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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century's end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes' promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the '60s – never materialise? 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 '20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
[...] And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call "bullshit jobs."
It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen.
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Ed Note: Link to John Maynard Keynes was NOT in the original article.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 03 2016, @02:48PM
And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide ... security support
They're not talking about typing firewall rules into a cisco router here.
My experience is all organizations eventually turn inward to fight themselves. I've been in quite a few battles like that where the only purpose of automation and reporting or other technical means is to fight other departments, not to benefit the customer or even the stock holders.
Eventually all middle managers turn "Genghis Khan" on each other. Its like a law of nature. And bad pushing out good means all you need is one bad apple to eventually destroy a company.
Numbers are selected to be gamed by the right people, and huge efforts are made to game those numbers by everyone, right, wrong, and indifferent. You can identify dying companies two ways.. one is growth of meeting frequency to speed the dilution of responsibility such that nobody is in charge of anything its all meetings and teams, the other is the production of truly awesome numbers that unfortunately have nothing to do with the customer or shareholders while no numbers having anything to do with shareholders or customers are produced.
In the end all that's produced is a battlefield of wasted lives and wasted effort. At least in corporate world there's usually no bloodshed, at least assuming the internal battles don't F up something safety critical in the real world which does sometimes happen.
As a practical matter in the financial services you'll have one department who's job it is to, well, cheat, more or less, and another department whos job it is to stop them. That way someone can testify honestly that the oversight committee met 104 times last year and generated 52 content free reports and couldn't possibly have worked any harder, etc etc.