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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: 2) by quintessence on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:35AM
Middle manager I see?
You are under the mistaken impression organization scales infinitely. It does not, and even the law you quote states: "Furthermore, Metcalfe’s law assumes that the value of each node n is of equal benefit. If this is not the case, for example because the one fax machines serves 50 workers, the second half of that, the third one third, and so on, then the relative value of an additional connection decreases". You have diminishing returns with too many chiefs and not enough indians, not to mention you curiously exclude management as a portion of the complexity that reduces productivity, increases redundancy and wasted effort. It would seem the larger something scales the less management you'd want, otherwise you are increasing the entropy of the organization with every new manager.
You are also completely ignoring self-organization in your evaluation, which is more prevalent and more efficient than any hierarchical structure (as an aside, you have Viet Nam vets describing having to contact a commander before returning fire. It got so bad waiting for the okay from Washington that they would actively subvert the entire command structure hence the saying "it is easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission").
I already made mention that some information management is inherent to most large undertakings. Whether that comes in the form dilute authority, technology, common practice, or middle managers is arbitrary.
Yes Gladys, your job too can be automated, which is why most managers can be shitcanned without affecting productivity at all.