It’s been a while since I wrote these posts, and I think it’s not for lack of reading, but for lack of engaging with newer papers. I’ve been doing a lot more reading and writing for my prospectus, which majorly involves re-treading my own work as well as stuff I’ve already read and cited.
That being said, I’ve read a few books this year! Focusing on books has been an interesting change of pace than reading tons of one-off essays or papers. Taking the time to think through an idea or a set of allied concepts in this way has been calming. I like it.
I read this over the Fall and Winter quarters with our HCI+Design Book Club at Northwestern. It’s a landmark work in HCI and had been on my bucket list for a long time, so I was glad to finally get to it, and wrest with some of its more complex and thought-provoking themes in our little reading group. We read a chapter a week and the result of this was that I genuinely really enjoyed reading it and digging into its meaty bits!
Here a longer version of my notes/thoughts on it: link to notes. I cannot recommend this book enough to people who do any kind of computational systems-building!
I read this one with the book club we run as part of the Computational Journalism lab. Schellmann has written an engrossing catalgoue of the ways in which corporations use automated systems to vet potential employees and monitor extant ones1. I thought this was the kind of book that’s broad enough that it can be a nice sort of reference piece to cite in a paper, but did find parts of it a little repetitive.
I also found myself progressively irked as I made it through the book – beyond the ethics and unforeseen impacts of these surveillance technologies (which I do not mean to ignore, just that I am always irked by that), it stood out that a lot of this tech is also just junk science! Companies designing these tools suggest arbitrary thresholds on made-up metrics to measure productivity or hireability; offer little to no means for digging into the algrithmic outputs; do little in the way of demonstrating any scientific validity of the tools they build; and face no real burden of proof when marketting these tools! Instead, the burden of proof is heaped straight onto employees and potential hires, with the implicit assumption always being that if you don’t do well on these arbitrary automated tests and metrics, you are probably missing something. Not your erstwhile employer who made this your problem in the first place. The power dynamic sucks, it always has, but these tools of bad science and massive scale seem to exacerbate it so much more.
I wish the book offered more in the way of thinking about changing this system, or even challenge some of the deeper economical incentives involved, but I found it to be expansive enough in scope that this is not a real complaint.
I am not sure where to begin with a discussion of Graeber’s work, there is so much happening here. Piece by piece, this book takes apart the mythos of efficiency and productivity that pervade so many of our conversations around work. The main question seems to be this: why, in a time of so much wealth and abundance and technological advancement (at least in the U.S.), do people still need to work 40-hour weeks? The answer: skewed distributions of wealth mean that a small group of power brokers control what kind of work is deemed useful and productive. This has however led to large parts of the white-collar labour force engaging in the titular “bullshit jobs” – jobs that exist for the sole reason of giving people things to do.
He delves into different types of bullshit jobs with interviews from a wide-ranging individuals. In doing so, he talks about not only economic power and inequality, but also the psychological impacts of being engaged in such work, and the moral and theological foundations of our attitudes toward work. I was really taken with chapters 3 and 4, where he describes just how much bullshit jobs can sap workers’ joy and sense of puropose and creative energy. It’s bleak. Despite this, the books ends on a higher note, talking about the different ways in which his theory of bullshit jobs comes to life in recent policy-making and corporate decision-making (e.g. automation of white-collar work), and how we can think about making a change (e.g. via universal basic income).
It feels really really really weird that (as white-collar workers) we spend our lives worrying about performance reviews and holding down jobs, after Graeber makes the case that people actually like feeling that they’re actually doing something useful and interesting in this world. Many aspects of current social and economic policy contribute to this dissonance (more in chapters 6 and 7), but a major argument is that most workers don’t actually play a part in deciding what counts as “useful” or “interesting”, which paves the way for bullshit jobs and general unhappiness. Bullshit jobs can also proliferate and create new ones (some examples in chapters 1 and 2), compounding this problem.
I will probably re-read this in a few years. Its messaging is the kind that is easy to forget in a world besotted with productivity and career success. I want to be productive and successful, most of us do, but it is nice to hear that wanting to do it on at least somewhat your own terms makes sense! It felt like a sanity-check to read this2, and I think revisiting it after grad school, with the context of a new set of experiences, will be interesting.
I recently learnt that the use of “extant” in place of “existing” is incorrect, since the former means “surviving”. In the context here however, these qualms may not apply. ↩︎
I don’t think I have a bullshit job, to be clear. In that, I count myself lucky. However, this makes me hyper-aware of the need to preserve this state of affairs over the course of my career. Graeber also cites Orwell and states that “a population busy working, even in completely useless occupations, doesn’t have time to do much else”. Like pursue stuff they want and need, outside of work: hobbies, rights, and so forth. That is not great. ↩︎