y’know what it’s kind of giving for me? there’s a bit in one of the hitchhiker’s guide books where a planet’s civilization goes completely belly up because they have the bright idea of shipping off into space 1/3 of the population that did “noncritical” sorts of jobs and then everyone dies because it turns out they were pretty important in the social ecosystem. like amerikkkan civilizational collapse won’t be traceable to any particularly profound anti- – from the western perspective – messianic event in history but rather the simple fact that society relies on people codependently laboring according to correct institutional process knowledge.
Yeah there are a lot of jobs that are theoretically useless in an ideal economic system or even a better economic system, but are actually productive in our current byzantine capitalist system.
It’s very easy to create actually useless jobs, jobs that presently do nothing. They definitely exist, but it’s really hard to pick them out broadly because their only utility is to appear productive.
A fun one to try and find when job hunting is the project lead for a project that requires approval from both c-level and other departments. This will never be approved and suggested changes will take months to percolate through, leaving your team free to do whatever the hell they want.
y’know what it’s kind of giving for me? there’s a bit in one of the hitchhiker’s guide books where a planet’s civilization goes completely belly up because they have the bright idea of shipping off into space 1/3 of the population that did “noncritical” sorts of jobs and then everyone dies because it turns out they were pretty important in the social ecosystem. like amerikkkan civilizational collapse won’t be traceable to any particularly profound anti- – from the western perspective – messianic event in history but rather the simple fact that society relies on people codependently laboring according to correct institutional process knowledge.
Yeah there are a lot of jobs that are theoretically useless in an ideal economic system or even a better economic system, but are actually productive in our current byzantine capitalist system.
It’s very easy to create actually useless jobs, jobs that presently do nothing. They definitely exist, but it’s really hard to pick them out broadly because their only utility is to appear productive.
A fun one to try and find when job hunting is the project lead for a project that requires approval from both c-level and other departments. This will never be approved and suggested changes will take months to percolate through, leaving your team free to do whatever the hell they want.
How would one find such a job?
Look for medium-sized companies with original founders and aging consumer bases.
Graeber talks about this in bullshit jobs
Iirc, they didn’t have janitors which led to a pandemic
phone sanitizers specifically