The Utopia of Rules On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Needed a better editor. Was also hoping for a more rigorous research into the roots, causes, and answers to bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is the dominant structure in adult life throughout the world. And everybody hates it, including the people nominally in power. How does that work? This book is his answer and is full of his usual sparkling sentences and big dubious historical claims: The organization of the Soviet Union was directly modeled on that of the German postal service. He is sadly not to be trusted on technical matters or in fact anything really contentious. But he's good on some other things. He notes that corporate life is just as bureaucratic as the public sector, but that corporations are rarely called bureaucracies. This is important! He further notes that left-wing utopias tend to envision vastly stifling regulation and committees as their only lever against unfairness and abuse. The book is slightly overegged - but compared to most anarchist social theory he is a model of rigour, epistemic care and systematic focus. In fact he is critical of his people's theorists and practitioners: Foucault’s ascendancy in turn was precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that both became the haven for former radicals, but that were themselves most completely divorced from any access to political power, or increasingly, even to real social movements—which gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus, the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of social power, a particular appeal. No doubt any such historical argument is a bit caricaturish and unfair; but I think there is a profound truth here. It is not just that we are drawn to areas of density, where our skills at interpretation are best deployed. We also have an increasing tendency to identify what’s interesting and what’s important, to assume places of density are also places of power. The power of bureaucracy shows just how much this is often not the case. He yields too much to standpoint theory when he is told that they had similar ideas earlier (which he hadn't read and which they didn't put so clearly). But he's fun and witty, heretical to his tribe, original as always. ...if we’re going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power — one that no longer contains either the super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.

The thread of this book often gets lost in tangents and rants but Graeber is such a sharp writer.

I didn't realize how much of this book would be a love letter to sci-fi in a weird way and yet, Graeber uses Star Trek as a metaphor in parts discussing how we never think about the bureaucracy of Starfleet. I have actually thought about this before, how Star Trek is surely depicting some kind of non-democracy society, but...anyway, this isn't as good as "Debt" but it's a worthy follow up in its own right.

I got this book hoping it would validate all my miseries about bureaucracy and its alienating effects. It provided some of that (more in the Utopia of Rules essay than the one that the book leads with), while sneaking in an intro course to anarchism among other things. Some may be frustrated by this misdirection, but I was along for the meandering path that the book took. It revealed some novel insights into our society, backed in no small part by Graeber's anthropological background with references to pop culture and historical context.