What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Research suggests that David Graeber’s Theory of Bullshit Jobs – that many workers experience their jobs as being comprised of meaningless tasks in which they have to appear productive – doesn’t entirely hold true.
Some reporting on this:
Graeber was wrong about the various trends he believed in — the percentage of bullshit jobs and their increase — but he was right about the capacity of bad managers to turn a perfectly good job into bullshit.
David Graeber finds that despite John Maynard Keynes’ prediction in 1930 that technological improvements would result in 15-hour work weeks in the Western worlds, that utopia is far from achievable. Instead, he thinks technology has been marshalled to make all of us work more, rather than less, in what he calls “bullshit jobs”:
rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
Definitely worth a read