Nice to see more empirical backing of the Bullshit Jobs theory 
The research found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or unhelpful to others.
The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were “bullshit”—socially useless and meaningless.
Librarians stay winning
my job is socially useful but it’s only something that takes like idk 15 hours a week to do, so forcing me to be on the clock 40 hours a week is bullshit. luckily i can squeeze in 25 hours of reading and gaming and get paid to do it
why don’t people understand how meaningful it is to serve the inhuman algorithm destroying the planet?
I sign paperwork for car sales and I think private ownership of motor vehicles should have never been allowed
If we survive the next hundred years or so, future generations will look back at it as utterly barbaric.
The work I do is meaningful but the pay is bullshit
graeber talks about this in the BS jobs book. he talks about how the feeling of doing something useful is supposed to be pay in and of itself and how its used to make other workers feel resentful if you make demands re conditions&pay.
page 1: government confirms aliens
page 10: government confirms alienation
I don’t think this supports grabbers thesis a lot of bullshit jobs add value to the production process we saw in the tech lay off this year they rehired a bunch of them for more money after these realized they added so much value collectively they made operations profitable.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I understood gaebers thesis on bullshit jobs as a way for anarchists to match Marxist bouguous decadence theory, its something else too but i cant rember. like we have a medical industry that is more expensive then having single payer but decadence of having an insurance industry is hard for capital to over come.
“socially useless and meaningless” is the phrasing they used
The average ad tech engineer at Google or Meta probably provides a couple dozen millions of revenue to the company but socially, it’s useless and meaningless
do you think it is really meaningless? seems to me there is hella meaning
Considering google and meta are advertising companies, the meaning is a net negative.
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What is “bourgeois decadence theory?” I thought bourgeois decadence was just a way of comparing the capitalists to popular depictions of romans during the fall of Rome?
I think it came more out of Graeber’s desire to provide a left wing critique of bueracracy in order to take it back from the right and correct some of the missteps of previous socialist movements. It’s in the same vein as Utopia of Rules imo.
There’s also lots of “bullshit jobs” in Graeber that still aid in valorization. Lawyers for example. The issue is that their role is only relevant in our particular social context. You can make a movie without lawyers in theory, but can’t in reality (if you want it to sell). So lawyers, who aren’t redundant, can still look at their work and go “this is pointless, jurassic park could get made with or without me.”
