The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber (PDF)

Description

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber is an engaging riff on the theme of bureaucracy and the BS people think about it.”De-regulation,” of finances, Graeber points out, creates more rules, paperwork, and bureaucrats, apparently because what happens is not the equivalent of firing a bunch of factory safety inspectors, but rather the employment of enough bureaucrats to redirect control of wealth from mid-sized companies to giant conglomerates. Yet, just as people imagine criminals to be mostly black or violent, or war to be philanthropic or necessary, or estate taxes to be about family farms, or voter fraud to be impacting elections, or elections to have any value that could possibly be hurt by voter fraud, or a minimum wage to eliminate jobs, or corporate trade agreements to not eliminate jobs, or guns to make us safer, or prisons to “correct” something, or wealth to trickle down, or small-time foreign thugs to constitute a graver threat than a McDonald’s diet, what matters is a fiction well told, not any facts.Career advancement in a bureaucracy, Graeber writes, is based not so much on merit as on the loyalty exhibited by a willingness to pretend that it’s based on merit. If you play along with the collective delusion, you’re rewarded.”Globalization” is not about tearing down borders, but rather trapping people behind militarized borders within which public supports can be denied and workers can be compelled to work for little or nothing — in other words, a species of bureaucratization. The effort to create a truly borderless and fair world is known as “anti-globalization.”The “free market” means heavier bureaucracy, and an expansion of those areas of life that come under the control of state violence. This was the story of Russia’s transition from state to private economics, Graeber writes: more bureaucrats, not fewer.When police bring law and order, we picture them turning a violent situation non-violent. In fact, they are not involved in most violent crime, and mostly show up to nonviolent situations which they turn violent. You have a much higher chance of being killed by police than by the terrorists they are now mostly imagined as combatting.When someone tells you to be “realistic” about such supposed fantasies as peace or justice, they are not telling you to recognize how things are, as they and you may imagine they are, but rather they are telling you to acknowledge the violence by which the state can impose its will no matter how stupidly it might choose to do so. “Real” in this usage comes from the Spanish real meaning royal or belonging to the king, not the Latin res or thing. It is the royal usage that created such phrases as “real property” or “real estate.” The point is not that a house truly exists, but that the king ultimately owns it. To “be realistic” about violence simply means to be violent about violence. After all, we all know violence exists; some of us choose not to multiply it.Cutting taxes on “job creators” doesn’t create any jobs, just the reverse. With more wealth, they do things like taking their pay in stock options, and then using extra money that could have gone into new hires or raises or research for stock buybacks. The result is a weaker economy inhabited by people convinced it’s both a stronger economy and an inevitable economy against which one need not waste any energy struggling for change.Why don’t we have robots doing our factory work and house work? Why don’t we have useful technological advances on the scale of previous eras? Graeber writes that the most immediate reason is that 95% of robotics funding has gone through the Pentagon which has no interest in such matters and is more interested in destructive inventions like killer drones.In addition, robots are understood as job killers rather than time savers because we offer no one a guaranteed income even if they don’t need to work. We begin with the requirement that everyone work no matter what, and then figure out stuff they can do to fulfill that requirement — such as trying all day to get us to switch from one giant phone company to another.Another problem is innovative corporate culture that kills innovation by investing in only sure things, requiring everyone to invest time in PR, and multiplying bureaucracy.People are told to cling to the American freedom of private health insurance companies as an act of rebellion against government bureaucracy, even as the insurance corporations create vastly more bureaucracy, paperwork, sickness, and death.We don’t notice bureaucracy, Graeber believes, because it has mushroomed. The average American will spend 6 months of their life waiting for stoplights to change and some larger length of time filling out forms.We don’t notice bureaucracy, think we despise it, and secretly love it, Graeber thinks — love it because it is the enemy of unpredictable and improvisational play, which we’ve been conditioned to believe is dangerous. Of course, the opposite is true.The preceding is a sampling of Graber’s book and my thoughts on it, not a summary. I urge you to dive into it yourself. It’s a book that intentionally raises many large questions. A couple of small ones stand out as flaws, however: 1) Why in the world does the author keep his money in Bank of America? 2) Why does he imagine that the “War on Terror” has ended? The whole point of a war on terror is that it’s not endable, as terror can never be eliminated. Nor of course can it be outdone in terrorizing by anything moreso than war.

⭐I loved this book of essays. Graeber always writes clearly, where you can almost hear him explaining ideas, returning to examples to illustrate his theories and repeating ideas to remind you of something he mentioned before a longer tangent.The second essay is probably my least favorite of the three, but the third essay resonated with me enough that I would have given it 5 stars even if I disliked the other two essays.I hope we find playful ways of implementing the ideas discussed here. Rules can be fun to follow when you participate in the creation of them. Nobody likes to follow stupid rules.

⭐I feel disappointed, and a little betrayed. “Debt” was my most important book of the decade; A sequel on bureaucracy could be an equally ground breaking contribution. Unfortunately, this is a wandering and disconnected series of weakly researched essays that, while making a few interesting points, buries them under digressions and inaccuracies.Graeber start with the experience of having his stroke-ridden mother declared legally incompetent, disabled, and then dead, and the kafka-esque absurdity of the paperwork. This process is no less ritualized than any Malagasy funeral, but yet the Western academic tradition seems entirely incapable of understanding bureaucracy: it is a vacuum of symbols from which meaning cannot be extracted. The most powerful tools of thick description and grounded theory are like Antaeus against Hercules.Directly, Graeber postulates that violence and administration are too sides of the same coin. That behind ledgers and rulebooks is always a man with a club, and any group of men willing to do violence will have administrative support. Internally, bureaucracy is a way to concentrate power among insiders, and with nod to Feminism and Critical Race Studies, bureaucratic techniques allow those with power to avoid doing any interpretative labor; the work of figuring out what other people desire and accommodating yourself to it. Subordinates spend an immense amount of effort figuring out the minds of their masters, if only to avoid being crushed. Those in power have the luxury of entirely ignoring the whims of those under them.As a revolutionary project, Graeber seeks to revitalize the Left against the neoliberal combination of bureaucracy and extractive capitalism that he calls the ‘worst of all possible ideologies’ (think Tony Blair or Hillary Clinton). He gestures toward Imagination (with a capital I) as key, and the alliance between avante-garde artists and the proletariat as the base of the Left, but has little to substantiate this idea, or break free of old circular debates about the nature of sovereign power, or the relationship between play and rationality.Unable to analyze bureaucracy directly, Graeber has to turn to the cultural encrustations that have grown around it. Some of this stuff is spot on: did you know that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are mirror inversions of an elemental British bureaucratic hero, why all the bosses in American police procedurals are black, or the occult links between Dungeons & Dragons and the Western magical tradition and idealized Roman Law. But some of the cultural stuff misses, like his read of Star Trek or the Nolan Batman movies, and ultimately Graeber is not a natural media studies type, and this seems digressive from the point of book on bureaucracy.And when I say ‘inaccuracies’, I mean that when Graeber makes specific claims about technological history, or human cognition, or the like, the footnotes lead to a justification that everybody knows this, rather than a scholarly source. There was one moment where he talked about the rise in management jargon with a phrase like “if you traced the rise of it in business speak since 1970, you would see…” and I thought “If? Aren’t you a professor? Can’t you get an RA to run this down in a week?” The whole book is full of moments like that, and their presence makes me less confident of Debt, which is a shame.Some interesting thoughts, but not nearly enough to save the book. I’d prefer that he baked this one for another couple of years.

⭐No further delay is warranted, obtain book

⭐Depressing but in a necessary way.

⭐I really love Graeber’s sensibility and the way he makes deep and compelling explanations of aspects and operations of modern society that we either take for granted (in this case corporate and government bureaucracies) or simply don’t bother to try and explain (money and debt in his previous book on the subject) While not as comprehensive or fleshed as his masterwork on debt, this book still contains many solid and compelling arguments, such as how the gutting of the US public service and labour unions in the 80s actually created the problem of workers “going postal” since working conditions had deteriorated so badly, or the role of fantasy novels as a type of mythic justification of the modern bureaucratic capitalist state in the final chapter. Other points about the ways that bureaucracy have stifled academic and scientific creativity, and the way that bureaucratic stupidity is an expression of unequal social relations I found harder to understand and wish they had been more fully explored. Still a really solid book, and my favourite of Graeber’s since Debt.

⭐A wonderful book! Graeber manages to write in a relaxed comprehensible – even witty – style about a subject that normally kills anything like that stonedead: bureaucracy. He asks pointed and excellent questions: why has bureaucracy in fact increased exponentially, especially in the USA, UK and Europe, while every right wing commentator is noisily insisting it’s going to be reduced? Why has it extended its tentacles from the military and government and corporations to education and the rest of society? Why does bureaucracy make us act so stupidly? Do we actually secretly like bureaucracy, because it makes us feel safe inside a game with rules, even if we don’t actually understand the rules? More seriously he also examines what is the connection between state violence and Batman? And why doesn’t Middle Earth have any bureaucracy? There’s one thing I’d like to ask him: have you read any Terry Pratchett? And particularly “Going Postal” and “Making Money”, late books where the Wizard of Ankh-Morpork dares to contemplate the irruption of bureaucracy into a fantasy world? Or “Small Gods” one of the finest religious satires ever written, which contains a particularly poisonous example of the perfect bureaucrat?

⭐Stunning, informative, well written, an absolute gem.

⭐A little laboured at times, and the connection to some of the philosophical points rather tenuous but the principles of bureaucratic violence are interesting. Some of the reasoning which ascribes particular recent developments to bureaucratic intent are, it can be argued, more a limitation of technology and the thinking of those behind it.

⭐Good Quality, Would repeat

⭐Excellent book, great subject, well written, good print quality.

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