The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

David Graeber is an anthropologist. It has been said that his political philosophy is close to anarchism, but from his writings you can conclude that this term is too narrow. He is influenced – I guess – by the anarchist tradition, that means he is committed to the idea that someday we would be possible to live in a truly free society. A society that wouldn’t be based on the bureaucracies of corruption and violence, where it would be possible for everyone to define his/her own ways of dealing with other people, and especially within social movements to embody the kind of world one wants to create.

One would think that reading about bureaucracy and paperwork is not the best way to spend an evening and part of the night too, but It was an absolute pleasure to read the Utopia of Rules, which was published in 2015. The actual title is The Utopia of Rules:On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy and itis a series of essays about bureaucracy and about how people relate to bureaucracies.

One of the things that Graeber wants to show in this book is it that although we all claim to hate bureaucracy, we always get more and more of it. Is there, somewhere in a very deep level that we actually really love it? What is bureaucracy’s secret appeal? The premise of this book is that we live in a deeply bureaucratic society. If we do not notice it, it is largely because bureaucratic practices and requirements have become so all-pervasive that we can barely see them-or worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way. Our lives have come to be organised around the filling out of forms.

The basic idea is that bureaucracy is a sort of systematised form of violence.An invisible violence, you don’t think about it while filling in forms and ticking boxes but it becomes apparent when you realise what would happen if you were to try to resist the bureaucratic structure that govern almost every aspect of our lives. Because for every activity, every aspect of our lives,especially in public, there are rules and laws that are enforced by violence.There are people with weapons who are there to threaten us if we don’t obey the rules. Graeber is fascinated by the role of police in our societies. He argues that most of what police do is enforce administrative ordinances, so basically what they do on day to day basis has nothing to do with crime. David Graeber describes police officers as bureaucrats with batons, which, after some thought, I tend to believe that it is kind of true.

Regarding the differences between public and private bureaucratisation, Graeber argues they are some differences but the areas they overlap seem to belarger than the areas they are distinct. Indeed, they have come together to a such a point that it’s very hard in many cases to know which one you are dealing with. It is, says Graeber a “ gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits.” This process does not yet have a name, but Graeber call this the age of “total bureaucratization.” One can see its effects in every aspect of our lives. “It fills our days with paperwork. Application forms get longer and more elaborate. Ordinary documents like bills or tickets or memberships in sports or book clubs come to be buttressed by pages of legalistic fine print.”

To return to the question of what is bureaucracy’s secret appeal, David Graeber says that what ultimately lies behind its appeal is fear of play. Because play, as social scientist Shiv Visvanathan said, is “cosmic and open-ended.” In contrast with game, which is more predictable and bounded,play emergence, novelty and surprise. Freedom, then, argues Graeber, is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating.

This is a fascinating book and there are several examples inside the book that made me think about things in a fresh way. Graeber has become one of my favourite thinkers living today. He has the ability to make you think about commonplace ideas and assumptions in a new light.

Full Review at: Maquina Lectora

There are two seemingly conflicting ideas of what it means to be privileged and powerful: on the one hand, it means that you no longer have to bother yourself about the day-to-day tedium of how to get your needs met; but on the other hand, it means that you’re in charge of all of this day-to-day tedium of how people get their needs met — bwa ha ha. You get to decide who owns what and how transactions will get transacted and who gets their cut.

Bureaucracy, according to [a:David Graeber|29101|David Graeber|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1253069199p2/29101.jpg], is part of the solution to this conflict. It allows the powerful and privileged to maintain their blissful ignorance of the tedium and the personalities of the hoi polloi they lord over, while giving them the illusion of knowledge so they can be confident in their mastery. Bureaucracy tediously collects data of usually stupid varieties and then summarizes them craftily so as to make it seem the epitome of knowledge — something that someone of privilege can digest in an afternoon and then feel as knowledgeable as though he had spent years among the people learning the lay of the land.

I can relate to this. I was once a low-level manager (more of a team leader) at a software company. Part of what I was supposed to do was valuable: I was supposed to motivate the employees on my team to work productively, and to feel good about what they were doing, and to help promote their career goals, and also to help coordinate their efforts. But most of what my new role entailed was wholly bureaucratic: supplying “metrics” to and writing weekly “progress reports” for people further up the ladder that they could use to justify their decisions (decisions I suspect that they would have made in just as slapdash a fashion without my input). I eventually found that my most useful role was to be an insulator between upper management and the people doing productive work — protecting the latter from having to think about the bombastic and erratic pronouncements of the former.

So, anyway, one of the purposes of bureaucracy is to organize ignorance in such a way that it allows powerful people to maintain their hard-earned stupidity while projecting an air of command and control. “Bureaucratic procedures,” writes Graeber, “which have an uncanny ability to make even the smartest people act like idiots, are not so much forms of stupidity in themselves, as they are ways of managing situations already stupid because of the effects of structural violence.”

By “structural violence” he doesn’t mean “metaphorical violence” as in “the ideology of racism is a form of structural violence because of how it demeans its victims” but he means “actual violence” as in “racism is perpetuated by the threat and use of police billy clubs on behalf of the dominant racial group, among other such things.” That violence is stupid is not an insult to violence but a description of it: it is the antithesis of understanding.

Graeber’s analysis of bureaucracy, both in government and in the more-or-less private sector, is also an analysis of how structural violence and bureaucracy support and justify each other, and also how the rest of us become complicit in structural violence and bureaucracy in pursuit of our own little slice of the stupid that we can luxuriate in from time to time.

My advice would be to skip the author’s introduction, which is kind of sloppy, and go directly to chapter one: “Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity” (also available on-line in an earlier form as “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor”).

Chapter two, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” is also available on-line. That leaves chapter three, “The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All,” for which you’ll actually have to get your hands on the book, and an Appendix, “On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power” which is a meditation on the Batman movies and what sort of mythology they constitute.