In an automated society, there are supposed to be fewer bullshit jobs, the drudgery passed on to machines. But that hasn’t happened in our brave new world. There’s just as much toil now, and even the few excruciating tasks that have been largely disappeared–phone operator, for instance–have just resulted in the shifting of responsibilities. Twice this week I’ve heard people publicly cursing into their cells as they tried to get through a series of prompts to attain some information or other. The salaries vanished but the work did not.

The first two paragraphs from David Graeber’s excellent Strike! magazine essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs“:

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.