I basically already thought that lots of jobs are bullshit, but I might skim or listen to David Graeber’s book to get more data.
It’s not really about how many jobs are bullshit, so much as what it means to do a bullshit job. On Graeber’s model, bullshit jobs are mostly about propping up the story that bullshit jobs are necessary for production. Moral Mazes might help clarify the mechanism, and what I mean about gangs—a lot of white-collar work involves a kind of participatory business theater, to prop up the ego claims of one’s patron.
The more we think the white-collar world works this way, the more skeptical we should be of the literal truth of claims to be “working on” some problem or other using conventional structures.
My intuitive answer to the question “What is a gang?”:
A gang is an organization of thugs that claims resources, like territory or protection money, via force or the threat of force.
Is that close to how you are using the term? What’s the important/relevant feature of a “gang”, when you say “CEA’s advice to build career capital just means join a powerful gang”?
Do you mean something like the following? (This is a probably incorrect paraphrase, not a quote)
A gang extracts resources from their victims by requiring they pay tribute or “protection money”. Ostensibly, this involves the victim (perhaps a small business owner) paying the gang for a service, protection from other gangs. But in actuality, this tribute represents extortion: all parties involved understand that the gang is making a threat, “pay up, or we’ll attack you.”
Most white collar workers are executing a similar maneuver, except that instead of using force, they are corrupting the victim’s ability to make sense of the situation. The management consulting firm is implicitly making the claim, “You need us. You can’t make good decisions without us” to some client. While in actuality, the consultancy creates some very official looking documents that have almost no content.
Or, in the same vein, there is an ecosystem of people around a philanthropist, all of which are following their incentives to validate the philanthropist’s ego, and convince him that / appear as if they’re succeeding at his charitable goals.
So called “career capital” amounts to having more prestige, or otherwise be better at convincing people, and therefore being able to extort larger amounts.
Am I on the right track at all?
Or is it more direct than that?
Most so called “value creation” is actually adversarial extraction of value from others, things like programmers optimizing a social media feed to keep people on their platform for longer, or ad agencies developing advertisements that cause people to buy products against their best interests.
Since most of the economy is a 0-sum game like this, any “career capital” must cache out in terms of being better at this exploitative process, or providing value to people / entities that doing the exploiting (which is the same thing, but a degree or a few degrees removed).
Most white collar workers are executing a similar maneuver, except that instead of using force, they are corrupting the victim’s ability to make sense of the situation.
I think it’s actually a combination of this, and actual coordination to freeze out marginal gangs or things that aren’t gangs, from access to the system. Venture capitalists, for example, will tend to fund people who feel like members of the right gang, use the right signifiers in the right ways, went to the right schools, etc. Everyone I’ve talked with about their experience pitching startups has reported that making judgments on the merits is at best highly noncentral behavior.
If enough of the economy is cartelized, and the cartels are taxing noncartels indirectly via the state, then it doesn’t much matter whether the cartels apply force directly, though sometimes they still do.
So called “career capital” amounts to having more prestige, or otherwise be better at convincing people, and therefore being able to extort larger amounts.
It basically involves sending or learning how to send a costly signal of membership in a prestigious gang, including some mixture of job history, acculturation, and integrating socially into a network.
If I replaced the word “gang” here, with the word “ingroup” or “club” or “class”, does that seem just as good?
In these sentences in particular...
Venture capitalists, for example, will tend to fund people who feel like members of the right gang, use the right signifiers in the right ways, went to the right schools, etc.
and
It basically involves sending or learning how to send a costly signal of membership in a prestigious gang, including some mixture of job history, acculturation, and integrating socially into a network.
...I’m tempted to replace the word “gang” with the word “ingroup”.
My guess is that you would say, “An ingroup that coordinates to exclude / freeze out non-ingroup-members from a market is a gang. Let’s not mince words.”
Maybe more specifically an ingroup that takes over a potentially real, profitable social niche, squeezes out everyone else, and uses the niche’s leverage to maximize rent extraction, is a gang.
It’s not really about how many jobs are bullshit, so much as what it means to do a bullshit job. On Graeber’s model, bullshit jobs are mostly about propping up the story that bullshit jobs are necessary for production. Moral Mazes might help clarify the mechanism, and what I mean about gangs—a lot of white-collar work involves a kind of participatory business theater, to prop up the ego claims of one’s patron.
The more we think the white-collar world works this way, the more skeptical we should be of the literal truth of claims to be “working on” some problem or other using conventional structures.
My intuitive answer to the question “What is a gang?”:
A gang is an organization of thugs that claims resources, like territory or protection money, via force or the threat of force.
Is that close to how you are using the term? What’s the important/relevant feature of a “gang”, when you say “CEA’s advice to build career capital just means join a powerful gang”?
Do you mean something like the following? (This is a probably incorrect paraphrase, not a quote)
Am I on the right track at all?
Or is it more direct than that?
Is any of that right?
Overall your wording seems pretty close.
I think it’s actually a combination of this, and actual coordination to freeze out marginal gangs or things that aren’t gangs, from access to the system. Venture capitalists, for example, will tend to fund people who feel like members of the right gang, use the right signifiers in the right ways, went to the right schools, etc. Everyone I’ve talked with about their experience pitching startups has reported that making judgments on the merits is at best highly noncentral behavior.
If enough of the economy is cartelized, and the cartels are taxing noncartels indirectly via the state, then it doesn’t much matter whether the cartels apply force directly, though sometimes they still do.
It basically involves sending or learning how to send a costly signal of membership in a prestigious gang, including some mixture of job history, acculturation, and integrating socially into a network.
If I replaced the word “gang” here, with the word “ingroup” or “club” or “class”, does that seem just as good?
In these sentences in particular...
and
...I’m tempted to replace the word “gang” with the word “ingroup”.
My guess is that you would say, “An ingroup that coordinates to exclude / freeze out non-ingroup-members from a market is a gang. Let’s not mince words.”
Maybe more specifically an ingroup that takes over a potentially real, profitable social niche, squeezes out everyone else, and uses the niche’s leverage to maximize rent extraction, is a gang.