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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Graeber was an activist far more than he was a serious academic. The "bullshit" label for jobs is just a vibe. It's very emotionally pleasing to look at the local Vice Presidents of Spreadsheets and say, "what do you even do, maaaann?" while smirking. But the fact of the matter is that those Spreadsheets might actually be moving tens of millions of dollars of real corporate value that ultimately help people get anything from basic needs (groceries) to durable goods that meaningfully improve their life (appliances, cars, etc.) Even if it's just AI slop marketing, digital commerce is a hyper efficient abstraction of the movement of value. You can make very good metaphysical critiques of this, but Graeber tried to make economic critiques. He failed.

Graeber, to be clear, was a shit academic when he reached outside his field (I have no way to vouch for his anthropological work). 'Debt' is riddled with sloppy work and treats 1800s economics as the state of the art to beat up on.

I guess I see Molochian incentives create bullshit jobs. Sure, locally speaking, I value hiring a super expensive lawyer to defend me in court, but only because the guy suing me hired his super expensive lawyer. We could take away those two jobs and be in the same place.

Yeah. Purely PVP roles, ego boost retinues

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