We're going to be talking in the future about the concept of AI sovereign wealth funds, where the people of a country are compensated for all the stealing of their content AI models have done in their training, to create wealth not just for regressive Nerd Reich oligarchic sith lords and their carbon bomb data centers, but for everyone of all backgrounds and persuasions. But historically, it's also important to point out that many jobs have just been straight up bullshit.
David Graeber argued something profoundly irritating to modern shallow corporatism because it struck a real nerve: vast numbers of people have over their careers secretly suspected that their jobs accomplish little or nothing of social value... and they are correct! In his book Bullshit Jobs, Graeber defined a "bullshit job" not as a difficult, boring, or unpleasant job, but as a job that even the person doing it believes need not exist. The worker often cannot convincingly explain why the position is necessary and may privately feel that if the job disappeared tomorrow, nothing important would happen... and they are correct!
A sanitation worker may have a difficult, somewhat considered less desirable job, but an important one, and society would very much notice within a week or two if all garbage services vanished. Likewise jobs such as engineers, construction workers, journalists, nurses, teachers, mechanics, farmers, delivery services, etc... Graeber's point was that many of the most socially necessary jobs are often among the least rewarded. In the book World War Z, this is also highlighted. Where in the fictionals story, blue collar type jobs, auto mechanics or handyman, fix with your hand jobs, while in modern society, are considered lesser than a job in soulless Wall Street hell, when the zombie apocalypse happens, that flips. Where when society is ravished by reanimated corpses private equity jobs of greed become even more obviously useless and the knowledge contained in more blue collar jobs become priceless.
Graeber often highlighted a bloating of managerial, administrative, consulting, compliance, marketing, public-relations, and bureaucratic positions in modern economies. Despite promises that technology would reduce working hours, people remained trapped in longer than 40 at minimal if not 50 to 60 hour workweeks. The puzzle was: if productivity keeps rising, why are we not working less? There is a deeper spiritual answer to this, which is that empire doesn't want people having too much time to get more politically active or work on their own development, but his answer also had great value - Modern institutions, both public and private, often generate layers of employment whose primary purpose is to justify imperial organizational hierarchies with stooges at the top, create the appearance of activity, and / or maintain systems of power.
The first categories of bullshit jobs Graeber highlighted are:
Flunkies: jobs that exist mainly to make someone else look important.
Goons: jobs whose purpose is largely competitive or adversarial, such as certain forms of lobbying, telemarketing, or corporate legal warfare.
Duct-tapers: workers who fix problems that should not exist in the first place.
Box-tickers: employees who create reports, metrics, or paperwork that nobody meaningfully uses.
Taskmasters: managers whose roles mainly involve supervising people who require little supervision.
His argument was not merely economic but psychological. Humans generally want to feel useful. Graeber found it striking that people often reported greater misery from feeling unnecessary than from working hard. Being paid to perform meaningless tasks can produce guilt, depression, cynicism, and a sense of alienation.
Modern society has achieved a peculiar inversion. We applaud the financier who moves abstractions across spreadsheets and reward them magnificently, while the caregiver changing an elderly person's bedpan receives a fraction of the compensation. We claim to honor value creation, yet our reward structures show otherwise. Again, back to the book World War Z. Graeber was careful to note that the concept is subjective. A job qualifies as "bullshit" largely because the worker themselves believes it lacks meaningful purpose. This is one reason the idea became so popular: countless people immediately recognized the feeling.
His critics argued that he overstated the phenomenon. Economists pointed out that if a company consistently paid people to do literally nothing useful, competitive pressures should eventually eliminate those positions. Others suggested that workers sometimes underestimate the indirect value of their roles within complex organizations. Even so, the phrase "bullshit jobs" entered the zeitgeist because it gave language to a widespread suspicion: that an advanced society ought to be using its enormous productive capacity to reduce drudgery and increase human creativity and flourishing, yet somehow millions of people spend much of their lives generating emails, attending meetings before meetings about meetings, updating dashboards, and producing documents that seem destined never to be read. The enduring question Graeber left behind is not whether every alleged bullshit job is truly useless. It is why so many people, frequently feel and thus their higher selves know that their working lives are detached from any clear social purpose. That question remains uncomfortable because it is difficult to dismiss as merely theoretical. Many people encounter it every morning when they open their inbox.