It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. Clever and charismatic” the new yorker, bullshit Jobs gives individuals, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, corporations, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture.
These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” Financial Times.
There are hordes of people—hr consultants, communication coordinators, tragically, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, telemarketing researchers, they know it.
Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years - Debt
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. Fascinating. . . For more than 5, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, 000 years, long before the invention of coins or cash.
. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion words like “guilt, ” “sin, ” and “redemption” derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong.
Now in paperback, the updated and expanded edition: David Graeber’s “fresh. . .
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
. An essential book for our times, freer world we should, perhaps, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, begin to imagine for ourselves. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible.
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Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.
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The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change
Most of us rank so far below the top earners in the country that the "winners" might as well inhabit another planet. Through exhaustive reporting and keen analysis, the job reveals the startling truths and unveils the pervasive myths that have colored our thinking on one of the most urgent issues of our day: how to build good work in a globalized and digitalized world where middle class jobs seem to be slipping away.
Work gives us our identity, and a sense of purpose and place in this world. Ellen ruppel shell paints a compelling portrait of where we stand today, and points to a promising and hopeful way forward. We read stories of sausage makers, firefighters, zookeepers, psychologists, hospital cleaners; we hear from economists, computer scientists, and historians.
Traveling from deep in appalachia to the heart of the midwestern rust belt, from a struggling custom clothing maker in Massachusetts to a thriving co-working center in Minnesota, she marshals evidence from a wide range of disciplines to show how our educational system, our politics, and our very sense of self have been held captive to and distorted by outdated notions of what it means to get and keep a good job.
Critically acclaimed journalist ellen ruppel Shell uncovers the true cost--political, and personal--of America's mounting anxiety over jobs, economic, social, and what we can do to regain control over our working lives. Since 1973, our productivity has grown almost six times faster than our wages.
The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt
Robert cialdini, best-selling author of Influence and Pre-Suasion . An indispensable resource. Gretchen rubin, best-selling author of The Happiness Project and Better Than Before “At last . . . Sutton even teaches readers how to look inward to stifle their own inner jackass. Clear steps for rejecting, deflecting, and deflating the jerks who blight our lives .
. . This book is a contemporary classic—a shrewd and spirited guide to protecting ourselves from the jerks, bullies, tyrants, and trolls who seek to demean. We desperately need this antidote to the a-holes in our midst. Daniel H. Sutton starts with diagnosis—what kind of asshole problem, and often surprising strategies for dealing with assholes—avoiding them, sending them packing, are you dealing with? From there, he provides field‑tested, exactly, evidence‑based, disarming them, outwitting them, and developing protective psychological armor.
On Bullshit
They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Each of us contributes his share. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not.
But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. A #1 new york times bestsellerone of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory.
Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here.
Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world. Bregman's book, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, both challenging and bracing, can become a reality in our lifetime.
A 15-hour workweek. From a canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he champions ideas whose time have come.
Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today. A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell. New york timesafter working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over.
Universal basic income.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
They stay informed about the news of the day, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions. Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them.
The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. It's the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world. In this timely and enlightening book, the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives.
Digital minimalists are all around us. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. He shows how digital minimalists are rethinking their relationship to social media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with their inner selves through regular periods of solitude.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
The new york times bestselling, groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. An essential read for understanding some of the egregious abuses of power that dominate today’s news.
Former new york times columnist anand giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. Giridharadas asks hard questions: why, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, for example, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world.
. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit--at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future--if we let it.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism, " and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism.
Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets, " where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification.
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital.