Articles

The Bullshit-Job Boom

Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense.

Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone

I would like to write about the bullshitization of academic life: that is, the degree to which those involved in teaching and academic management spend more and more of their time involved in tasks which they secretly — or not so secretly — believe to be entirely pointless.

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Memorials

by David Charles

David Graeber, author of one of the most influential books I’ve ever read—Debt: The First 5,000 Years—died earlier this week.

Updates

Reviews

Are More and More People Working Meaningless Jobs?

New York Times

"In “Bull__ Jobs,” Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, applies a critical eye to the Western world of work, where, he says, companies pay people to carry out an endless array of tasks that make no meaningful contribution to society. Graeber is expanding on a 2013 essay that he published in Strike! magazine and that subsequently went viral. In it, citing a famous prediction by the economist John Maynard Keynes, he argued that technology should have made workers more productive, leading to a 15-hour workweek, but instead has been used to make people work more, in pointless jobs they hate."

Book review: Bullshit Jobs

CS Thinks

We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everyone has to be employed at some sort of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darvinist theory, he must justify his right to exist
Buckminster Fuller

Money for Nothing

Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away. In the future, who will still work for a paycheck?

Back to Work: Review of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs

Nonsite

"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."

Book Review: Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber is an academic investigation based on Graeber's viral newspaper article about why some people feel their jobs are meaningless and why people do jobs they think are "bullshit." This book should be required reading for any economics or business student and would be a great gift for anyone who is unhappy but isn't quite sure why.

Bullshit Jobs

Do you believe your job is pointless and unnecessary? If so, you might want to read this book!

This book is translated to: Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese

If you’re a publisher, please contact estate@davidgraeber.org

If a translation’s missing from this list, fill the feedback form and let us know!