presented by David Graeber
in Chaos Communication Congress » 36th Chaos Communication Congress
on 12/27/2019
transcribed by Yash Lad

Articles and publications
presented by David Graeber
in Chaos Communication Congress » 36th Chaos Communication Congress
on 12/27/2019
transcribed by Yash Lad
Have you noticed how there aren’t any new French intellectuals any more? There was a ver- itable flood in the late ’70s and early ’80s: Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau … but there has been almost no one since.
I would like to make a public apology to anyone who has been hurt by their involvement with HAU.
We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self.
In Nablus, every street seems to have a men’s hair salon. There are literally thousands of them. Most stay open until at least 2 at night; often other than mosques they’re the only places lit up and open at two at night; and it seems any time you pass by one, there are likely to be four or five nicely coiffed young men clustered inside, watching someone get a haircut.
The Japanese translation of "Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank" by Tatsuhiko Haga
The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of ’agricultural revolution’ remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.
The one, possibly only thing, I dislike about Vancouver BC's SkyTrain is that it's completely run by machines. I have used the system over 100 times in the downtown area, and only once have seen a human working at a station as an employee of the rail system.
This is a very difficult column for me to write because it’s about my mother.
A week or two after the then IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a posh New York hotel in 2011, there was another case when an Egyptian businessman was briefly arrested for a similar assault at another such New York hotel.
Nobody thinks much about bureaucracy anymore. But in the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the word was everywhere.
Since David’s death in 2020, much of my life has been entwined with his vast archive of published and unpublished texts, hundreds of notebooks, audio and video recordings, and correspondences. David once said that the real care for a “great man” begins after his death, and is almost always done by women. Now I know what he meant.
Sometimes—not very often—a particularly cogent argument against reigning political common sense presents such a shock to the system that it becomes necessary to create an entire body of theory to refute it.