Another one of those situations where I couldn’t guess what 8,000 of those ~9,000 current employees do at Zoom.
Graeber wrote a book that had all the media sites saying basically the same thing at the time it came out, namely that most jobs are bullshit (and I would assume by extension white collar most of all):
I just picked this article at random, there were a bunch posted up 2018 when the book came out.
Since bullshit jobs make no economic sense, Graeber argues, their function must be political. A population kept busy with make-work is less likely to revolt.
Who are the secret masterminds of this grand scheme? The stone cutters?
It’s more insidious and way more amusing than a secret cabal. It’s a collective unspoken agreement by all concerned there’s nothing better to replace late stage make believe capitalism so we’ll all collectively do a performative version of work and act like we’re all doing something productive worthy of being paid.
The weird thing for me is that i don’t know who has done them or where these bullshit jobs exist. Most, maybe, every, job i’ve ever had is more or less Money+Work+Time=>Production+Income. This feels like a complaint by the non-technical creating non-technical jobs in a technical economy and doubting those jobs have value. I mean, i’m guessing, not really sure. I mean abstractly they probably don’t. All those marketers and influencers and creative types in Google are probably “ornaments” to the fundamental level stuff by the coders and engineers, without which none of that non-technical work would even exist. I mean that’s pretty much Elon Musk’s whole premise with Twitter, that he can burn out 75% of the company as dross and keep only the engineers and programmers. I’m pretty sure those food delivery guys biking in NYC to bring tech workers their sammies are operating as close to 100% efficiency as they can. I have no doubt that swimming in finance investor capital, tech companies probably do have thousands and thousands of “soft” jobs that decorate the house, so to speak, but don’t build it, because they have so much money available and so many spots to fill. But i don’t know, and i wouldn’t know where to look for them. I don’t know anyone doing a BS job.
So you are essentially suggesting a mass hallucination.
I mean, I guess that’s possible.
Not at all likely, but I guess it’s theoretically possible.
Then you’ve had the good fortune to never work in a large corporation.
I like that, capitalism as a mass hallucination fits into my very favorite description of how talking about it is about as possible as describing water to fish.
It seems like it starts with the presumption that the only “real” jobs are the ones that actively improve the human condition. I guess they want everyone to be curing cancer or something.
Actors, chefs, game designers, etc. aren’t “real” jobs in that sense, but since humans have moved past the hunter/gatherer phase and learned about specialization and trade, we now have free time to make our own personal lives better.
That essay also seems to suggest that every company in the world is conspiring together to distract people by offering jobs. I mean it’s just ludicrous to suggest that Amazon is hiring hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers because of some back-room deal with…THEM…to keep the population under control.
It’s nonsense.
You can be a socialist (the good kind) without falling into this conspiracy theory trap. You want a UBI? There are a lot of good arguments for it. None of them have anything to do with this junk.
Don’t look at me, you’re the one wondering what 8,000 people are doing at Zoom.
I feel like this crap is caused by the same underlying societal mental illness that results in the history channel being dominated by decidedly non historical nonsense.
There seems to be a (growing?) portion of the population who wants to believe in crazy conspiracy theories.
The collective delusion is the finance markets ability to create money from nothing (see IHC, International Holding Company, that has gone from 200million to 236bn in five years, yet seems to be insider / family trades only, is almost impossible to buy, isn’t listed on an exchange, and doesn’t exist to launder money so much as create money).
EBay laying off 500
It comes down to the question of how much of the output of capitalism you believe is ultimately wasteful. If you sift through a land fill, you’re going to conclude that an awful lot of the output is wasteful. If the output is wasteful, then many of the people producing the output are wasting their time, so it follows that their jobs are bullshit jobs.
Then look at the enterprises where there arguably isn’t any actual product at all. Financialization firms. Marketing and advertising concerns. Consulting firms.
Then look at the activities in companies that genuinely have products, but where many of the activities don’t really seem to bear on producing those products at all. The cycle of outsourcing everything, then 3-5 years later insourcing it all back. The cycle of let’s build a new enterprise management system, then let’s replace the people who had that idea with someone with a totally new idea. The cycle of let’s buy our biggest competitor and realize the synergies, then let’s kill all the product lines we inherited from that acquisition and decide we don’t really want to be in that business.
There are a lot of pointless jobs out there. It’s a big reason people are disappointed and unhappy in their work. They understand that what they’re doing doesn’t really matter.
Great use of the word “deep.” Also from that story:
A cut of 7,000 jobs represents about 3% of its global workforce.
Whoops beaten to the post
Yahoo laying off 20% or 1600
Wow. I used to work there. News says they’re mostly cutting in their ads group. How do they plan on making money? What the heck does Yahoo even do now?