#the utopia of rules

[1000rh]

We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of our existence. It is as if, as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap our hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up. Insofar as we are even willing to discuss it, it is still in the terms popular in the sixties and early seventies. The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellious against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states. In the face of the gray functionaries of both state-capitalist and state-socialist regimes, sixties rebels stood for individual expression and spontaneous conviviality, and against (“rules and regulations, who needs them?”) every form of social control.

– David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules (2015)

[toastyslayingbutter]

Just finished up!

4.5/5 book

[maaarine]

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (David Graeber, 2015)

"So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons. If you think about it, this is a really ingenious trick.

Because when most of us think about police, we do not think of them as enforcing regulations.

We think of them as fighting crime, and when we think of “crime,” the kind of crime we have in our minds is violent crime.

Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it.

I find this all the time in public discussions.

When trying to come up with a hypothetical example of a situation in which police are likely to be involved, people will almost invariably think of some act of interpersonal violence: a mugging or assault.

But even a moment’s reflection should make it clear that, when most real acts of physical assault do occur, even in major cities like Marseille or Montevideo or Minneapolis — domestic violence, gang fights, drunken brawls — the police do not get involved.

Police are only likely to be called in if someone dies, or is so seriously hurt they end up in the hospital.

But this is because the moment an ambulance is involved, there is also paperwork; if someone is treated in the hospital, there has to be a cause of injury, the circumstances become relevant, police reports have to be led.

And if someone dies there are all sorts of forms, up to and including municipal statistics.

So the only fights which police are sure to get involved in are those that generate some kind of paperwork.

The vast majority of muggings or burglaries aren’t reported either, unless there are insurance forms to be filled out, or lost documents that need to be replaced, and which can only be replaced if one files a proper police report.

So most violent crime does not end up involving the police.

On the other hand, try driving down the street of any one of those cities in a car without license plates. We all know what’s going to happen.

Uniformed officers armed with sticks, guns, and/or tasers will appear on the scene almost immediately, and if you simply refuse to comply with their instructions, violent force will, most definitely, be applied.

Why are we so confused about what police really do?

The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture.

It has come to the point that it’s not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits.

And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences."

[wellconstructedsentences]

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber

[perfect-immortal-machinegirl]

Fuck me… Graeber was so right about this one… wow…

[fourdramas]

“It’s as if we have finally achieved the ability to make [such] virtual realities materialize, and in so doing, to reduce our lives, too, to a kind of video game, as we negotiate the various mazeways of the new bureaucracies. Since, in such video games, nothing is actually produced, it just kind of springs into being, and we really do spend our lives earning points and dodging people carrying weapons.”

-David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, p. 34

[quotes-by-dilanka]

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

[st-just]

The heroes are purely reactionary. By this I mean 'reactionary' in the literal sense, they simply react to things, they have no projects of their own...Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, by contrast, are relentlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly we are supposed to, at first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they're having all the fun.

David Graeber, Of Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power

[1000rh]

Nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy. But in the middle of the last century, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, the word was everywhere. […] Everyone seemed to feel that the foibles and absurdities of bureaucratic life and bureaucratic procedures were one of the defining features of modern existence, and as such, eminently worth discussing.

– David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules (2015)

[howieabel]

Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite, really—but, the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not really lead to the domination of “the market.” More than anything, it simply cemented the dominance of fundamentally conservative managerial elites—corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

[maaarine]

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (David Graeber, 2015)

"If two parties are engaged in a relatively equal contest of violence—say, generals commanding opposing armies—they have good reason to try to get inside each other’s heads.

It is only when one side has an overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical harm that they no longer need to do so. (…)

For this reason, situations of structural violence invariably produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification.

These effects are often most visible when the structures of inequality take the most deeply internalized forms.

Gender is again a classic case in point.

For example, in American situation comedies of the 1950s, there was a constant staple: jokes about the impossibility of understanding women.

The jokes (told, of course, by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible.

“You have to love them,” the message always seemed to run, “but who can really understand how these creatures think?”

One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men.

The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men.

In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved.

Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.

This kind of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of such patriarchal arrangements.

It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom (“women’s intuition”) unavailable to men.

And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mystically wise. (…)

Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them — including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top — while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them.

That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretive labor as well."

[dclcq]

Power makes you lazy. While those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, what you don't have to know about, what you don't have to do.

David Graeber

[sharpened--edges]

In [Batman Begins (2005)], the primary villain is Ra’s al Ghul, who first initiates Batman into the League of Shadows in a monastery in Bhutan, and only then reveals his plan to destroy Gotham to rid the world of its corruption. In the original comics, we learn that Ra’s al Ghul … is in fact a Primitivist and ecoterrorist, determined to restore the balance of nature by reducing the earth’s human population by roughly 99 percent. The main way [Christopher] Nolan changed the story is to make Batman begin as Ra’s al Ghul’s disciple. But in contemporary terms that, too, makes a sort of sense. After all, what is the media stereotype that immediately comes to mind—at least since the direct actions against the World Trade Organization in Seattle—when one thinks of a trust-fund kid who, moved by some unfathomable sense of injustice, dons black clothing and a mask, and takes to the streets to create violence and mayhem, though always in a way calculated never to actually kill anyone? Let alone who does so inspired by the teachings of a radical guru who believes we need to return to the Stone Age? Nolan made his hero a Black Bloc disciple of John Zerzan who breaks with his former mentor when he realizes what restoring Eden will actually entail.

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House, 2015), p. 221.

[ladylazaru]

Playful gods are rarely something any sane person would desire to encounter.

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

[melvillehouse]

Do you hear hold music and think: “oh, good”? Do you wish lines were longer? Do you wish paperwork was more confusing? No, you don’t.

Do you like coffee? and friends? and good books? Do you maybe harbor the suspicion that all this bureaucracy is really just a cipher for state violence?

Yes, you do! JOIN MELVILLE HOUSE AND BROOKLYN ROASTING COMPANY for coffee, company, and a conversation about David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules. It’s happening on April 28th, and it’s going to be a good time.

(illustration by @paigevickers)

[st-just]

In such a universe, freedom really is a zero-sum game. The freedom of gods or kings is the measure of human slavery.

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules