While studying at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India in 2022, I was often puzzled by the incessant paperwork we had to do to get things done. Upon getting admitted to the University online, you would have to stand in a neverending line for bureaucratic acceptance. Despite all the meticulous documentation online, you had to produce paper—a representation of what is deemed authentic.
At the end of the line, I was asked if I had an electricity bill for my previous stay in Delhi between 2018 and 2020. Frankly, I did not keep one of mine. However, the administrative staff ordained that without it, you would not have a hostel facility on campus. I protested, nonetheless. As an easy way out, the staff suggested collecting an electricity bill from someone you know and attaching it here. I complied.
Soon after, every semester, another relay of signs on paper followed. You paid your fees online. You now need to get clearances from all sources. Your library. Your department. Your school. Your hostel. And so on… In each instance, you stand in line and produce the online documentation of fee payment, which was to be approved by the administrative staff.
This relentless paper trail follows on in every sphere of Indian life. You complete your processes online, yet you must get them approved in person. While I had thought of it for a bit, I did not wholly understand why they have to make one’s life so difficult—why are these jobs of approvals even deemed necessary, despite much of the work already being done by the computers and internet?
David Graeber on the theory of bullshit jobs
Recently, I came across an essay by David Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant’, published in 2013 on Strike Magazine, an online publication.[1] Partly thanks to a friend who reads too much Graeber. In the essay, Graeber opens with the prediction of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s about how, with technological advancement, advanced countries will achieve fewer work-hour weeks.
It was supposed to be true. With more jobs now being done by machines, humans were supposed to rest—take more vacations, read more, party hard, drink wine, and spend more time with their families. But this did not happen. Instead, a new set of jobs was created to oversee what machines did.
Graeber calls most of them “bullshit jobs”: a job is meaningless and useless to society (and even those who do those jobs precisely know about it)—and yet we pretend that they are necessary. In discussing “bullshit jobs”, Graeber notes: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”[2]
In an expanded version of the essay, Graber published a book: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory in 2018.[3] In the book, the author contends that over half of all societal jobs today are pointless, and are “psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth”.[4]
What are bullshit jobs, anyway?
Building on several interviews and personal accounts, David Graber further highlights five types of jobs that he deems entirely pointless in society. “Flunkies” exist wholly to make their superiors feel important and powerful. These “flunkies” include receptionists, administrative staff, restaurant door attendants, etc. “Goons”—those who act on behalf of their employers to cause harm or issue warnings—include corporate lawyers and lobbyists.
“Duct tapers” are those who temporarily fix problems that already have permanent fixes. “Box tickers” are armchair journalists (like me) and survey administrators whose very existence sustains making things feel important when they are not all that useful. Finally, “taskmasters”—who create extra work for others who don’t need it—are leaders in companies.
But what kind of jobs are necessary anyway? And who gets to decide what is worth it? Take the example of a care worker (a nurse, for instance). What happens if, someday, in a dystopian world, all nurses have disappeared from earth? Say, there are no musicians. There are no teachers. There is no one to pick up garbage. The truck drivers are on strike indefinitely—and your food supplies are cut off. What happens then?
The absence is felt enormously. When there is something amiss, you invent it. But, say, one day, a mid-level administrator job is taken off the hierarchy of jobs; what happens then? Does one feel their absence? Many tend to make a case that the absence of many of these administrative tasks makes one’s life easier.
Keep ‘em busy!
All these jobs do not need to exist, and yet they exist. It is not like they sell sushi, produce iPhones, or clean streets. They exist because they could exist. And these “bullshit jobs” make for over “three-quarters of total employment”.[5] Well, why do they exist, then?
Graeber answers: “The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”[6]
However, Graeber adds that there is a “profound psychological violence” to doing “bullshit jobs”.[7] How does it make one feel when they know that their job is profoundly useless? It could create a deep resentment towards their work—perhaps bottled up.
The advent of AI and the emergence of “bullshitness”
In thinking harder about the bullshit jobs, I think of the ways in which the Indian system works. Most modern buses in India have a “stop button” in them, yet no one uses them. Moreover, no one thinks they need to use them. In that vein, you have bus conductors, who, for every next stop, whistle, bang the door, or shout at the driver to stop. They issue tickets and collect cash. But, if the Indian state were to issue kiosks inside buses and bus cards for everyone to tap as they enter and exit, a whole range of people, in one strike, would become jobless.
I wonder what would happen to a society like India, where a significant presence of joblessness is felt on an everyday basis. India’s growth story is impressive. Every once in a while, the Indian Government releases the results of quarterly GDP numbers, leaving one awestruck. However, inequality is replete. With more and more means of production now under the control of the capitalist classes, the road to equality seems distant every day.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), the rich will invariably have more means of production to lay off more people—and the joblessness will seep in deeper. I have elsewhere thought of the phenomena of joblessness with the advent of AI.
In that essay, I suggest: “The issue is whether or not AI will replace all of our work tomorrow; it is much more perverse. It entails fundamental questions of who controls these machines. Who does it tend to benefit? And if an ordinary individual does not work tomorrow because a machine elsewhere has taken over their job, how do they make their livelihood? Historically, this fundamental shift—from humans to machines—has caused increased productivity and, thereby, more money. But who gains from it?”[8]
With the emergence of AI, all jobs today are prone to “bullshitness”. This means that almost every job today can be replaced with AI and that their efficiency will be much more inordinate—and efficient. AI can sing better. AI can paint things now. GPT systems are now able to tell better stories. (I am not sure how far they can still do anything original.)
As academics (or as anthropologists, in the case of Graeber), we think our jobs are secure—and are, after all, not very bullshit. Graeber is good; he gets read—but what about the rest of us? Bullshitness is inherent to our jobs. We produce scores of articles on a yearly basis without any intellectual value.
Barely anyone reads them. (Sometimes, the structural aspects of the paywall make it harder to access!) Nonetheless, most of what we write is barely read outside of our sphere. Sometimes, whatever we even produce in the name of a journal article barely has any heuristic value. What, then, are our jobs? (Bullshit?!)
Coming to terms with the “bullshit jobs”
Coming back to the aspect of the administrative paper trail, where you are incessantly asked to produce physical artefacts of a paper before an administrative staff, I think bullshitness is inherent to social structure now.
The administrative staff, who checks your papers, will go home peacefully at the end of their job and await their salary in their account at the end of the month. If there is any excess money left, after all the expenses, the staff could then buy a toy train for their wannabe-architect nine-year-old girl. However, this is an artificial fix.
Very soon, society will come to terms with the bullshitness of some of the jobs—and a new set of machines will replace humans. There will be more and more job displacements with AI. Two things can be thought of here.
First, at the level of AI, just because you can do something efficiently with the machine, you don’t have to do it. What’s the rush, really? I think our capitalist system is running against itself. Everything everyone seems to be in a hurry to get things done. We can reproduce a whole alt-society based on AI. But how do we tackle the problem of joblessness?
Just because we could clone humans, cloning humans is inherently unethical. Therefore, at the AI level, we need to slow down and think of the advent of AI. Sometimes, it is just good to sustain the bullshitness of jobs.
Second, at the societal level, we must forge new relations with AI and work. We need to think of ways to reconcile with technological advent. We may also need to think of a new social contract—that allows for a more equitable distribution of resources globally.
We must create a social contract that empowers society’s least beneficial and empowered. This is a big challenge for our society in today’s age. Unless we figure out what we can do if all our jobs are taken over by AI, I think we will have to reconcile with the bullshit jobs.
References:
[1] David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” STRIKE! Magazine (STRIKE!, August 2013), https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs.
[2] Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”
[3] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Penguin UK, 2018).
[4] Michael Delucchi et al., “What’s That Smell? Bullshit Jobs in Higher Education,” Review of Social Economy 82, no. 1 (January 2, 2024): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255.
[5] Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”
[6] Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”
[7] Graeber, Bullshit Jobs.
[8] Adarsh Badri, “Future of Work: When Robots Completely Take Over All Our Jobs – Adarsh Badri,” February 4, 2024, https://adarshbadri.me/philosophy/future-of-work-robots-take-over/.
Cover Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash