In 2013 the anthropologist David Graeber examined one of the strangest contradictions in modern capitalism: despite exponential gains in productivity, people were working even harder that ever. In his landmark essay called “On the Preponderance of Bullshit Jobs” and then a book a few years later, Graeber showed how as much as 37% of all jobs in capitalist societies are, well, bullshit. Or, to use his own words “where even the person doing the job secretly believes the job really shouldn’t exist.(...) But nonetheless, part of the conditions of employment is that you have to pretend that it does.”
Graeber wasn’t the first to notice the problem. Back in 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that ever-increasing industrial output from factories would make it possible for everyone on earth to work 15 hours a week. Within a few decades the economy met his expectations, but people’s workloads didn’t get lighter.
Fast forward to today, and the question of Bullshit jobs is once again on everyone’s lips. Everyone from Bill Gates to Sam Altman and Elon Musk have heralded AI as the new harbinger of the 15 hour work week. After all, the very things that AI is supposedly good at—getting rid of menial intellectual labor and automating digital tasks—are exactly the sorts of things that will get automated away.
But here’s the thing, what if bullshit work isn’t a bug in industrial captialsim? But that it is it’s key feature?
In this week’s video I dig into why Bullshit work is almost definitely here to stay despite the promises of tech barons.
South Africa