system) to the Internet that is the most persuasive.
It's a lovely rant, a little too self-enclosed in its rationality (great discussion of the nature of rationality in the book, by the way) to be entirely true, but I gained a huge number of insights into a thread of American thought that led to the World Trade Organization demonstrations, Occupy Wall Street, and the phenomenon of non-Democrats rallying behind Bernie Sanders. show less
I don't buy his argument that high fantasy is a mechanism for reinforcing bureaucracy, but his notion is interesting that games are a "utopia of rules," and therefore bureaucratic in nature, while play is opposed to bureaucracy. He does a lovely job of pointing out that the Star Trek universe is "an Americanized vision of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union, and above all, one that actually 'worked.'" But it is his comparison of the post office (once such a successful model that "postalization" was an ideal and the Soviets modeled their organization on the German postal system) to the Internet that is the most persuasive.
It's a lovely rant, a little too self-enclosed in its rationality (great discussion of the nature of rationality in the book, by the way) to be entirely true, but I gained a huge number of insights into a thread of American thought that led to the World Trade Organization demonstrations, Occupy Wall Street, and the phenomenon of non-Democrats rallying behind Bernie Sanders. show less
I feel disappointed, and a little betrayed. Debt was my most important book of the decade; A sequel on bureaucracy could be an equally ground breaking contribution. Unfortunately, this is a wandering and disconnected series of weakly researched essays that, while making a few interesting points, buries them under digressions and inaccuracies.
Graeber start with the experience of having his stroke-ridden mother declared legally incompetent, disabled, and then dead, and the kafka-esque absurdity of the paperwork. This process is no less ritualized than any Malagasy funeral, but yet the Western academic tradition seems entirely incapable of understanding bureaucracy: it is a vacuum of symbols from which meaning cannot be extracted. The show more most powerful tools of thick description and grounded theory are like Antaeus against Hercules.
Directly, Graeber postulates that violence and administration are too sides of the same coin. That behind ledgers and rulebooks is always a man with a club, and any group of men willing to do violence will have administrative support. Internally, bureaucracy is a way to concentrate power among insiders, and with nod to Feminism and Critical Race Studies, bureaucratic techniques allow those with power to avoid doing any interpretative labor; the work of figuring out what other people desire and accommodating yourself to it. Subordinates spend an immense amount of effort figuring out the minds of their masters, if only to avoid being crushed. Those in power have the luxury of entirely ignoring the whims of those under them.
As a revolutionary project, Graeber seeks to revitalize the Left against the neoliberal combination of bureaucracy and extractive capitalism that he calls the 'worst of all possible ideologies' (think Tony Blair or Hillary Clinton). He gestures toward Imagination (with a capital I) as key, and the alliance between avante-garde artists and the proletariat as the base of the Left, but has little to substantiate this idea, or break free of old circular debates about the nature of sovereign power, or the relationship between play and rationality.
Unable to analyze bureaucracy directly, Graeber has to turn to the cultural encrustations that have grown around it. Some of this stuff is spot on: did you know that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are mirror inversions of an elemental British bureaucratic hero, why all the bosses in American police procedurals are black, or the occult links between Dungeons & Dragons and the Western magical tradition and idealized Roman Law. But some of the cultural stuff misses, like his read of Star Trek or the Nolan Batman movies, and ultimately Graeber is not a natural media studies type, and this seems digressive from the point of book on bureaucracy.
And when I say 'inaccuracies', I mean that when Graeber makes specific claims about technological history, or human cognition, or the like, the footnotes lead to a justification that everybody knows this, rather than a scholarly source. There was one moment where he talked about the rise in management jargon with a phrase like "if you traced the rise of it in business speak since 1970, you would see..." and I thought "If? Aren't you a professor? Can't you get an RA to run this down in a week?" The whole book is full of moments like that, and their presence makes me less confident of Debt, which is a shame.
Some interesting thoughts, but not nearly enough to save the book. I'd prefer that he baked this one for another couple of years. show less
Graeber start with the experience of having his stroke-ridden mother declared legally incompetent, disabled, and then dead, and the kafka-esque absurdity of the paperwork. This process is no less ritualized than any Malagasy funeral, but yet the Western academic tradition seems entirely incapable of understanding bureaucracy: it is a vacuum of symbols from which meaning cannot be extracted. The show more most powerful tools of thick description and grounded theory are like Antaeus against Hercules.
Directly, Graeber postulates that violence and administration are too sides of the same coin. That behind ledgers and rulebooks is always a man with a club, and any group of men willing to do violence will have administrative support. Internally, bureaucracy is a way to concentrate power among insiders, and with nod to Feminism and Critical Race Studies, bureaucratic techniques allow those with power to avoid doing any interpretative labor; the work of figuring out what other people desire and accommodating yourself to it. Subordinates spend an immense amount of effort figuring out the minds of their masters, if only to avoid being crushed. Those in power have the luxury of entirely ignoring the whims of those under them.
As a revolutionary project, Graeber seeks to revitalize the Left against the neoliberal combination of bureaucracy and extractive capitalism that he calls the 'worst of all possible ideologies' (think Tony Blair or Hillary Clinton). He gestures toward Imagination (with a capital I) as key, and the alliance between avante-garde artists and the proletariat as the base of the Left, but has little to substantiate this idea, or break free of old circular debates about the nature of sovereign power, or the relationship between play and rationality.
Unable to analyze bureaucracy directly, Graeber has to turn to the cultural encrustations that have grown around it. Some of this stuff is spot on: did you know that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are mirror inversions of an elemental British bureaucratic hero, why all the bosses in American police procedurals are black, or the occult links between Dungeons & Dragons and the Western magical tradition and idealized Roman Law. But some of the cultural stuff misses, like his read of Star Trek or the Nolan Batman movies, and ultimately Graeber is not a natural media studies type, and this seems digressive from the point of book on bureaucracy.
And when I say 'inaccuracies', I mean that when Graeber makes specific claims about technological history, or human cognition, or the like, the footnotes lead to a justification that everybody knows this, rather than a scholarly source. There was one moment where he talked about the rise in management jargon with a phrase like "if you traced the rise of it in business speak since 1970, you would see..." and I thought "If? Aren't you a professor? Can't you get an RA to run this down in a week?" The whole book is full of moments like that, and their presence makes me less confident of Debt, which is a shame.
Some interesting thoughts, but not nearly enough to save the book. I'd prefer that he baked this one for another couple of years. show less
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy: Engaging read from the author of Debt, with lots of interesting observations but no one theme other than the anxieties of late capitalism. Here are some examples I noted, more like a series of theses than anything else: (1) Have you noticed that military officers and police aren’t ever considered “bureaucrats,” even though they mostly manage people/fill out forms? Police aren’t actually involved in dealing directly with most violent crime, but they are major sources of violence (note that this book was published before some of the more well-publicized violence against black American citizens of late); we’re confused about this (we show more means the largely white, relatively well-off people likely to be reading this book) because police officers are “almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture.” Imaginary police are heroes, and they do spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, not filling out forms. Police are bureaucratic heroes not recognized as bureaucrats.
(2) Graeber argues that the US government took its modern style from big corporations, but that our culture doesn’t let us connect the terrible customer service of Comcast to the critique of “bureaucrats” like we see for the Veterans’ Administration. (3) Modern managers have the idea that they should be in solidarity with shareholders, not with workers; this allows them to collaborate in financialization and degradation of workers. (4) “Whenever someone starts talking about the ‘free market,’ it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He’s never far away.” (5) Markets and bureaucracies are linked, both claiming to create impersonal rules within which freedom of choice can then operate.
(6) Violence communicates, but it also enables an indifference to communication, either as emitter or receiver. The threat of violence communicates, but also “is perhaps the only form of action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative…. [V]iolence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing.” (7) Because of the ways in which bureacracy controls so many of our actions, radical projects face barriers when confronted with large, heavy objects like cars and buildings—which must be owned and maintained according to bureaucratic rules. Once the inspectors arrive, the informal arrangements that worked fine start to fall apart.
(8) There are two kinds of imaginative labor at issue in oppressive capitalist systems: the first is the creative work that the dominant class gets to do because it has leisure and workers in mind-numbing jobs don’t. The second is the imaginative labor of figuring out what people with power might do to you, or want at this moment, etc., and that imaginative labor belongs to the people who surround powerful people—the imaginative work the oppressed do to figure out how to perform in the way that works best for them in front of the oppressor. This imaginative work, Graeber says, belongs to the private/social production sphere. (9) “There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment strategies that furthered labor discipline and social control.” This was capitalist self-preservation. Better Uber, the reasoning goes, then self-sustaining flying cars.
(10) Don’t forget the attractions of bureaucracy: “[W]ho really wants to live in a world where everything is soul? Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor …, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you’re dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse.” Playfulness isn’t always good—consider how horrific a playful god would be to those on the ground. And he also discusses Jo Freeman’s classic essay on the tyranny of structurelessness http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The problem we must face is that a utopia where everyone plays by the rules is as unattainable as a utopia of absolute free play.
(11) The post office used to be a model for other institutions; it was then crippled in the US “as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn’t really work.” When some workers cracked, their rebellion was always described as “acts of inexplicable individual rage and madness—severed from any consideration of the systematic humiliations that always seem to set them off”—bearing an “uncanny resemblance to the way the nineteenth-century press treated slave revolts.”
(12) The popularity of heroic fantasy is a negation of bureaucracy’s commitment to value-free rule-bound neutrality. “Fantasy worlds create values so absolute it is simply impossible to be value-free.” (There I’m not sure he’s in tune with the grimdark revolution, but ok.) Narratives contrast with bureaucratic rules; fantasy worlds run on secrets, while bureaucracy aims at least in principle to be transparent. Part of the pleasure then is the honesty of the fantasy world, where the secrets are supposed to be secrets, and no bureaucrat will yell at you for filling out a form wrong when you should’ve known better. And yet worlds like D&D also involve the resurgence of rules—standardized characters/races, abilities, etc. (Brandon Sanderson’s rule-based magic would be a good example.) Thus, such games “ultimately reinforce the sense that we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality.”
(13) The modern superhero plot and its conservative values serve as instruction to white boys: imagination and rebellion lead to violence, and violence is a lot of fun but must ultimately be directed back at excessive imagination and rebellion. show less
(2) Graeber argues that the US government took its modern style from big corporations, but that our culture doesn’t let us connect the terrible customer service of Comcast to the critique of “bureaucrats” like we see for the Veterans’ Administration. (3) Modern managers have the idea that they should be in solidarity with shareholders, not with workers; this allows them to collaborate in financialization and degradation of workers. (4) “Whenever someone starts talking about the ‘free market,’ it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He’s never far away.” (5) Markets and bureaucracies are linked, both claiming to create impersonal rules within which freedom of choice can then operate.
(6) Violence communicates, but it also enables an indifference to communication, either as emitter or receiver. The threat of violence communicates, but also “is perhaps the only form of action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative…. [V]iolence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing.” (7) Because of the ways in which bureacracy controls so many of our actions, radical projects face barriers when confronted with large, heavy objects like cars and buildings—which must be owned and maintained according to bureaucratic rules. Once the inspectors arrive, the informal arrangements that worked fine start to fall apart.
(8) There are two kinds of imaginative labor at issue in oppressive capitalist systems: the first is the creative work that the dominant class gets to do because it has leisure and workers in mind-numbing jobs don’t. The second is the imaginative labor of figuring out what people with power might do to you, or want at this moment, etc., and that imaginative labor belongs to the people who surround powerful people—the imaginative work the oppressed do to figure out how to perform in the way that works best for them in front of the oppressor. This imaginative work, Graeber says, belongs to the private/social production sphere. (9) “There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment strategies that furthered labor discipline and social control.” This was capitalist self-preservation. Better Uber, the reasoning goes, then self-sustaining flying cars.
(10) Don’t forget the attractions of bureaucracy: “[W]ho really wants to live in a world where everything is soul? Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor …, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you’re dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse.” Playfulness isn’t always good—consider how horrific a playful god would be to those on the ground. And he also discusses Jo Freeman’s classic essay on the tyranny of structurelessness http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The problem we must face is that a utopia where everyone plays by the rules is as unattainable as a utopia of absolute free play.
(11) The post office used to be a model for other institutions; it was then crippled in the US “as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn’t really work.” When some workers cracked, their rebellion was always described as “acts of inexplicable individual rage and madness—severed from any consideration of the systematic humiliations that always seem to set them off”—bearing an “uncanny resemblance to the way the nineteenth-century press treated slave revolts.”
(12) The popularity of heroic fantasy is a negation of bureaucracy’s commitment to value-free rule-bound neutrality. “Fantasy worlds create values so absolute it is simply impossible to be value-free.” (There I’m not sure he’s in tune with the grimdark revolution, but ok.) Narratives contrast with bureaucratic rules; fantasy worlds run on secrets, while bureaucracy aims at least in principle to be transparent. Part of the pleasure then is the honesty of the fantasy world, where the secrets are supposed to be secrets, and no bureaucrat will yell at you for filling out a form wrong when you should’ve known better. And yet worlds like D&D also involve the resurgence of rules—standardized characters/races, abilities, etc. (Brandon Sanderson’s rule-based magic would be a good example.) Thus, such games “ultimately reinforce the sense that we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality.”
(13) The modern superhero plot and its conservative values serve as instruction to white boys: imagination and rebellion lead to violence, and violence is a lot of fun but must ultimately be directed back at excessive imagination and rebellion. show less
Engaging and more accessible than the vast majority of "social theory" writings. Despite having some good insights, there are two main problems that lowered my rating. First, rather than develop a coherent picture, the book is actually a collection of four separate essays that examine different aspects of the topic. This contributes to the main issue, which is that most of his assertions aren't well supported by argument or evidence. We are asked to take as "self-evident" some rather wild conclusions, with flimsy basis. He calls his work "social theory" but it's at best a hypothesis, and far from a "social science" that he aspires to. While that's fine for expressing an opinion in a film review (the final chapter), it doesn't work when show more trying to explain why we don't yet have the flying cars and ray guns and robots promised during the 20th century. It's not at all clear that he understands how technology or engineering actually works, nor any evidence that he cares. Rather than question the appropriateness of the original predictions as unrealistic hype, he accepts them at face value as completely reasonable expectations, then contorts an explanation that fits the conclusion he's already constructed. While his criticisms of Big Science and academia are spot on, correlation doesn't always imply causation, and he's smart enough to know the difference, and just hopes that we won't notice. show less
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David Rolfe Graeber was born February 12, 1961 in New York. He was an anthropologist, anarchist, author, and a professor at the London School of Economics. He was an outspoken critic of economic and social inequality. He coined the phrase "We are the 99 Percent,' the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement." He earned his BA in anthropology from show more State University of New York at Purchase in 1984. He earned his masters and doctorate from the University of Chicago. He did ethnographic research in central Madagascar which he used for his PhD thesis (1997). He was a prolific author. His books included Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013), The Utopia of Rules (2015), Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), and in fall 2021, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow. David Graeber died on September 2, 2020 at the age of 59. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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The Guardian Book of the Day (2015-05-06)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
- Original title
- The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
- Alternate titles
- Utopia of Rules
- Original publication date
- 2015-02
- Quotations
- [Graeber talked to an economist from one of the Bretton Woods institutions “(It is probably better not to say which one)”, about how the government deals with corporate fraud. The economist tells him that they prefer to ... (show all)settle rather than go to trial, usually for 20% - 30% of the amount of the fraud.]
ME: Which means . . . correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that effectively mean the government is saying, “You can commit all the fraud you like, but if we catch you, you're going to have to give us our cut”?
OFFICIAL: Well, obviously I can't put it that way myself as long as I have this job . . . (Introduction: “The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization”, pp. 25-26 (Melville House, 2015))
First of all, they assume that the “public” is an entity with opinions, interests and allegiances that can be treated as relatively consistent over time. (1. “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” p. 98 (Melville House, 20... (show all)15))
First of all, they assume that the “public” is an entity with opinions, interests and allegiances that can be treated as relatively consistent over time. (1. “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” p. 98 (Melville House, 20... (show all)15))
To illustrate what I mean, consider that in English-speaking nations, the same collection of referred to in one context as the “public” can in another be referred to as the “workforce.” [. . . ] The “public” does not work [. . .] It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work: this is why leftist critics often complain, the media will always talk about how, say, a transport strike is likely to inconvenience the public, in their capacity as commuters, but it will never occur to them that those striking are themselves part of the public – or that if they succeed in raising wage levels, this will be a public benefit. (1. “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” p. 98 (Melville House, 2015)) - Blurbers
- Piketty, Thomas; Tett, Gillian; Bennett, Drake; Kuttner, Robert; Mason, Paul; Meaney, Thomas
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