PERSON
David Graeber
The anarchist anthropologist who named the bullshit job, diagnosed the spiritual violence of meaningless work, and left—dying in 2020 before the winter of 2025—the most incisive framework for asking whether AI will eliminate pointlessness or merely automate it.
David Graeber was the anthropologist who turned the familiar inside out until it became visible. When his 2013 essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” detonated across the global professional class, the response was not curiosity but confession: workers from every continent wrote to say he had named something they had felt for years but could not articulate without risking their livelihoods—the gnawing suspicion that their jobs were not merely unpleasant or underpaid but
pointless, that if their positions were eliminated tomorrow the world would continue without noticing. His taxonomy identified five species of pointless work—flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, and taskmasters—and his explanation for their existence overturned one of the deepest assumptions of mainstream economics: that markets eliminate inefficiency.
Bullshit jobs persist not because markets fail but because the modern economy distributes income through employment, employment requires jobs, and when genuine productive work is insufficient, the system generates pointless work instead. Graeber called the psychological damage this