Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

Shullenberger speaks of an emerging “voluntariat,” with capitalist firms increasingly harvesting the results not of paid labor but of unpaid interns, internet enthusiasts, activists, volunteers, and hobbyists, and “digitally sharecropping” the results of popular enthusiasm and creativity to privatize and market the results.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

No one seems to feel free to say what they really feel about such matters—at least in public.

Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves—not unlike Soviet workers, actually—working forty- or even fifty-hour weeks on paper but effectively working fifteen hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent

“lifestyle liberalism, fiscal conservativism”)—had

Where once hoopers and wainwrights and seamstresses saw themselves as heirs to a proud tradition, each with its secret knowledge, the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their “scientific management” sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their every move predetermined by someone else.

Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working is an indignity, since the demand is perceived—rightly—as the pure exercise of power for its own sake.