{"id":7493,"date":"2015-04-22T06:54:35","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T11:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7493"},"modified":"2015-04-22T06:54:35","modified_gmt":"2015-04-22T11:54:35","slug":"a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse-david-graeber-on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7493","title":{"rendered":"A Practical Utopian\u2019s Guide to the Coming Collapse \u2013 David Graeber on \u201cThe Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Practical Utopian\u2019s Guide to the Coming Collapse \u2013 David Graeber on \u201cThe Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n

Graeber\u2019s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called\u00a0\u201cOn the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist\u00a0John Maynard Keynes\u00a0predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we\u2019d be on 15-hour weeks. \u201cIn technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn\u2019t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. 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.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber\u2019s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. \u201cThe ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that \u2018My God, if it\u2019s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it\u2019ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.\u2019 You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.\u201d Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. \u201cCancer? No, that\u2019s still here.\u201d Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac \u2013 all of which, Graeber writes, are \u201ctailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don\u2019t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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A Practical Utopian\u2019s Guide to the Coming Collapse \u2013 David Graeber on \u201cThe Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d Graeber\u2019s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called\u00a0\u201cOn the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist\u00a0John Maynard Keynes\u00a0predicted that by the end of the century technology would have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4895,260,458,3899,786,2785],"class_list":["post-7493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-david-graeber","tag-employment","tag-john-maynard-keynes","tag-ruling-class","tag-technology","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7494,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7493\/revisions\/7494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}