I’d say that still works because ownership of a thing isn’t work. Saying “I own a coffee maker” says nothing about what I do for work. If their description doesn’t include describing labor then they’re clearly not working for a living.
I'm pretty sure none of these are actually "bullshit jobs" as defined by Graeber, they just do things that Hexbear culture doesn't like.
Also, plenty of very real R&D & manufacturing jobs couldn't be described in 3 words without being needlessly vague or reductive. There is in fact complexity in a modern industrial economy.
Yeah this is a little bit "if you don't have a hard hat and a big hammer you aren't proletarian," which is the exact opposite of what we should be saying
It's been a while since I read it, but there are two broad categories of bullshit jobs, right? In the first, the job itself is bullshit; you might barely have any day-to-day responsibilities and no one notices if you do any work or not, or perhaps the work itself doesn't accomplish anything of value (I think an example of the latter was someone who prepared exhaustive compliance reports that no one actually read). The second category is a real job that contributes to a bullshit industry. So a network administrator is a real job, but doing IT work for an insurance company is in service of a bullshit industry that just shuffles money around. On the other hand, an engineer for Lockheed Martin, while undeniably doing harm, is not doing a bullshit job.
Totally with you on complexity not implying bullshit, though.
This is more than three words, but "I fetishize real work and imagine that the only thing that counts as real work is when white guys with beards do stuff that would fit in the age of empires tech tree"
I guarantee the author of this meme is some urban liberal that is working through their own alienation from work
See, I’d just describe my job as “running a hydroelectric plant” then. When people lead with the esoteric, abstract jargon instead of the concrete, that screams to me either they’re puffing up what they do to make it sound more impressive than it really is, or they’re a grifter. It’s like people that describe themselves as entrepreneurs; people who run a small business developing something they’re passionate about talk about making the product or service, people who talk about being an entrepreneur are about to sell you on a Ponzi scheme or MLM scam.
The two firsts are bad examples because it's just software engineering. They might build a scammy bullshit service but they might also build the interface through which we operate trains so that's not the definition of bullshit
Dunno if its any interest but graeber was insistent that having a BS job was self defined. Because there are jobs that may appear useless to an outsider but in fact are not.
Also having a job which is harmful, destructive, or evil is not the same as having a BS job.
Ive never read this but the cover always shits me, we're going to need comrades doing behind the scenes admin after the revolution
oh its a poster, my point remains, it ties into that lib attitude i see masquerading as principled anarchism, ya know why work? work less, its individualist garbage imo