Human Robots

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Contents

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber 7

Drones will cause an upheaval of society, by Noah Smith 13

Rise of the Bond villains, by Izabella Kaminska 19

Further reading 25

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6 CONTENTS
On the Phenomenon of
Bullshit Jobs
—
David Graeber

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.1 There’s every reason to believe he was right. In techno-
logical 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 en-
tire 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.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited
in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that
1 Source: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

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8 CONTENTS

he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the

choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve col-
lectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but
even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we
have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and
industries since the ’20s, but very few have anything to do with the
production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report com-
paring employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a
clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the
UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers
employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector
has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, man-
agerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from
one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words,
productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away
(even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling
masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large
a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to
free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures,
visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of
the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and in-
cluding the creation of whole new industries like financial services or
telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corpo-
rate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and
public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those
people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security
support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of
ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that
only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time
working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just
for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the
CONTENTS 9

mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to

happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet
Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred
duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is
why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece
of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market
competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at
least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out
money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow,
it happens.
While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs
and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actu-
ally making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some
strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried
paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more em-
ployees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working
40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours
just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organ-
ising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook
profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The
ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population
with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what
started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the
‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral
value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to
some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours
deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of ad-
ministrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came
up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individu-
als who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they
don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired be-
cause they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they
are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither
10 CONTENTS

does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very
limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they
all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some
of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets,
and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that
before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling
up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral
dynamics of our own economy.
*
Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate
objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’ ?
What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s
the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would
take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social
expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be
no objective measure of social value.
I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are
making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are
not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced
their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with
a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to
discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the
front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the
radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He
was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably
brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet,
after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and
plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it,
“taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.”
Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm.
He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, con-
tributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should
not really exist.
CONTENTS 11

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what
does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely
limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently in-
finite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of
the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call
“the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not
anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these
jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a
corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same
goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a
whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at
parties and admit that you do something that might be considered
interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even
discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and
they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their
job really is.
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even
begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s
job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage
and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that
its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers,
to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually
do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there
seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits
other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an
objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is
to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply
disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or
mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke,
the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without
teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one
without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be
a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer
were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries,
telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many
12 CONTENTS

suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of

well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this
is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of
right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resent-
ment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract
disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows
that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely
what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans
have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school
teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school
administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the
problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as
if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars!
You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to
also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to main-
taining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could
have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly
squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a ter-
rorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger
stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed
to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the
ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its
financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering re-
sentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable so-
cial value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It
emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only
explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not
all working 3-4 hour days.
Drones will cause an
upheaval of society like
we haven’t seen in 700
years
—
Noah Smith

The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change.2 It

is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our
society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no
one is paying attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence
of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to
put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun.
You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the
Age of the Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But
imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries
2 Source:http://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-
in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years/

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before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by
the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life
training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he
was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long
metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy
with a gun.
That day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning
of modernity. For centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting in-
fantry ruled the battlefield. Military success depended more and
more on being able to motivate large groups of (gun-wielding) hu-
mans, instead of on winning the loyalty of the highly trained warrior-
noblemen. But sometime in the near future, the autonomous, weap-
onized drone may replace the human infantryman as the dominant
battlefield technology. And as always, that shift in military technol-
ogy will cause huge social upheaval.
The advantage of people with guns is that they are cheap and
easy to train. In the modern day, it’s true that bombers, tanks,
and artillery can lay waste to infantry—but those industrial tools of
warfare are just so expensive that swarms of infantry can still deter
industrialized nations from fighting protracted conflicts. Look at
how much it cost the United States to fight the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, versus how much it cost our opponents. The hand-held
firearm reached its apotheosis with the cheap, rugged, easy-to-use
AK-47; with this ubiquitous weapon, guerrilla armies can still defy
the mightiest nations on Earth.
The Age of the Gun is the age of People Power. The fact that
guns don’t take that long to master means that most people can
learn to be decent gunmen in their spare time. That’s probably why
the gun is regarded as the ultimate guarantor of personal liberty
in America—in the event that we need to overthrow a tyrannical
government, we like to think that we can put down our laptops, pick
up our guns, and become an invincible swarm.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. People Power
has often been used not for freedom, but to establish nightmarish
tyrannies, in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and elsewhere. But
CONTENTS 15

Stalin, Mao, and their ilk still had to win hearts and minds to hold
power; in the end, when people wised up, their nightmare regimes
were reformed into something less horrible.
But another turning point in the history of humankind may be
on the horizon. Continuing progress in automation, especially con-
tinued cost drops, may mean that someday soon, autonomous drone
militaries become cheaper than infantry at any scale.
Note that what we call drones right now are actually just remote-
control weapons, operated by humans. But that may change. The
United States Army is considering replacing thousands of soldiers
with true autonomous robots. The proposal is for the robots to be
used in supply roles only, but that will obviously change in the long
term. Sometime in the next couple of decades, drones will be given
the tools to take on human opponents all by themselves.
Meanwhile, technological advances and cost drops in robotics
continue apace. It is not hard to imagine swarms of agile, heavily
armed quadrotor drones flushing human gunmen out of buildings
and jungles, while hardened bunkers are busted with smart muni-
tions from cheap high-altitude robot blimps. (See this video3 if your
imagination needs assistance.)
The day that robot armies become more cost-effective than hu-
man infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete. With
robot armies, the few will be able to do whatever they want to the
many. And unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced
tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may
think whatever they please, but the Robot Lords will have the guns.
Forever.
Where this scenario really gets scary is when it combines with
economic inequality. Although few people have been focusing on
robot armies, many people have been asking what happens if robots
put most of us out of a job. The final, last-ditch response to that
contingency is income redistribution – if our future is to get paid to
sit on a beach, so be it.
3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU
16 CONTENTS

But with robot armies, that’s just not going to work. To pay the
poor, you have to tax the rich, and the Robot Lords are unlikely to
stand for that. Just imagine Tom Perkins with an army of cheap
autonomous drones. Or Greg Gopman. We’re all worried about the
day that the 1% no longer need the 99%–but what’s really scary is
when they don’t fear the 99% either.
Take a look at countries where the government makes its money
from natural resources instead of human labor–Saudi Arabia, Russia,
Iran. Look at the money and effort those governments spend making
sure their people don’t rebel. What will those countries look like
when repression starts getting cheaper and cheaper? And why will
America and Europe and East Asia be different? Isn’t a nation
where the rich can get everything they need from robots essentially
suffering from the same “resource curse” as Saudi Arabia?
When we think of the “rise of the robots,” we usually think of
Skynet and Agent Smith–the evil of artificial intelligence. But that’s
not who we should be worrying about. A.I.’s–if they ever exist–may
or may not have any reason to dominate, marginalize, or slaughter
humanity. But we know that humans often like to do those things.
Humans already exist, and we know many of them are evil. It’s the
Robot Lords we should be afraid of, not Skynet.
Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and rugged individualists have
always based their visions of a capitalist paradise on the idea that the
state is the main threat to the power and freedom of the individual.
And in the Age of the Gun, that was true. But in the Age of the
Drone, that is no longer the case. When the rich hold unlimited
military power in their own two hands, who’s going to stop them
from just taking the property of everyone else? If you’re a card-
carrying National Rifle Association member, you should ask yourself
whether you’re going to be one of the Robot Lords or one of the
rest.
We can carry this dystopian thought exercise through to its ul-
timate conclusion. Imagine a world where gated communities have
become self-contained cantonments, inside of which live the beauti-
ful, rich, Robot Lords, served by cheap robot employees, guarded by
CONTENTS 17

cheap robot armies. Outside the gates, a teeming, ragged mass of

lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation. They can’t farm
the land or mine for minerals, because the invincible robot swarms
guard all the farms and mines. Their only hope is to catch the at-
tention of the Robot Lords inside the cantonments, either by having
enough rare talent to be admitted as a Robot Lord, or by becoming
a novelty slave for a little while.
This sounds like nothing more than a fun science fiction story,
but why shouldn’t this happen? Human civilization was somewhat
like this for most of our history—aristocrats feasting in their manor
houses, half-starved peasants toiling in the fields. What liberated
us? It might have been the printing press, or capitalism, or the
sailing ship. But it might have been the gun. And if it was the gun
that liberated us, then we should be very worried. Because when the
Age of the Gun ends, the age of freedom and dignity and equality
that much of humanity now enjoys may turn out to have been a
bizarre, temporary aberration.
18 CONTENTS
Rise of the Bond
villains
—
Izabella Kaminska

- Our economy needs investors like Mr Zorin. California

welcomes him with open arms.
- May I quote you on that, Mr Howe?
- Certainly. Is there anything else I can tell the Financial
Times?

The dialogue is from A View to a Kill, in which James Bond — a

la Roger Moore — poses as an FT reporter “James Stock” to figure
out whether tech billionaire Max Zorin is simply a savvy microchip
entrepreneur or a megalomaniac eugenicist with a plan to takeover
the world.4
The Bond canon provides a few other characters who, as we’ll
explain below, no longer seem quite so fantastically fictional.
4 Source:http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/05/21/1857942/rise-of-the-
bond-villains/

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There’s Hugo Drax, the owner of Drax Industries, which con-

structs space shuttles. Drax wants to destroy most of the entire
human race except for a small group of carefully selected humans
who should live in space, until they have the chance to re-colonise
the earth.

Then there’s Karl Stromberg, a shipping tycoon, obsessed with

living in his own sovereign submersible state.

Auric Goldfinger, who loves gold, and wants to make his stash
more valuable by contaminating the official gold reserves of the
United States — bringing the US money system down in the process,
mwa ha ha.

And last and not least Ernst Stavro Blofeld — overall criminal
mastermind taking on governments from his eyrie with mountain-
views in a neutral state, a volcano lair, a Las Vegas penthouse and
even an oil platform off the coast of California.

We bring this up on account of the following slides we found

tucked into the a presentation5 by Andreessen Horowitz partner Bal-
aji Srinivasan, brought to our attention by this extraordinary Baffler
piece6 on the rise of the “Silicon Reich”.

Corey Pein recounts the not-so-secret intentions of select group of

people who were created by markets. Who evolved. Who disrupted.
And who have a plan: to takeover the power bases of the world.

In the US the plan includes:

5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
6 http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_

machiavellis
CONTENTS 21

And like true Bond villains, they have lairs:

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And the great thing about hubris publishing slides is it doesn’t

take Roger Moore to expose their sovereign-busting intentions:
CONTENTS 23

Of course, if we try to stop them they might just deploy the

Skynet plan instead:

On a more serious note, the Baffler piece recounts the rise of

the so-called Dark Enlightenment, an underground movement– with
increasingly high-profile followers — focused on forwarding freedom
24 CONTENTS

through the displacement of democracy by totalitarian autocracy

(deemed much more efficient than government) and the glamourisa-
tion of geekhood in somewhat eugenist terms.
Behind the movement stand the writings of a blogger called Cur-
tis Guy Yarvin, more commonly referred to as Moldbug.
As the Baffler notes:
This plea for autocracy is the essence of Yarvin’s work.
He has concluded that America’s problems come not
from a deficit of democracy but from an excess of it—
or, as Yarvin puts it, “chronic kinglessness.” Incredible
as it sounds, absolute dictatorship may be the least ob-
jectionable tenet espoused by the Dark Enlightenment
neoreactionaries.
The Baffler concludes that for now the rantings remain an inter-
net phenomenon, though the world should be cautious of the fact
that Silicon Valley is sounding more Moldbuggian by the day.
Whether this turns out to be the making of an anacylcosis inter-
change from Republic to Empire (either in the Roman or Star Wars
sense) is consequently unclear.
For now, us little people (i.e. the Betas, Gammas, Deltas and
the Epsilions who don’t inhabit errr Alphaville7 ) can be reassured
by the fact that the Alphas don’t seem to see the contradictions in
their own plan, or the likely negative economic effects of those plans
if materialised.
Here’s hoping in any case that if nationhood is disrupted it’s not
due to the formation of superior autocratic corporate states with
very specific corporate visions and cultist dictators but rather due
to the rise of social mobility and greater commonalities between us
all.

7 This essay was posted to the FT ‘Alphaville’ blog.

Further reading

• Why the future doesn’t need us, by Bill Joy

http://trusttour.org/day-705/
• The Education of a Libertarian, by Peter Thiel
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-
libertarian
• Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich, by
Corey Pein
http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_
machiavellis

• “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how

bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded”,
interview with David Graeber
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_
the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/

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