/lit/ - Literature

>>23040357
Do you think all of the people who work those jobs are going to go "wow I guess I do work a bullshit credential inflated job that a high schooler could do" and then default on their mortgage, sell their car and tell their wife and kids they are going to have to cut back?

>>23040357
Would that crossbow actually work? I wanna make one, looks cool!

>>23040357
Read Bataille. Hiring people to do nothing is a form of potlach. Read Nietzsche. Healthiness is overcoming illness, not simply lacking exposure to it. You are feleing apprehension that the old protestant work ethic has been swallowed up by the corporate model, but the latter is so productive it can afford to light money on fire and still outcompete its predecessors. Could the corporate model be outperformed itself? In theory, but they end up purchasing their challengers before that happens.

>>23040357
Find a different job. Figure out how to be homeless. Figure out how to get neetbux. Learn to live with boondoggling. You can mix and match as you like.

>>23040357
Because
1. The vast majority of people just want to get by, and have enough money to survive in relative comfort
2. The machinations of a corrupt system that they have no control over besides seeking out employment that isn't a service job is pretty much of no concern to them
3. Most of the rich who rely on such a system are completely and utterly disconnected from reality, and the average person avoids engagement with them for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the secondhand embarrassment that comes from talking to a trust fund baby
>>23040413
Making a crossbow out of office supplies isn't that hard and if you pile on the rubber bands it can punch small holes in drywall

I'm going to tell you why I don't question it. I get paid top dollar for sitting in front of a computer at the comfort of my home doing next to nothing. Why should I complain?

>>23040357
anyone have the short story about the erotic cake baker?

>>23040508
>erotic cake baker
Is that a euphemism?

>>23040451
>they end up purchasing their challengers before that happens
fascinating. best thing I've ready in months. this is the stabilizing factor? hilarious. greed as a weapon. buy them not even for their ideas or assets; just as a defensive measure. even if they're not strategizing that way, the same thing happens:
1. established inefficient corporations dominate the market
2. young energetic clever startup challenges them
3. one inefficient corp buys the startup, hoping to dominate the competitors with their acquired vigour
4. now-subsidiary startup becomes inefficient as well (mired within the larger corp's bureaucracy) ; the equilibrium is maintained

>>23040357
>But is there any book that explains why normies think its normal?
They don't though. The whole book is about how normies are secretly distressed or depressed that they do basically nothing. They all know something is wrong.

>>23040357
in my opnion, it's precisely because everyone has been bombarded by propaganda through television (first) and throug the internet (now) through hours and hours on end about how all of this is is normal, that all push towards change has been suppressed. From Gen X onwards people have been more and more exposed to video content portraying life as it is not, until we reached a point where we are interacting more with portrayed life than with real life. People think they have power over this, but the truth is that no one does: something that is repeated long enough will get into your brain no matter what, especially if it concerns this peripheral representations of how "normal" life and "work" are supposed to look like. Take the average sitcom, tv series, marvel capeshit blob and tell me if the normal part of life in this shit looks anything like actual normal life outside of it.
Especially after the pandemic they pushed the accelerator on this, partly because they noticed that the actual misery of living in today's world was making itself visibile in infinite lines of people with masks and working under camera surveillance in your own house etc., partly because everyone consumed way more media having to stay indoors.
There is now a level of capillary propaganda never seen before in human history and the results of this is that people are, as prophetized by many writers, degenerating into the equivalent of human cattle.
The only way to attempt breaking out of this conditioning is to consume the least amount possible of media - and consume extremely little in general - do not partake in any of the social rituals required to be part of the parade, and read and study extensively for several years, as this will increase your focus and ability to think for yourself.

>>23040520
Microsoft owns the big meme AI company now, that's why their stock price has been soaring. They ate their disruptor. Not the first time this has happened. Won't be the last. Capital is Saturn. Read pre-meme Land too while you are at it. The true disruption might happen when the legit actual born before 1965 boomers are gone. Look at the succession crisis Disney has with their CEO. Eventually time will get rid of him and they will need to hire someone who can run things or break up the company. These people do actually know something about something, however aloof and tone-deaf they may come across as. Their dads were in the army, and their first jobs weren't sitting at desks reading emails. Yeah, you could stick a paint-by-number pajeet at the top of every company in the world, but how sustainable is that? In a way they operate on the same paradigm, they came from hunger and they weren't born into what was already built, although that's where they ended up. It worked for Microsoft, but the one running Sports Illustrated not so much. It's people who are second gen corporate you need to wonder about, they've never "solved" a "problem," they invent work to create job security, but again, if the older corporations keep vampirizing the new ones, it buys them more time and adds fresh blood to the body

actually if you don't know, now you will—when a company does M&A this requires even more bloat... layoffs of the redundancies eventually, but in the interim you need to beef up your project mgmt, legal, compliance, accounting departments to figure out if what you're eating is actually edible, paying even more people to do activities which bring in ZERO cash for the business, and to manage all the new people working on the new non-thing, you're going to need to hire...
now imagine trying to stand up to one of these firms and take their market share when they can pay people to oversee the people doing due diligence to research the feasibilty of knocking you out

>>23040555
Im curious why you say pre-meme Land, it seems to me his later ideas are a natural development of his former when truly stripped of their humanism.

>>23040578
because it's that sort of boring post-paleoconservatism / post-lolbertarianism that everyone right of burgers blogged about when they were wittingly or unwitting trying to do "philosophical" neo-fascism under a shell company c. 2008-2016; there's no real insight there it is just a repetition

>>23040357
>TikTok

lol there's your problem

>>23040357
What’s truly bullshit is how gatekept the bullshit jobs truly are. That’s what pisses me off. I don’t get mad at the women posting their tik toks, I’m happy that they live nice, but it’s insane how many hoops you have to jump through if you’d like to do something similar. It’s not easy. You must know somebody at the end of the day. And there’s so many education paths you can go down if you don’t pick the exact right one then you’re sol. There’s basically no path for the auto didact except being a poorfag who doesn’t get to go out on the weekends.

>>23040555
its obvioious to anyone who works one of these jobs that companies cant meaningfully innovate anymore so they are left doling at the last bits of innovation left over from the people who used to actually do stuff or refuckifying a ui for the 40th time

>>23040503
How can I get this job?

>>23040503
Exactly, things will have to get to the point where infrastructure and products we rely on are failing due to a lack of knowledgeable people to maintain it and new products are no longer being produced that push the boundaries of what's possible (we can definitely see the very beginning of this today but i think its a long way out before the average normie really notices. That may be a long time so for the average shitter even if they are worried about that long term decline in knowledge, it's better for them to just go with the flow.

>>23040357
>But is there any book that explains why normies think its normal?
>Why they see videos of tiktok HR girls showing their routine of drinking cappucino and strolling on segways and dont get mad?
because everybody is in on the grift. our society places industriousness as a premium virtue, so everybody wants to see themselves and be seen as industriousness, but nobody wants to be exposed as anything else.

>>23040701
Literally learn to code.

>>23040555
>nice trips
>read land
nice try

>>23040357
I once thought I could improve things but it is all so tiresome. There huge machinations at work and more than enough people who will try to just to get by. Improvement in corporate culture are very slow, in the 70s people still had foremans who would smack the shit out of them. Amazon you're still not allowed to have a nice shit.

>>23041083
amazon is terrible, forced 3 day in office, constant talk of pips and layoffs, non technical management who basically know they can yell at people because of the company culture

>>23041097
Nontechnical management is absurd and twill fire any competent person just to make the balance sheet look good

>>23040357
I came across this video essay on youtube where this guy presented what I thought was a good explanation for bullshits jobs. I forget his exact thesis, but it basically came down to the need to keep cash circulating in an economy defined by an inflationary, expansionary monetary policy. The entire world economy is propped up by central banks extending lines of credit and pumping in more money in. But that money needs to come full circle and result in consumer spending, or else it basically acts as dead weight. Bullshit jobs are an adaptation to this. Basically, it's fake productivity make-work that the economy invents as an excuse for giving people some spending change. The expectation is that people will spend, not save, and keep the consumer turd economy greased up and moving its bowls, so to speak.

>>23040413
With one rubber band for a string it will be extremely weak. With about 7-8 braided together like >>23040482 said - it will drive a pen through a drywall.

>>23040357
FYI here's a good video that goes into detail on the thesis of Graber's book in case you haven't read it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo

>>23040357
Isn't this basically what Marx talks about when he mentions alienation? Like there's too many degrees of separation from the laborer and the thing they're producing for them to tangibly really perceive the impact of their work? Is this just a feature of the industrial world?(Never read Marx btw)

>>23041117
>bowls
bowels* I felt it was important to correct this

>>23040357
Because they’re normies. Read Le Bon on crowds.

>>23041117
Traditionally when money becomes more scarce/valuable and the rich hoard it and consumption collapses what that's called is an economic depression bro, not exactly something fun for most people

I do think it's an economics of shitting, which makes me sound like Zizek or some perverted French psychoanalytic theorist but hear me out. Consumption implies defecation. It's not a productive economy, the only thing it ultimately produces is waste. If one were to cast a spell and change one's view of the economy, capitalism is optimized to produce pollution, trash, and sewage. The goal is not to build something, but to keep eating and shitting, and to make sure the eaters and shitters have enough to eat and shit enough to make ends meet. It's not a results oriented process, it's about the act of consumption itself as an end in itself. To produce shit, you need bullshit jobs, because it doesn't matter what people are doing. The superrich just need to keep their money moving and it will all come back to them eventually since they own stock in everything, whatever the consumer spends on, comes back to them.

>>23041163
No. Alienation is when you hate your meaningless job so much that nothing can make you excited to work it again even if conditions change

>>23041163
Alienation to Marx is selling yourself generally. Graeber as an anarchokiddie thinks there's degrees of substantive difference instead of everyone being pimped all the time

>>23041180
Yes that's the fate they're trying to avoid. But it's a system that runs on fumes. It's like they're running in quicksand, or putting everything to remain stationary rather than actually move forward, because if it stops, that's what happens.

>>23041180
Solved by printing money. Delay the issue just one more generation and the next generation won’t realize how things used to be because they weren’t alive

>>23041195
But printing the money is only the first part. The last part is getting into the hands of consumers to spend. That's where the bullshit jobs come into play.

>>23041186
Yea but people have always eat and shat. Archaeology is the study of dead peoples waste and shit. Goes beyond capital.

>>23041194
>>23041195
Sure but if you want it to "stop" than what? Do you have an alternative besides more scarcity and unemployment?

>>23041232
Production of things for consumption doesn't require most "bullshit jobs", it's much more FIRE sector thing

>>23040357
normies dont question anything.

I heard a stereotype that Germans like to say 'that shouldnt be that way theres a better way'. I didnt realize that was rare; most people just exist. They arent trying to fix problems because they dont care.
Their only cares are their lives personally. Why should it matter to them the wider world? People are bred to be selfish narcicissts.

When you look at an average person deeply you'll see a core of selfishness surrounded by details.

>>23040451
>In theory, but they end up purchasing their challengers before that happens.
you put far too noble a spin on it. They dont strengthen themselves they weaken their opponents. Maintaining themselves as kings in a land of cripples.

>>23041317
Is "strength" an asset or a liability? Let me ask accounting what the best way to book that is

Why do we tolerate this? We are stupid. Born stupid. We do not know better.

>Reduction of infant mortality ergo less selection pressure, increasing mutational load
>Population decrease means there is less scarcity so less selection pressure from this source. Compare to the normal (malthusian) historical situation described in A Farewell to Alms
>Negative selection pressure from education and careerism
>Our culture is consistently idiotic on these topics in a predictable way
Everything in a democracy is optimized for the production and continued survival of more and more retarded people. This was generally understood 100 years ago but it was apparently too late. Communism (including American communism i.e. progressivism, conservatism (conservation of communism) and soviet communism), and nazism are very different but all of them stem from the inherent rampant cretinism of the 20th century. At this point it is kind of useless to call it communism because this is not exactly true, /lit/ marxists while very wrong about many topics are still pretty smart people - they are simply becoming smart compared to the world around us as the world becomes more and more retarded. However, communism if understood vulgarly as redistribution from the rich tothe poor has something of the essence of the phenomenon since it is generally a redistribution from the least retarded to the most retarded in society, some statistical outliers of retarded rich people notwithstanding the rich can generally be assumed to be higher IQ.
Like communism in the 20th century, the 18th and 19th were characterised by the rise of democracy, allied with burgeois capitalism and protestant religion. This is also best understood as a redistribution of "political property" in the sense that aristrocatic titles are a form of property (see the slow expansion of voting rights which was likened to monetary inflation by Alfred Jay Nock. (Monetary inflation is another form of cretinization)). While the enlightenment seemingly brough education and culture to the masses and brought the cultural waterline higher, deep down at the biological layer the ultimate effect was the exact opposite. We are soon going to be back to the average intelligence level of 1000 AD peasants, a dark world of mystery and religion reverence for the things which we do not understand. We are not worthy to understand them.

We are humans but we are getting stupider with each passing generation. We are getting closer to the chimpanzee and the orang-outan. The monkey can smile and she can enjoy eating nuts and fruit, the gorilla can rest happily in the jungle next to her infant cubs. Hominids play and breed and occasionally they lash out at each other and tear out each other's brains and eat the offspring of their rivals. They do not think about what will happen in a billion years when the sun will expand and engulf the earth. If they could they could still do nothing about it.

>>23041463
So the elite are creating more perfect slaves—not just protestant work ethic but soviet command ethic have been made obsolete by the new religion, that of the return on investment, i.e. the breeding of capital. The corporate job requires minimal intelligence, far more trusting.

I know I'm a talentless midwit with average amounts of motivation. My office job which produces various reports and spreadsheets is perfect for me. The lunch dates with Stacey's and beers with the boys is great. Knowing I'm not going to starve to death or die in a shitty factory gives me more comfort than the looming crisis of Western civilisation which I can't avoid regardless of my career.

To blame "capitalism" is bizarre to me. If anything bullshit jobs are caused by the fact that the economy has to be managed by a government. All the mountains of legislation and regulation and laws and bail outs are what leads to these jobs. I suppose some what argue that is what capitalism actually looks like, but I think that would be a poor argument. Its the expectation that the economy has to be propped up and prevented by failures that is where the bullshit comes from.

>>23040503
>Why should I complain?
You shouldn't, but you should feel ashamed. You're contributing to the suffering of future generations by not generating anything of value.

>>23040357
>Why they dont question the fact that our jobs make no sense

because who the fuck cares as long as they can feed their families...

i mean yeah, the jobs are bullshit. but they exist for a reason. it's there to fuel consumerism. if people had any self-control or virtue of any kind, the bullshit jobs would start to disappear.

>>23042291
>To blame "capitalism" is bizarre to me. If anything bullshit jobs are caused by the fact that the economy has to be managed by a government.
Bullshit. All bureaucracies suffer from bloat over time. It doesn't matter if it's a government, school, military, hospital, or private industry. The idea that private companies are automatically efficient is pure superstition.

https://youtu.be/WSatPoD2W-o?t=143

>>23040451
>read bataille
You clearly haven’t

>>23042351
It's a demonstration of surplus wealth to be able to comply with all the regulations needed to run a large cap public company, to hire all those people who do nothing to actually enrich the firm. The regulations are rules on how wealthy firms are supposed to behave. (Regulators also ultimately come from the industries involved, they are hired by the government to make the rules). It's a very sophisticated potlach, but make no mistake it is still the ceremonial destruction of wealth. And of course, there's non-regulation bullshit jobs, like hiring an entire department of race priests to ensure the racial harmonics of your workplace are in order—another form of wealth destruction the poorer firms can hardly afford. It's a sign that you are a proper, wealthy firm, that you have cash to blow through on things for which no return is coming

>>23040451
>Could the corporate model be outperformed itself? In theory, but they end up purchasing their challengers before that ha-
They are "performing" great in Ukraine kek

>>23042405
Still have not read Bataille

>>23042413
You really think corrupt authoritarian countries don't have "fake" business activities? Or you're not allowed to say that over there, Ivan? Go back to stripping chips out of washing machines from Kazakhstan, obviously market economies don't have anything to offer you.

>>23042437
Do you have an actual opinion to offer?

>>23042444
Nope, just stating facts. Reading a wikipedia entry does not constitute reading Bataille. Go write a shitty substack “thinkpiece” elsewhere, loser

>>23042449
>posts longer than a sentence are likened to eceleb grifter websites
ok retard

>>23040357
Because my job where i go larp as a normgroid on the days i actually have to go into the office is retarded and useless, but you know what?
It pays me enough to enjoy my non-normie hobbies, so I'm fine with that, and consider it better than slaving away building a roof in 40 degree weather before going home and instantly crashing because I'm dogtired
That's why I don't give a shit that i work a bullshit job

>>23040676
They're not gatekept at all
Just lie on your CV and spam linkedin applications and you get one eventually, it really isn't hard
My meme humanist degree doesn't matter, even if I enjoyed getting it, all it matters is that I have the degree to check off the requirement of having one

>>23040357
>Why they see videos of tiktok HR girls showing their routine of drinking cappucino and strolling on segways and dont get mad?
It's because they do things they like instead of bitching about how rotten the world is on Japanese cartoon image board

>>23040357
Not everyone can make food or clothes. I work as a software developer, you can tell that a bullshit job, but I was always good at programming and mathematics, and I get money from it. So I shouldn't pursue it and try to do something I'm mediocre at, because it's considered a useless job by other people's standards? I can't live like that man, just leave us alone and mind your own business.

>>23043170
It depends what software you are working on - does it actually improve anyone's life or help people in any way? If so, it wouldn't be defined as a bullshit job. No one is saying that software developers or administrators have no potential value in society. They are saying that the current system is wasting these people's potential to create true value by encouraging and enriching grifters, middlemen, timewasters, morons, usurers, rent-seekers (you know who all these terms apply to).

>>23043229
Bullshit jobs are desk jobs that don't create anything real or material. And software is nothing real or material. I don't see why the HR in my company is more useless than me, we do both desk jobs and create nothing.

>>23040357
I know 4chan thinks they’re geniuses and all normal people are retarded but your simply just wrong. Most normies know bullshit jobs exist and don’t do anything. It’s just that everyone is used to it and mostly thinks of a job is something you just use to put food on the table and your real life is outside the job, it doesn’t matter at this point and is just another weird (and a bit sad) quirk of reality. Of course there are people that want a job that actually does something and that’s why they become doctors or engineers or some shit.

>>23043361
Where did you get that definition? If you read Graeber, or anyone else who talks about this topic, you will see that it's not based on whether you "create anything real" or not - it's based on the job's necessity or usefulness for society as a whole. Obviously we are not retarded enough to be saying "jobs that don't create material products are not necessary for society". That would be an insane, autistic argument. In fact, there are plenty of bullshit jobs that DO create real, material products. The problem is that those products are bullshit products - they don't do anything useful or help anybody. An effective HR person in an organization that is actively innovating or improving society would be highly valued by Graeber and others who use the "bullshit jobs" concept. The point is not that "HR is bad". It's a larger point about the kinds of industries that make money and survive and are encouraged.

>>23043361
Yeah but that's the window that all the real grifters like scrum and agilefags use to enter the conversation. "Software is incorporeal so how can you prove that my micromanagement science is any less effective?"

>>23043066
Are you aware that you build up fitness from doing physical exercise? You don't go home dogtired from a physical job. When I worked an office job I'd probably go home more tired as a result of atrophy, lethargy and mental tedium (if only in keeping my mind away from the existential nothingness that comes creeping in with boredom)

>>23040371
The first chapter of Bullshit Jobs basically states that most people in these jobs are aware of how useless they are, it's a major premise of the book. The fact that people feel useless makes them feel undeserving of better treatment.

>>23040723
retard

>>23040357
>But is there any book that explains why normies think its normal?
Uh....you mean with that much specificity? Not that I know of. If you mean, are there any books about how normals generally aren't meta-analytic, yes, the entire western philosophical tradition is predicated upon that.

>>23043402
This is true
I had far more energy when I was blue collar

>>23043379
>it's based on the job's necessity or usefulness for society as a whole
Why does a job have to be useful for the whole society to not be considered a bs job? What if there are 50 people in the country that like to pay a dominatrix to shit in their mouth? It's useless for society as a whole, but not for those guys.

>That would be an insane, autistic argument. In fact, there are plenty of bullshit jobs that DO create real, material products. The problem is that those products are bullshit products - they don't do anything useful or help anybody.
Then nobody would buy them and the business would vanish. But if they can keep producing, it means it's useful for plenty of people.
By your logic there should be no niche products or services.

>>23043376
This. There is still a large chunk of the population who doesn't get how fake our economy is (i.e. crotchety middle aged women who say shit like "kids these days don't want to come to work"), but a lot of us actually do. I just wish there was more of an official acceptance of this, if we stopped pretending that these jobs matter then more people could be allowed to do something like read a book at their desk instead of pretending to work the whole time, and maybe get some more days off.

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>>23043801
Stop spamming/flooding, schizo

>>23042344
its not that private companies are automatically efficient. but we live in a mixed economic system where governments are involved in almost every part of the economy and lot of the inefficiency comes from them. governments often wont let businesses fail when they should.

I sympathize with the premise of Bullshit Jobs, but it its arguments generally aren't rigorous/evidence-based enough to elevate it above polemic.

>>23043754
Mad cuz unable to maintain the gains from previous generations

>>23043801
thanks, I enjoyed this. felt topical.

>>23040357
How did we go from Boomers lamenting not being productive in their high paying cubical jobs to Zoomers/Millennials ripping each other to pieces to get these jobs? what happened?

>>23040357
It's fairly simple to figure out without reading a book about it. With technology that boosts efficiency of production and global trade that boosts efficiency of transport, the necessary and valuable goods and services are made cheaper and more rapidly with as little human labour than ever. When you delegate work to machines and immigrants there just isn't as much need for people to work in those services, trades and crafts. It's a natural progression in (capitalist) democracies where the goal is to preserve the life of all citizens in it and give them the freedom to consoom as much as they want on their free time. Naturally the demand of consooming a bunch of meaningless and useless shit creates jobs to supply those demands.

People know somewhere inside themselves that something is wrong, but there's not much to so about it except get a "real" meaningful job (but those are limited and often require hard manual labor that can break your back), become some edgy revolutionary like Ted K and rot away in prison, become homeless or move to a third world country where there's demand for real jobs because the infrastructure and economy is so shit there. But no one wants to be homeless or live in a shithole country. So we keep going along with it and for social reasons put on an act as if we're doing something important.

The issue is also existential. We don't want to think about how meaningless our lives are, so we hurry to work, do our job, socialize, consoom, eat, sleep and shit and die. And we want to do this as safely and comfortably as possible as aesthetic people (read Either/Or). It's rhetoric (read Rhetoric and Persuasion) and surrogate activities we use to escape, ignore and suppress the feelings of meaninglessness.

>>23044298
There’s no Shire (community) anymore to feel that community ‘shame’ in the alienation, why should they? their community is a walmart now. Zooms know it, millennials know it but are too low test to admit it. They just want an easy ride since they’re living in a diverse, competitive environment for living space.

>>23044298
Because the alternatives (outside of skilled trades) are manual labor and gig work, both of which are for imported helots. Imagine being born and raised in a developed country and having to work with people who got here yesterday. It means you're a failure.

>>23044331
>He thinks skilled trades aren’t going to hollowed out by immigrants too, thus lower the quality of the job like the service economy.

non-whites aren’t like Anglos when it comes to the economy, rehire not focused on making a good product, but scamming and cutting corners. That kind of worth ethic is going extinct due to demographic and cultural trends.

>>23044323
Zoomers are not woke bro, they go on tiktok

>>23044344
What?

>>23044341
My point was you can be a plumber or electrician or contractor and make more than credentialed email readers at SlopCorp. Those jobs still have natives doing them, unlike say being a delivery/rideshare driver. In cities especially, there is a caste system, there are jobs never done by the native-born; if you are doing one of those jobs you essentially are from a line of failures.

>>23044360
What is this ‘caste system?’

>>23044344
Zoomers are more extreme than millennials, this goes in both political directions. Being employed might mellow them out as they will be acculturated to dealing with other people and no longer developing opinions in a vacuum with no skin in the game

>>23044369
There are jobs which are strongly correlated with ancestry, immigration status, etc. This is obvious if you live in a major city.

Living in the modern world feels like sitting in a chair, watching as a prison is slowly being built around us and all the while 'violence is wrong, violence is wrong, violence is wrong' plays on repeat over a speaker.

>>23044379
Caste system or not, the fact that liberal democracies profess egalitarianism while replacing old hierarchies of birth, caste, religion with a new hierarchy of wealth and 'meritocracy', actually creates a legitimacy problem inherent to them: How can privilege and wealth be defended?

>>23044407
Just create a bunch of pseudoscientific propaganda about how the rich are smarter and more deserving and hope they don't teach kids about social darwinism in school anymore

>>23044411
But if the pseudoscience myth of the rational, individual agent of classical liberal economics (if he exists) would actually be a kind of asocial and ahistorical psychopath. But In reality, people are products of the society they are brought in and deeply embedded in and motivated by socially conditioned values.

>>23044407
>actually creates a legitimacy problem inherent to them
ok, go be legitimate somewhere else then, the deal has always been you get to be the slave and your children and their children get to do better, the only crisis is if the engine stops or if immigration crosses a certain threshold, last time it did we effectively froze immigration for 40 years in the US; there will come a day when Ecuadorian Americans are giving orders to Angolan migrants on behalf of Italian Americans hired by Jewish Americans married to Anglo-Dutch Americans. And if not, something went wrong and we're speaking Mandarin

>>23044429
>the deal has always been you get to be the slave and your children and their children get to do better,
Any moment now the graphs lines will go up

They think it’s normal because this sort of job has always existed. It’s just never been occupied by the majority of the population. You know? It’s like asking why they would think it’s normal if most everyone was engaged in non-bullshit labor jobs. They’re just typical sorts of jobs.

>>23044441
You also have to keep in mind that reddit, blind, 4chan never existed in the past so people couldn't come together and go "hey I do nothing all day while being surrounded by a bunch of people who also do nothing, anyone else do that?" The public image of the desk job was generally pretty clean

>>23044407
maybe they should just stop professing egalitarianism because it's obviously not reality nor will it ever be.

>>23040357
>yet you dont see any book explaining how people are just ok with that
People value the reward from work (status and money) far more than the work itself and the most coveted "job" is getting the money without any work. So it would make sense that society tries to achieve this.
If I remember correctly from other discussions, the author lists out these non-jobs and one of the categories is basically a useful idiot that exists to stand between executives making decisions (at the highest level the work is simply to understand what is happening inside and outside the company and force the company to act on that) and idiots trying to intervene.
I would guess that the latte secretaries are hired expressly to be idiot do-nothing morons. It's just that the morons exist purposefully as a barrier, to do nothing. Say an executive would get 100 emails a day, five might be actually important and 30 might be from environmentalists or scammers and the latte girl's job is to make sure all of those 30 emails get to someone that isn't important (her) instead

>>23044455
Wat. What were the bullshit jobs in bronze age civilization?

>>23044455
>hey I do nothing all day while being surrounded by a bunch of people who also do nothing, anyone else do that
this would be too much cognitive dissonance to accept so these do-nothing people instead focus on the 5% of their day that's "work". Any by "focus" I mean "dwell on" in hindsight. These people don't so much live in the present as they do misremember the past

>>23044481
Probably house slaves, if you have to know

>>23044481
Oh yes the one singular division in all of human history "post-social media" and directly before that "bronze age civilization"

>>23044481
Meant for >>23044441

But in reply to >>23044455
You know, people conversed before Reddit existed, anon... And there were movies like Office Space in the 90s, for example. People knew some jobs were bullshit. They just don't give a damn. They get their money for sitting somewhere 9-5 and pressing buttons, and making a living is all they need.

>>23044438
Keep coping Ivan/Chang, people hate living in your country and they've hated it for 200 years

>>23044513
>well I am statistically worse off in every quantifiable way compared to my parests generation but did you consider CHINA AND RUSSIA?

>>23044492
Huh, I don't think that's an example of a bullshit job. It wasn't work that could be automated back then. It was just necessary physical labor, like any other "job" at the time.
Or if you mean sex slaves, I dunno. Are prostitutes bullshit jobs? I guess maybe.

>>23044524
I'm not you. I am better off than my parents were. My graph lines are up.

>>23044540
Paraphrasing my professor
>in the Late Roman Republic people began to worry more about wealth and comfort than hard work
I wouldn't think that bullshit jobs were a mainstay in a society but rather seem to multiply after a certain point of success. I'm sure many administrators of God-king pharaohs and many Mesopotamian scribes counted as "bullshit jobs", at least compared to their contemporary farmers or brick-makers.
> Are prostitutes bullshit jobs? I guess maybe
Probably not brothel prostitutes but ornamental slaves surely were.

>>23044562
That's why I said statistically, I'm addressing your premise retard

>>23044524
You are worse off compared to the people who died of the plague in 1000 AD and at least they didn't know better so they died with more dignity than us.

>>23044540
>>23044571
They're related concepts, but unnecessary jobs are different from bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs aren't even useful in the context of providing luxury or comfort, they're jobs that are actually fucking useless and could be abolished outright with some simple restructuring without depriving anyone of anything (other than the employee themselves, obviously). An example the book gives (I read the first few chapters, wasn't gripped) is a military sub-contractor who gets assigned to drive 3 hours to turn on a power switch because the contract says the military guys at the station aren't allowed to do it themselves. We're talking about jobs that are basically make-work.

Service and entertainment jobs resulting from excess are interesting to talk about but their existence makes logical sense, whereas the existence of literally useless make-work jobs in a supposedly free enterprise system violates our understanding of economics and is a genuine head-scratcher.

>>23044608
Statistics are fake and gay. Anyway the original point is that bullshit jobs are competitive for younger workers because odds are you are a low-status third world recent arrival if you can't get one. Boomers already have these jobs and won't retire. Not going argue with you about inflation or purchasing power, if you delivery groceries you are lower status than an email reader and make less money. Your children have a shot at becoming email readers, or perhaps Ai button pressors.

>>23041163
>Isn't this basically what Marx talks about when he mentions alienation? Like there's too many degrees of separation from the laborer and the thing they're producing for them to tangibly really perceive the impact of their work? Is this just a feature of the industrial world?
The short definition (according to Marxists.org) is the "transformation of people's own labour into a power which rules them as if by a kind of natural or supra-human law. The origin of alienation is commodity fetishism – the belief that inanimate things (commodities) have human powers (i.e., value) able to govern the activity of human beings."

It's a feature of the industrial world yeah but the way I took this is, for example, in the form of the consumer society. As the products of our labor (which is a collective human activity) become split off or "alienated" from the producers, they come to take on "alien" seeming qualities in the form of commodities which stare back at us (physically in the case of goods sitting on store shelves), and come to possess meaning (which humans also give commodities) like fetish objects in primitive religions, which we buy back to regain. Human beings are strong, intelligent, creative and independent but those virtues become alienated (transformed, split off from us) into commodities and we have to buy the stuff to "be" those things again. You see this in commercial advertising all the time, you gotta have the truck to be tough:
https://youtu.be/JPBpZCTRM0I

Relationships between humans become mediated through the relationship of things. I suppose this is also where "the fear of falling behind" and "keeping up with the Joneses" comes from. Anyways, part of this too is that work ceases to be the center of our creative lives. We feel at home when we're not at work, and we're at work when we're not at home. People feel a release at the end of the working day, and they pick up work not out of a creative passion (and if they do, over time they lose their passion as it becomes just another job, as they're working for the inhuman logic of the market), because they have to go to work to enjoy the things they do when they're not at work... but the more they work, the less time they have to enjoy the things.

The situation people are in under industrialized capitalism is inherently "contradictory." But I see it, and I think this is what he was getting at, is that a kind of inhuman "invisible hand" logic has taken over and rearranges human beings to serve its purposes. So these socialists in the 19th century were thinking of socialism as a futuristic society where human beings would take over this "machine" and tell *it* where to go, rather than working for the "machine" and having it tell *us* where to go, and work and creativity and play would all become sort of intertwined in the Culture novels by Iain Banks or something like that. I don't know what Graeber would've thought about it though.

>>23044429
Too bad this arrangement will never work. The elites know this. That's why they're bailing out and building bunkers in Hawaii.

>>23044865
those bunkers and the wealth they are monuments to are useless without the USG, it's just neurosis

>>23044007
if you had a job you would have seen the evidence

>>23043737
Well then that book is wrong because it lacks common sense, and so do you, retard.

>>23040357
>Written by a jew
Pass.

>>23047110
>david grabbler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PC8Luqiws

>>23040357
Is the book good

>>23040357
>Why they see videos of tiktok HR girls showing their routine of drinking cappucino and strolling on segways and dont get mad?

You know why no one gets mad while watching those videos? Because everyone understand they are basically ads that companies create to attract workers. It's not real. They do not genuinely live these lives.

If you had worked in a corporate environment for a few years you would know that the only reason workers are hired is to generate money, the more money you can squeeze out of them the better. No one is willingly paying someone that does not generate money.

The problem isn't that bullshit jobs do not generate money, and are therefore useless to companies, because they do, and are therefore deemed useful.
The problem is that our economy is no longer attached to value production. Speculation and manufactured needs are the norm, and these are the reason why so many people earn money while producing nothing of value for anyone.

>>23044970
You wont be able to build a boat that will be able to cross the Pacific to reach them once everything goes down the shitter.

>>23040357
>capitalism bad
How is it capitalism's fault? Isn't it more government intervention's fault? If there was a true free market without subsidies and all that bullshit the bullshit jobs would be inefficient and eliminated. Since there would be no government protection for firing people, they'd be fired on the spot.

>>23043361
Software IS real. If you're an artist, you can make a beautiful digital picture, it already existed before you printed it out.

>>23049311
I'm pretty sure if the ancient Polynesians were able to do it, a post-nuclear/post-demon-invasion people could do it.

>implying capitalism bad is wrong
capitalism is bad is the final redpill hiding in plain sight

Wow /lit/ had no insight here

>>23040413
I never paid attention to the improvised crossbow in the cover but now that I did, it's probably rather genius. I interpret it as symbolism for the amount of dead time which one experiences in these bullshit jobs to the point that they play around with pencils and rubber bands out of sheer boredom.
I admit that this interpretation is probably incorrect since nowadays most people play on their phones though.

>>23040536
>and read and study extensively for several years, as this will increase your focus and ability to think for yourself.
what should i read and study?

>>23040371
>Wife and kids
Welp, problem identified

>>23040357
>Tfw got to work from home during pandemic
>did my work twice as fast plus saved money on gas
>now told I have to come into the office or else
>why????
>local news running articles about downtown businesses going broke
>city hall complaining about closures of offices
I bet it has something to do with real estate prices too but the pandemic lockdowns proved everything Graeber said was right. Also it revealed how bs all the environmental talk is because now I gotta drive my car into a traffic jam hellscape three times a week.

>>23050750
>why????
because management are control freaks
there are some jobs where spontaneous meetings can be worthwhile (R&D types of jobs), which would necessitate in-person work
also there are some jobs without well defined KPIs (like widgets assembled per hour), in which case how can anyone know if you really are working?

ITT: Greedy third worlders defending a system that exploits them

You will never be white or rich rajesh/nikolajovicziocz/chang

>>23050750
Combination of commercial real estate (both from the investor side and the "we paid billions for this tower so you better fucking use it" side), power tripping executives/management and middle management needing to justify their own bullshit jobs.
Work from home is the only mass benefit workers (and still not close to all) have received in decades and was the single positive to come from the tyrannical behaviour of 'the elite' during The Pandemic™.
In my opinion it's really quite illuminating to see how they detest it.

>>23040357
Yeah I mean his take is a very much rooted in his discipline. He’s adding nuance to the misconception that we live in a hyper-efficient, rational choice driven capitalist economy. Nothing that he says is that surprising if you’ve spent any time reading other anthro shit.

I left my ”get paid in the highest percentile for my age to write one line of code a day in a bank palace or from home job” to study math and live with my parents and l’m more sane and happy now than then, although I fear my eventual return to the clutches of neoliberal capitalism since I’m definitely not the smartest in competition to get an academic position (which would also involve bullshitisms anyway)

>imagining myself as a successful scifi and fantasy writer being interviewed at a talk show and being humble and funny
It hurts bros. Why is the middle of a book the hardest fucking part to write?

>>23040357

All jobs are "bullshit". Payment of all kinds is a Government facility, exactly as currency itself is. Moreover, that which is "produced" is itself the supreme Government facility.

>>23040357
>why can't the fish see the water?
cause they're fish

>>23049757
Read The Technological Society by Ellul. Technique is the devil that you seek, not capitalism.

>>23049546
In a (completely free and ideal) market, assuming it could in some way enforce the required laws without a state, there is still a need for bullshit jobs because a market does not only need supply (i.e. production) but also demand (i.e. consumption) in order to yield profits and accumulate capital. The economy has to provide the people with money so they can actually buy stuff. If everything becomes more and more efficient (as would be the underlying assumption in advocating for unrestrained markets) there is more and more the need to create bullshit jobs for demand to keep up with the supply.

>>23051472
>French author
Does he babble on and on with an unnecessarily abstracted prose and retarded allegories for a point he could have made in 10 pages or is it legitimately a good read?

>>23051482
No, it's completely transparent.

>>23051486
I'll check it out, cheers anon

I work an absolute bullshit job and I have great anxiety about not actually doing anything and every day I assume that they're just going to fire me. I've been drunk this whole week and I just send smilies to people on Slack for a few hours while watching porn and drinking beer.

The weird thing is that no one really complains about it, sometimes I think that no one actually realizes what I'm even supposed to do.

>>23051473
That doesn't make sense, the sales growth would not equal the money you're wasting on salaries for the bullshit jobs.

>>23053122
You're thinking microeconomics. From that perspective sales would never cover wages.

I live in a shithole country. Having a decent income defines if you're going to live without worries of with the constant fear of getting shot or robbed on your way to work.
I'm in a bullshit government job that pays me very well for just for upload and organize some video files and I don't feel guilty about it.
My only concern is that I not doing something meaningful to me. I really don't care about the society. Things here are so fucked up that it's hard to have some collective spirit. It's the jungle law.

>>23041117
You're thinking of Luke Smith. And his theory is wrong, or at least incomplete because it only can explain labor supply and not labor demand. Companies don't make hiring decisions based on perceived needs of the macro economy

>>23040357
I wanted to like this book because I also hate work and don't like careerist people but it was too apparent that Graeber was also coming from a place of resentment and didn't really know what he was talking about. All of his evidence for jobs being bullshit came from interviews with disgruntled lower level employees, he didn't even interview a single middle or upper manager for their perspective on why companies work the way they do.

Also, bullshit office jobs exist because of organizational complexity. Consider a typical office wagie: 80% of his time may be spent on bs but if he disappeared all of a sudden you realize he was responsible for some critical monthly process that only he knew how to do and now everything is fucked. It is easier and cheaper for the company to just keep him on full time rather than contract everything out on a task by task basis.

>>23054126
If interest rates are low and money is cheap companies will hire people they don't need and hold on to people they don't need just to have them on hand in the event they need them. We've seen this exact thing play out over the past 4 years. The whole point is that the system is promoting all the wrong incentives.

According to people having read this book, being a guard is a bullshit job, because 99 % of the time you're not needed.
Military, bullshit. No reason to have a standing army when you're not being invaded.
Am I getting you guys correctly here?
Because that's what it sounds like.

I was in the army reserve in my early twenties and the level of bullshittery was off the scale.

people would be getting paid a day's wage for standing at an unused gate for 45 minutes in a random car park.

the higher ups would say "go and stand next to that gate for an hour and we'll put 8 hours down on the time sheet". so you'd get £80-£100 for doing literally nothing. and it was happening on a mass scale

>>23040357
Boomey Moneybags McBoomerson strolled into the office carrying wheelbarrows of cash and throwing bills like confetti. Being obese he asked a young lad to open the door to his car. The chauffer asked him to provide GPS directions. Frustrated McBoomerson shouted at the incompetence of the chauffer. His son, Zoomie, asked "Dad just open the google maps app or waze already!"
His eyes bulged and the old man gave the passengers the thousandth inch stare. Empty. He began shouting his accusations once more. His daughter in the uber next door did the same. Daddy's densest little girl was EMPOWERED.
AH THE WONDERS OF CORPORATE AUTHORITY.

In The Bell Curve Dr Murray remarks how the majority of Americans are too dumb to have basic middle class values.
That is the ability to show up to work on time and do bare minimum orders. That is asking for a lot for these people. They feel proud to accomplish nothing.
Remember Nietzsche's last man? The ubermensch lost the war and the last man has grown fat in the spoils.

>>23040357
>is there any book that explains why normies think its normal?
Do you want to put in your best 100% effort every single day for 55 years (probably forever for millennials) just to have a few hours per day to yourself or anything you might actually enjoy? No? Then you figured out why normalfags are fine with bullshit jobs. Also they don't want to rock the boat and risk ruining a good thing. There you go, no book required.
>w-well uhh if I was employed i would always be top of form like my idol julius ebola
Nigger you browse 4chan, nobody here is the peak of anything let alone putting in effort.

>>23056071
"Yeah...super"

Every American classroom ever:

>>23054898
I think the guard in the book wasn't even supposed to pull a fire alarm. If he saw a fire he was supposed to leave the room like everyone else.

>>23056087
What does a man like this do for work. Is he happy?

>>23054898
Jefferson argued, "Standing armies [are] inconsistent with [a people's] freedom” and “completely adverse” to the “spirit of this country.” Instead of relying on the potentially despotic and overgrown institution of a standing military, Jefferson instead favored the use of militia.

>>23054898
Yep

Ever try fitting apples into your cheeks?

>>23056100
He could have any job. You'd be surprised by the kinds of people who go to conventions dressed up as superheroes.

>>23040357

Is this really the best intellectual argument you can fathom?

It's nothing to do with these systems.

Everything revolves around the industrial revolution.

A few people can do the job that once took thousands of people.

It's not just production but transportation.

The whole world becomes interconnected due to locomotion, combustion, wires, satellites, and so on.

With all the primary jobs taken care of that leaves a huge workforce that can engage in "bullshit" or more accurately creative jobs.

That's why "modern art" is kinda awful because everyone is participating rather than just a few elite talents.

There isn't anything impressive about making something perfect anymore.

What is impressive is grandeur.

The HR people and others are simply a mandatory job because there's a never ending river of 'consumers' or customers.

These customers.... some of them are reasonable people... but many of them are absolute psychopathic monsters that are looking for someone to torment.

If you don't have an HR person to funnel those people through then it puts stress on more important people in the system.

Just like the customers the employees are also pulled from the same pool of people.

It's very common for them to hold resentment against the boss.

The boss is always a target and seeks to isolate themselves from distractions by lower tier workers because even if there are good ideas down there the number of them is too vast to listen to and make sense of.

So you have to have an HR person for the employees to talk to and a place for them to put their complaints about the other employees who disrupt the work environment.

Having the boss trying to run the company and manage the high school drama has obvious problems.

This is all so simple and straight forward that not understanding it indicates you never had any real world experience.

Most likely you've lived naïve lives of leisure and pleasure and never faced much in the way of professional hardships or pressure to perform a task that would make or break a business.

Anyway I'm sorry for interrupting you with this schizoid rank so please continue your profound thoughts how how this is a "capitalist" system or whatever.

>>23040357
generations of jew grooming to make them used to seeing work as just necessary slave labor for later