
Review of _Bullshit Jobs_ - brannerchinese
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review
======
knolan
I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting
bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering.
Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as
something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and
passed off as innovation.

Edit: you can read more about the idea here.

[https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT...](https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT75&dq=bull+shit+jobs+“duct+tape”&source=bl&ots=xL4O7mlGMW&sig=5d3WPf8btLridL9RopkQiqGCmno&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHiczZiaTbAhWksKQKHacYCz8Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=bull%20shit%20jobs%20“duct%20tape”&f=false)

My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work
doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many
programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting
stuff.

My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat
transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for _disruption_ by buying
a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they
redesigned the computer.

Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.

~~~
heydenberk
Other 'bullshit jobs' including making trains and toasters and ladders by
taking existing components like nuts and bolts and simply welding them
together.

I've always wanted to like David Graeber. Superficially, he seems like a
smart, rigorous, heterodox left-wing thinker. But his work is intellectually
bankrupt more often than not. Brad DeLong has been doing the hard work of
breaking down Graeber's facile arguments and incorrect information for years.
Here's one blog post to look at if you're curious.
[http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-
th...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence-
of-high-quality-delong-smackdowns-back-to-david-graeber.html)

~~~
davidgraeber
Why are people such suckers?

Brad DeLong is a self-proclaimed troll and a proven serial liar. He for some
unfathomable reason decided to go gunning for me despite my never having met
him or interacted with him in my life; he started by spewing outright personal
slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I could figure
out) until I pointed out false personal aspersions were actionable; so then he
appears to have decided to go after the book instead. The first time I tried
to correct one of the obviously false statements about my work that appeared
on his blog, providing irrefutable evidence (he claimed Giovanni Arrighi had
never said something I'd attributed to him, I produced a quote from Arrighi
saying exactly what I'd claimed), he simply cut the part with the evidence out
of my response (he carefully edits the comment section). After that I blocked
him on twitter and stopped even looking at his blog. I thought eventually he'd
get bored and go away, but bizarrely, he kept it up for literally years. He
stalked me online, showing up to attack me whenever my name was mentioned
prominently in a public debate, on twitter, he made up dummy eggshell accounts
to try to trick me into engaging with him, he'd pretend I was arguing with
him, knowing I couldn't see his tweets (people showed them to me later), he'd
take tweets I'd made in arguments with others and putting them on his blog
pretending they were addressed to him, and otherwise behaved in a totally and
frankly rather unhinged fashion. Finally, again, knowing I'd blocked him and
had refused to interact with him for years at that point, he created a twitter
bot to attack me every day for a month, each tweet ending with "stay away!" \-
i.e., pretending he wasn't the one stalking me but the other way around.

So the man is irrefutably a liar. You can believe his other claims about my
scholarly work if you like.

In fact, most of the "factual errors" he claims to have found are either
differences of interpretation, downright misrepresentations of my position, or
points so trivial it's somewhat flattering that's the best he managed to find.
Example: he once posted an entire blog post just to say my interpretation of
the Sumerian principles called "me" was incorrect. When I showed this to one
of my best friends, who is a Mesopotamianist, the friend started laughing out
loud. Nobody, he said, really knows what the "me"s are. There are a half dozen
interpretations. The one I adopted was the most widely accepted one but sure,
he said, lots of people have other ones. I think the biggest actual mistake
DeLong managed to detect in the 544-odd pages of Debt, despite years of
obsessively flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential
appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I thought it was
one, actually it's three. Yup. Guilty as charged. I got the number wrong. The
difference between 1 and 3 had absolutely no bearing on the point I was making
in the sentence in question. But DeLong has triumphantly trumpeted this again
and again as proof that I'm an ignoramus. In other words, he's still not
managed to find anything really substantial wrong with the book.

Frankly, this is a transparent and rather pathetic game. Anyone who goes
through a long book on diverse topics will be able to find some things they
can hold out and say are "errors." Just to show how easy the game is to play,
just in the course of his trolling me, DeLong managed to himself make more
glaring errors than he managed to come up with in 544 pages of text. Some were
genuinely embarrassing. Let me recall a few offhand:

1\. he claimed that Switzerland doesn't have an air force (it does)

2\. he claimed that Jeremy Bentham's body is preserved in London School of
Economics (everyone who knows anything about Bentham knows his body is in
University College London, LSE didn't even exist when he died - and this guy
is an economic historian?)

3\. he was completely unaware that the bubonic plague struck Medieval Europe
more than once - which, again, for a professional economic historian, is
incredibly embarrassing. I mean this is very very basic Medieval History 101
stuff. And he was just totally clueless.

I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out
there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation,
and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some
things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance
of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want
to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to
consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall
Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you
might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different
scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book,
attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians,
Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do
you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work
full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic
historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to
discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the
argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you
think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at
the Bank of England.

Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried
to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I
guess I have to explain what's really going on.

~~~
heydenberk
> Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried
> to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't,
> I guess I have to explain what's really going on.

After reading your response and digging into this a bit further, I retract my
previous comment and no longer put any stock in Brad DeLong's intellectual
honestly. I apologize for spreading it further.

~~~
davidgraeber
Thanks much for saying. I mean it's understandable. It wouldn't normally occur
to anyone that someone that reputable - professor at Berkeley, former Treasury
official - would also be an internet troll. In fact he might be the only
person I know of in a position that reputable who behaves the way he does. But
he does.

~~~
jbdelong
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republi­can)
computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming
little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each
other's garages..."

~~~
davidgraeber
Yes, DeLong, we all know there was a garbled sentence in the first edition
that was instantly removed the moment anyone noticed it. The only reason
anyone has heard of it since is because you have reproduced it probably 457
times in a your endless attempts at defamation.

Look, I don't know you, DeLong, and I don't know or particularly care why you
have decided to go on a five-year mission to use whatever dishonest means you
can think of to destroy another scholar's intellectual reputation (a mission
at which you seem to have failed pretty miserably, considering some of the
honours I've noted above), but I'm starting to get tired of this. Your first
effort at outright personal libel constituted an obvious potential legal case.
The endless dishonesty about the book is less clear ground from a civil law
perspective, but from the point of view of professional ethics, it's a very
clear case of a violation, in fact, short of actual plagiarism, it's about the
clearest case of a violation of professional ethics I can imagine.
Universities have ethics codes, Berkeley does too, and using calculated
dishonesty to try to defame another scholar, with clear and even admitted
malicious intent - let alone, doing it perhaps a hundred times - isjust the
kind of violation over which it is possible to make a formal complaint. Do you
really want me to have you hauled up before your university's ethics board?
Because I'm seriously considering it.

(Oh and there's no point in taking down the tweets and blogs containing the
most obvious, demonstrable lies because I have screen-shots.)

------
thefsb
Here are the first 3 paragraphs of the section on Duct-tapers from Chapter 2.

[https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK](https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK)

This was striking for me because I immediately thought that all the stuff I've
authored for salt, ansible, grunt, etc. is duct tape. And I hated doing that
work. I always did.

It's necessary and necessarily complex but a lot of the complexity is because
fitting all this stuff together is going to be a mess no matter what. We can
argue about better and worse approaches to managing the complexities (micro-
services, whatever) but it's still complex and I resent that.

------
jadedhacker
Link to the original essay: [https://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

------
brannerchinese
Review of _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber_; review by Eliane Glaser

> As well as documenting personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society
> that has forgotten what it is for. Our economies have become “vast engines
> for producing nonsense”. Utopian ideals have been abandoned on all sides,
> replaced by praise for “hardworking families”. The rightwing injunction to
> “get a job!” is mirrored by the leftwing demand for “more jobs!”

------
platz
Off topic

~~~
jwilk
From the HN guidelines:

 _Please don 't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is
spam or off-topic, flag it._

------
IshKebab
> people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills but
> because we want to contribute something meaningful to society.

That is a pretty extraordinary claim!

