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Comment by RapperWhoMadeIt | Hacker News Reader

Performative work is just another term for one of the main topics exposed in the book "Bullshit jobs" by David Graeber. I finished the book last month and it was a very compelling read. It tries to explain the psychology behind trying to understand why almost everyone knows that it is unrealistic to expect employees to be productive and hardworking for 8 or more hours a day, but at the same time nobody is ending our current corporate wage slavery system, in which actually being there is more important that actually doing a meaningful job!

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I think the two key texts here are Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, specifically his riff on “market Stalinism”:

> The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.

the worst part is, there's no way around it. if you're trying to motivate any individual or group whose desires are not fully coherent, no matter what your intentions and ideology are, any effort to incentivize and document performance approaches Borges. by transitive property the incentive is to create appeasing documentation. the strain of the actual loses out to the efficiency of the plausible.

this is, i think in part, why there is a modern desire towards "local" products and personalities in media, and full diy cottagecore fantasies. it is the only way to at least convince yourself that you could confirm authenticity, even if that is a delusion, because anything else is obviously superhuman in scale. at least you can assign responsibility to a face at a farmers' market, even if they're no less hired than the person minding self-checkout at the grocery. at least a parasocial relationship with a social media personality feels realer and more responsible than traditional mass media, even if they're delivering the same talking points.

the winner of this paradox will be either an anarchist culture relentlessly dismantling everything and enjoying the unknowable, or a vertically integrated police consciousness that simply is/does everything and doesn't need to convince/believe anyone else.

"anarchist culture relentlessly dismantling everything and enjoying the unknowable"

A guy by the name of Max Stirner clearly articulated what this new culture would be and would look like. It's too bad that's he's been sort of side-lined by history...

Any good summaries of his speculated culture?

I found your comment hard to follow, but I think I got the general idea. I’m not sure I buy the last extreme disjunction you’re making though. Surely we can have some middle ground between anarchic individualism and a totalitarian thought-police. All long-term societies of the past and probably of the future are examples. The extreme societies historically implode or revert back to moderate patterns that compromise between diktat and individual speech, usually sometime after the death of the god-leader (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc.)

I like your theory about local goods/thought products.

i'm definitely speculating. middle ground is just boring.

if your benchmark is long-term societies, anarchic cultures are it, and anything else including our modern state is an outlying extreme. but here we are.

technology provided the possibility of control, and by current trend, advancing it seems to make some of those possibilities more thorough and more resilient. but moving past the dialogue of incentive and metric by integrating all experience would be a different thing altogether. it's more of a singularity fantasy than anything a human could possibly worry about.

I don’t see it the same way.

Indian society - not the country because that’s a new creation - has been around for a few thousand years. It hasn’t devolved into anarchy, neither is it totalitarian in the way you are using the word.

They (well, “we” since I’m Indian) figured out that imposing self-censoring through the caste system would lead to social stability. People were born into a certain way of life and they’d die inside it.

From within the straitjacket of caste came inventions like 0, astronomical analyses, religions, Kama sutra, literature, languages, and engineering achievements.

I don’t glorify caste. It’s wrong.

But, a society between the two extremes you posited exists today and it exists because caste based social engineering worked.

This sounds like the justification for the society featured in Huxley's Brave New World. It may not totalitarian by the dictionary definition, but it's definitely authoritarian.

Then the definition of both totalitarian and authoritarian needs to be expanded and made inclusive. There’s no central figure/politburo telling a believer in caste that they have to believe in it for the greater good. It’s Vaclav Havel’s description of communism - everyone’s playing along with the caste charade because their neighbor’s are.

It has suffused society to the extent that Indian Muslims will sometimes complain that a Muslim tanner (considered low caste because they work with carcasses) wanted to marry into an upper caste Muslim family. Islam rejects caste per se so this caste based thinking is endemic to Indian society, not religion.

Edit - I am not justifying caste. I’m just pointing out that the previous commenters above me were needlessly limiting the types of societies to anarchy and totalitarian. They should include fatalist societies too.

i would consider a caste system, and the social engineering necessary to create and maintain it, to be control technology.

it's possible the only reason we aren't at an "extreme" now because we're still tipping between steady states. there was no structured society for, effectively, forever. pretty stable, long enough that it is hard to consider the current world a normal situation.

we've had a few thousand years of confusing buildup, as we maybe transition to a total structure, lasting who knows how long, but i can't see something like that being short-lived.

yes the society between extremes exists and we're in it. but none of this around me looks stable or capable of withstanding what the future holds. and the longer-lived examples, though impressive on an individual timescale, are still a sudden late flash in the deep and mostly unknown timeline of all human history.

"Market Stalinism" is a great phrase. I've been referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement whenever I see excessive metric-driven workplaces.

> nobody is ending our current corporate wage slavery system, in which actually being there is more important that actually doing a meaningful job!

Good corporate management is constantly fighting it: Downsizing, firing all people in bullshit jobs. "We release you to seek new opportunities!". Using only the bottom line as a measure of success is another one. No indirect performance measures.

David Graeber was a polemical writer, he never offered viewpoints that steered readers off from narrative he had in his mind. For example, the idea that bullshit jobs are something that can be removed by more ruthless and goal oriented management.

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