The Writing Life in an Age of Bullshit Jobs

"What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" David Graeber asked in Bullshit Jobs.

One can equally ask--why so little demand for novelists and filmmakers, painters and sculptors, dancers and musicians?

My first thought regarding this issue was the answer C.P. Snow and John K. Galbraith gave to that question--that it reflects elite priorities in an industrial society, which are, above all, "growth," for which read profits, and have more confidence the "shock troops of capitalism" will deliver them than any arts types.1 More recently I considered the possibility that the explosion in the range and convenience of electronic, digital media was the key factor, bringing on a "post-scarcity" age in regard to word, and image, and sound, at the very time that readership collapsed--all as ours has been an age of scarcity in every other area.

Both these ideas still seem persuasive to me. Yet, reading Bullshit Jobs Graeber had me rethinking the matter yet again, not least the possibility that this may be another instance of that perverse tendency he identified in our economic stage at this curious stage in its development, its rewarding people in inverse relation to the actual value of their work to other people.

"But artists aren't useful people!" you protest?

Okay, perform this simple thought experiment, the next time you think of artists and the arts as somehow "unimportant"--a world without them. For the moment, let us not concern with the fine arts and high culture that, it must be admitted, are enjoyed by a comparative few and think of what even the "cultureless" many have. Picture the aesthetic element removed from every article we use, from our consumer electronics to our cityscapes. Picture your life without every note of music you have ever heard, every film or TV show you have ever watched, every video game you have ever played.

Would you not feel that your life has been impoverished, perhaps gravely so? So much so as to diminish the value of the technological achievements of which we make so much? Those worshipping at the Church of Apple foam at the mouth and reach for their torches and pitchforks if someone tells them their iPhone is not the telos of five billion years of evolution, but would people value their phones so much without the content they access through them--content created overwhelmingly by artists?

Does the existence of corporate law as such mean as much to you as what would have just been lost?

1.Anyone not taken in by the silly Edisonade propaganda and the idiot cult of the tech billionaires so beloved of the libertarian/neoliberal right (Atari Democrats as well as Reagan Republicans) knows that in real life the vast majority of working engineers and researchers are poorly treated. However, when that is how "late capitalism" treats what it supposedly regards as its most precious workers, one can well imagine how much more shabbily it treats artists.