User:Marymountain/Bullshit Jobs

The articles content is relevant to the topic as it is discussing jobs that can be pertained to "bullshit". I think that some areas are under-developed as it could have a few more jobs listed as bullshit jobs in depth. I feel overall, the article is short. The article is very well written, and definitely written neutrally as it describes bullshit jobs without an opinion on each job. There are many citations that are included and the facts throughout the article are referenced to the citations that are listed. The citations do work, and take you directly to where the information came from.

Publication
In 2013, Graeber published an essay in the radical magazine Strike!, "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs", which argued the pointlessness of many contemporary jobs, particularly those in fields of finance, law, human resources, public relations, and consultancy. Its popularity, with over one million hits, crashed the website of the essay's publisher. The essay was subsequently translated into 12 languages. Many people who are working these bullshit or pointless jobs know that they are working jobs that do not contribute to society in a thoughtful way. It states in Illing's article, "Technology has advanced to the point where most of the difficult, labor-intensive jobs can be performed by machines". Instead of producing more jobs that are fulfilling for our environment, they create meaningless jobs to provide everyone with an opportunity to work.

Graeber and Corporate Feudalism
In his 2018 interview with Suzi Weissman for the Jacobin Radio, Graeber compares the idea of Bullshit Jobs to Corporate Feudalism. He talks about big corporate meetings being the equivalent of "feudal jousts". Entire teams prepare for presentations of data and reports that no one will read. Here you will have various team members that are just there to say "I do the illustrations" and "I do the graphs" without doing anything physically productive. Graeber goes on to compare the people hiring these teams as "feudal lords". These corporate managers serve to inflate their own position by populating the ones below them without incentive for downsizing due to unproductivity.

Graeber then goes on to discuss the rise of non-bullshit jobs that coincides with his initial viewpoint, which he calls the "caring" or "care-giving" jobs. That is to say, a caring job is loosely defined as someone providing an essential task for others to thrive. He gives the viewpoint that our usual notion of a "care-giving" job lies within fields such as nursing, whereas in actuality it can extend all the way to the blue-collar working-class people. These people provide the every-day essentials for the world to run, thus taking care of those around them. It does not happen in the direct nurturing sense that is usually thought of, but nonetheless it still pertains to society's well-being.