bullshit jobs 2: counter-text to the original by graeber
multiformers
모-1 bullshit jobs show how the historical mode and logic of capitalism is simply a technical redesign of certain base passions precisely in measure. in the first age through a discovery of capacity to act instrumentally on the world and in the creation of the arcane task-forcer bullshit job around the time of peasantry, in the second age to appropriate, transform and modify the worlds terrain into employability itself (tasks self-cultivate rather than are instructed) this was around the time of third-world extractionism, colonialism and up until the first international where labour was still assumed instead of generated. abstraction is not their king, its the operative cost of the slow not necessarily dialectical direction of the world. abstractions increase -> demands for rituals of status, designation etc increase, these demands are not just passionately decrepit but economically insignificant in the long run too, theyre precisely unoptimized for capitalist exchange modes and economic growth, they have the abstractive-induced aesthetic of efficiency but are themselves latently inefficient, precisely because they are fulfilling a human role.
모0 bullshit jobs increase alienative libidinality, they create demand for alienation, they allow status exchanges, the gift economy never ceased to exist but simply relocated, which is where you will locate gift econcomic modes of reciprocity today, you'll find them in bullshit job designations. they serve to fill up space for the machine. theyre not essentially useless, theyre relatively useless to actual drivers of the machine, and the actual inner infrastructure is always too overburdened to even be involved in the status game. every game is relative to its own function with no universal drive or hegelian spirit. the maximal gamer of the various intertwined worlds is then simply the maximal schizophrenic, abstracting his own feeling of usefulness. optimizing the graeberian topology actually just counter optimizes the social assemblage undermining it. if you tweak the labour economy in a way that removes efficiency, you get less efficient state apparatuses but also in turn you create a vaccuum where affective economies actually concentrated, and as a result you have to water the plant the other way around, produce the abstractions back in order to re-fulfill the required "passional" roles, or inversely, re-select for mechanisms that allow the social assemblage to fulfill its full operational density (mix of functions, desires, drives and processes all intersecting).
flunkies
모1 a flunkies job is thought to exist primarily to make superiors look or feel important, not to produce necessary outcomes. necessary outcomes are a production on many various levels, and outcomes themselves are never delinated by a clear understanding of what is necessary by either a a flunkie nor whoever hired them. most jobs are vaccuums by default since social systems especially at scale arent actually operative and create lots of dead space even through regulation, although this is especially common in both flunkies and their masters since the executive principle both of these roles used to share happens to be fluid at larger scales than most other executive-executing jobs.
most other executive-executing jobs, when fit more neatly into a window, end up encompassing a wider set of narrow actions, which feels like control to those employed to it because of the way its design slots into existing infrastructure, not because of the way the infrastructure itself has supposedly designed or failed to design a role for the flunkie. slowly over time as the flunkie role evolved, it went from executive correspondence to executive forrespondence, meaning justifiable maintenace took over maintaining justifiability. whilst ducktapers took over in the role of maintaining meta-justifiability (the norm of the justifiable itself), justifiability itself collapsed as a source of power because the flunkie was taken over by taskmasters and level-scalers, who complimented eachother, one who set the conditions of mediation higher, and the other who created the necessary dead weight and humiliative ontology that was necessary to create conditions where the norm could truncate the need for justifiable maintenance. since maintenance then became an entirely pre-emptively
모2 the core function of a junkie is not just status display, but in practical utility, their job is status display, that is to say, the practical utility harnessed through status display is itself reappropriated through the lens of a larger status display, meaning the actual practical utility is reserved within the lens of status, the practicality of which still nonetheless exists in various volumes. however, this practicality itself is burdened by its component of slavery, since it is a job created to cultivate status-power rather than to disperse, activate, intensify or produce it. hence, flunkies are superstructures meant to regulate in-between zones, they are navigational in nature. the fluidity of the social role should not be confused with the fluidity of a junkie, who is only fluid because he is dispersed in a wide social realm where the role has to pick up after others intentions seemingly, when in reality, the functional window encompassing the total set of a flunkie's actions is very narrow, only the margin of possibilities within this narrow window is high, and also offensively seemingly unpredictable.
in the second era of flunkiedom which will be more exclusively elaborated as the text develops, flunkies existed as proto-goons within the master-matrix, only later being appropriated or turned into boxtickers (who always existed but were never important enough to create any visible benefits until far later) or level-scalers (who only exist far into the future of the employment market). however, up until and before the second era, a flunkies job was used to transfer doubt into marketability and optionality, such as the fake cultivation of an atmosphere of latent productivity around the master, but later as scaling began were transfered into genuine roles of maintenance that are no longer interperable as affectivity buffers, making it impossible to deduce whether their maintenance can serve as a badge of importance or purely regulatory grounds.
모3 the window of acting possibilities is cultivated as a sloterdijkian bubble from the inside which is directly opposed to ambient functions like executivity or status display or coordination structures like badges of importance that have the passive expectation of status display rather than its predetermined outcome. the affective bubble which sometimes presents as micro-altercation and sometimes as simulated envionrments in its active state is meant to simulate a set of living conditions that appear as if they are unconstrained and full of complex openings or paths. the flunkie exists as a carrier for the masters will-power, converting the masters inactionable looting (perceived actionable conquests) into status-powers that can then mirror themselves outwards, all whilst reproducing inner connections. the component of slavery exists in the idea that labour power can be converted into higher utilities such as affective reciprocity without burden of economic rationality - the flunkie becomes a slave not only to his circumstances but an idiot required to remove himself from the frame of his circumstances and reassert himself as legitimate only fully within a complex of order and obligation only seperated by theology through an underlying cynicism that actually maintains the job qualification of a flunkie rather than rids it of its possibility to exist as such.
the minor or unecessary tasks that serve as a pretext for their presence may be burdening, but they perform a variety of roles simultaneously, from setting an atmosphere to providing an affective cushion to bystanders, to behaving busy as a prerequisite for others to mirror this act, to creating excuses that cultivate labour as a principle, which is precisely what allows the scale to even justify itself in its own mind, and as such to prevent the loss of meaning behind the lives of those attempting to serve these jobs rather than somehow causing a loss of the job setting, since the job is already a naturalized condition or state where social war is fought over both the stakes and fulfilment or lack thereof of meaning, rather than as it somehow truncating some existing qualities of it, as well as of maintaining executivity of the job itself (ambient functions override on top of scripts of meaning).
simultaneously, the scale that is justified through the flunkie is the atmosphere that creates a living experience in the enviornmental phenomenology of the corporate world, due precisely to the way in which overly instrumental atmospheres actually prevent variety, anything deemed partially dead inside is caught in a matrix of resistance and must transfer over to either side of the scheme so that the enviornment retains not only its cosplay or mirroring, but also its basic enviornmental presence of executivity. executivity as such is a basic requirement of an enviornment, and so the flunkie fills in a roll of bystandardism that creates the background enviornment necessary for regulative processes to commence
모4 the flunkie may be framed as a job that appears or manifests itself as necessary to the master only after it either already exists, becomes converted, or becomes an excuse, but quite on the contrary, this job is an implicit precondition to simulated action, only seperated by being beneficial to real actionaries and not imposed artifical conquistors by the fact that the flunkie itself must manifest itself as burdened by its own roleplaying capacity. that is to say, the actionable realm of a flunkie is the expected territory of any actionable or intended-executive realm whatsoever, only seperated and therefore only enlightened into a bullshit disposition precisely because it perceives itself as something that should not be actionable, therefore carrying itself into the peripheries of the visions of others as a result of its orientation.
the flunkie is not commanded by the exchange economy to enter unfair circulatory dispositions, the flunkie is victim to the commonality of all social circulation as naturally burdening, and is only further burdened by the ways in which the economy of labour abstracts itself away from its own predicaments, essentially, the rules that obfuscate the lack of fair norms through design that become the unfair norms, rather than the unfair norms that are already there as territoriazable - which are simply the precondition of the act in general. that is to say, the event of the flunkies disposition in its abstract realm carries a majority of the weight of burden that the condition suggests, rather than the norms expected of the condition as a side effect of its existence.
모5 flunkie roles are not at all resistant to elimination, but most flunkies are flunks, never achieving proper flunkiedom, and never even notice they failed the flunkieness required of them to persist the masters orientatory complex or the superstructures needs. simultaneously however, flunkies not only cross-justify and meta-justify themselves (especially when they desire not to, or assume the configuration of their job-process is itself justificatorily imposing and burdening - which only further raises their productive self-creation), but masters both create flunkie demands and actually bring flunkies into existence by latently carrying flunkies tasks into higher-order realms and expanding them outward rather than collapsing them. a large amount of the job market was actually created by the expansion of first grade flunkies (which were back then referred explicitly to as slaves, or understood as underlings), who created a majority of bullshit professions (not to be confused with bullshit jobs) that exist in the wider industrialized market of computational-resourcificatory realms (cloud+corporate+consumer) that ended up giving birth to level-scalers who as a result of their acts created using philosophical mages the necessary abstractions required to turn flunkie jobs into repositories of goon-boxticker duos that carried us into structures like clouds and interfaces. level-scalers themselves on the other hand were in their first age simply workers and task-forcers, meaning they were relational fields meant to exist in a state of generalized abstractiveness, employed as hyper-selves in professions meant to maintain the territory required for flunkies to come in and further maintain the territory of the territory.
모6 the symbolic underlayer that exists to maintain the structure is not the primary control-orienter of a corporate unit, but rather, the unit itself is a hyperscaled effect, a consequence of circulatory networks that already have occured as products of flunkies orientations throguh spaces that have been colonially interpreted by masters as grounds of coordination. masters lock eachother out of their own domains because scale requires intended simulated enviornments, which themselves can only ever be attended and never consistently conditionable. the model of a factory or data center is entirely self-attainable and therefore can never be non-intended, whereas flunkies serve as the closest replacement to machines in the sense of their intention and not at all in their scriptedness (as flunkies are the most and not least fluid component)
flunkie jobs to the contrary cannot possibly cease to exist due to automation, its only their more narrow service contract that exists and becomes legible when they are re-interpollated through bullshitism. bullshitism itself specifically when it comes to flunkies actually paradoxically is its own simulated enviornment, as flunkies are fetishists that require meta-simulations and accidental self-propulsions into realms of higher order they themselves produce, that masters only as a result can exist within, and only if flunkies actually produce the necessary ambient effects such as executivity to make these roles possible and active.
모7 flunkies exist for many reasons, one of which is to create a living enviornment that can harness reception as a fact. this type of reception serves the primary purpose of obscuring the underworkings of the management of a firm, not of providing a (false) sense of business security. a flunkies existence isnt justified simply or purely around the idea of preventing clients from feeling let down by management, but to prevent clients from learning about the semiotic and ontic conditions of the working enviornment, to prevent clients from ever accessing the symbolic underlayer, of being coincidentally let in on information about the working enviornment, which is treated as a private signal because it has a sovereign signal behind it. its not that the soveirgnity is private, but that a flunkie reproduces a phenomenology of management that creates the atmospheric impasse required to prevent a symbolic realm from registering as obscurable or reterritorializable by a firm's client.
a flunkies existence is to engage the client in a combat scheme, a type of informational wall that deliniates a process by which a flunkie doesnt prevent clients from accessing the previously mentioned semiotic conditioning of the underworkings of management, but to prevent the enviornment from feeling decodable on the side of the client, so that the client never actually manages to libidinally or productively attach to the idea that the enviornment can be mentally accessed or reconfigurable. it can then be argued that a flunkies job isnt to exist at all, but quite to the contrary, to fight for their own existence at a constant pace, so that they inhabit a phenomenological micro-management of status-power, that allows them to gatekeep the symbolic underlayer of management.
모8 originally, in the first era of flunkies, a flunkies job could never possibly be thought of as boring because there wasnt enough scale for duck tapers to exist, and as such a world populated solely by goons and early flunkies was mostly a conquistadorian executive master-role function, meaning entirely up for metaphorical lower-stakes grabs which still had a slightly non-simulated essence, meaning were affectually unbounded enviornments.
this is why a modern or third era flunkie job can be thought of as boring to the flunkie, because of the amount of self-productioin require to maintain the pace of renegotiations of self-existence and the meaning-making practicality tequired to pull this off, whilst simultaneously remaining hostile to anyone threatening to the master-space feels like its imposed by external enviornments and is retroactively blamed on the master. however, it is true that the ambient function of most enviornments is in fact deeply affected by masters, who primarily serve to deregulate and linearize the experience behind the living that is a product of insturmentalization.
모9 the usefulness of flunkies is not actually therefore necessarily in the broader sense inversely related to the perceived importance of those they serve, nor are their masters importance proportional to the amount, quality or attained status-power of the flunkies. rather, the feedback loop exists as a compounding effect that depends on first of all the simulated action that is proportional to the symbolic underlayer of the larger group-to-maintain. the flunkie simultaneously corresponds to the entire atmosphere, to the close league of the master and his associations and compartments, the motion of the master, and most importantly also as the active superstructure that carries status-power and ambient function (say, executivity - seriousness, maintenance - importance, or regulation - productivity).
모10 a receptionist may then exist to signal hierarchy instead of efficiency, but in this case then they are not a flunkie but rather a goon. goons are not expected to embody passive roles like maintenance, but quite to the contrary, their guarding function and cross-effect employability sits neatly besides a role that doesnt have the requirement of cohering with affective layers of a complex-turned-simple enviornment, but rather with simultaneously convincing spectators and clients, and also serving a service of outward rather than inward maintenance. a flunkie cruically exists to signal hierarchy in a cross-pollinated way with other ambient functions - and cruically - they must always be ambient, because regulatory structures that work off social infrastructure require the complexity of stacking mediating effects and perceived or re-activating causal chains.
reactivating causal chains also exist only in simulated enviornments, because simulation enables the required amount of stratification needed to create chains that are activated from non-affective forms of communication, who most of the time arent even aware theyre maintaining a connection. it is not however true that systemic structural stratification is the cause of simulation, but as stated, once simulated enviornments kick off, that is when they build up the scale, meaning-production and networks necessary to cause latent effects of stratification, which cause social waves to actually require flunkies of higher degrees. most flunkies are meta-flunkies, flunkies in passing who have created higher order turfs. they of course have been hired, but as such have also existed in ways that created enough noise to produce so many more compounding effects, that flunkies are their own imprisoners, re-activating their own causal requirements. in this sense, flunkies actually gave birth to ducktapers, who as a result could only exist way later than flunkies themselves.
모11 due to stratification, actions, strategies, outcomes and effects are all mixed up, meaning official business doesnt have to be efficient, causality doesnt correlate efficiently to outcomes, and actions simultaneously are categorized through rules but also exist entirely outside of them at every layer. this is because the simulated action that serves as the affective shield creates inner-world bubbles that retrospectively reinforce alternate dynamics, the complexity of the multi-stage apparatus itself can be entirely inoperable or itself in an act of maintenace. this can be shown through imaginary friends, a subset of multiform workers that exist in a condition of simulation that exists on one hand to justify a corporate layer, but on the other to simulate an operation meant to encompass a bubble, but only ever being able to reach at best an affective transference, and never an actual simulated action. this is because simulations are direct counterpieces to lived experience that transfer directly onto enviornmental constraints as fully believable dividers that dont arise from affective economies but from instrumental-turned-affective subsidary economies as part of a wider network that exists as a result of job-tasking, which is a compounding and complex evolution of social economy.
모12 passive living inside of the workplace that exists within a simulated enviornment actionally is at once free time yet also due to enforced ambient function of the flunkie in a state of productivity that disables its shutdown and prevents it being read as peace rather than boredom). this is because the phenomenological enviornment itself constantly swaps registers without the flunkies approval, yet since a part of the junkies job is to maintain the interpass between three layers (masters orientation, superstructural groundwork, and interconnective frequency) the flunkie has to experience the pressure of the entire dead weight of all orientational pulls, basically, all the leftover fragments of the constant incomplete reorientation of the enviornment is an actual driver-force that the junkie both has to pass through, and maintain the presence of within a wider expectation of the coruscating of the status-power of the enviornment that transfers as orientational legibility to the workers of the corporation and passes through the masters authority back into ambiental legibility. the symbolic underlayer of this enviornment also as a passive effect slides contradictorally against the leftover fragments of the incomplete orientations that are detrimental to external clients of the corporation and must be re-mediated through the junkie.