Quotes from this book:
I don't like this essay, and it feels as if it's very "progress is a linear progression." It isn't. Progress has cycles, and they overlap.
One might suggest an even darker possibility. A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. Information technology has allowed a financialization of capital that has driven workers ever more desperately into debt, while, at the same time, allowed employers to create new “flexible” work regimes that have destroyed traditional job security and led to a massive increase in overall working hours for almost all segments of the population. Along with the export of traditional factory jobs, this has put the union movement to rout and thus destroyed any real possibility of effective working-class politics. Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we still await cures for cancer or even of the common cold; instead, the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made, one might say, to ensure that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.
As always, I'm not fond of people talking disparagingly with regards to medications that help with mental health issues and/or cognitive disabilities. While Ritalin certainly does not work for me, I also know that other ADHD medications still make it possible for me to do the things I want to do even when I don't have to actively be engaged in "the system."
I don't think most people understand what it's like to sit down and try to read books, any and all, and not even be able to focus on the words in front of your face because your brain simply won't let you with everything else happening around you (and not because you're thinking about other things, though that is a form of distraction most people can resonate with). I don't think most people understand what it is to have your whole life halted by pondering whether or not you should even be alive. We should be more careful about the narratives that we launder into left spaces, even if our so-called "greats" did it for us.
Are there discussions to have about how psychiatry is used and abused in order to punish people? Yes, but that argument rests within similar conversations to the medical system as a whole and the prison industrial complex. So that final line in this section really annoys me, especially coming from someone as lauded as Graeber has been.
ANYWAY, I think there is something to the bolded part. This part, which I do think has some merit, is also why I find the final line to be nonsensical and absurd. Are those things used to control? Certainly, they have been.
But he should've spent more time focusing on the things that he had already brought up, as he had a stronger point there. Almost everything that we've seen developed in many of our lifetimes has come to be part of a surveillance system.
Here, I think our collective fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the Internet have blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed us imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation that creates open-source software. It isn’t. These are just the sort of research teams most likely to produce results. If anything, research has been moving in the opposite direction. It is still driven by giant, bureaucratic projects; what has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led all parties to adopt language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. While this might have helped somewhat in speeding up the creation of immediately marketable products—as this is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do—in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.
The laundering of corporate sensibilities is a topic that I wish he would've spent more time on here. He really could've written multiple essays. Perhaps others can take up that mantle because there are a dozen or so topics here that would've done better with depth.
However, there's also the connections to things like the philanthropic foundations that I would've liked to see covered here, too. Certainly these 'titans of industry' who set up nonprofits to launder their images (people who it's clear Gates got his inspiration from) had an impact on how those structures inserted themselves into places they certainly should never have been (particularly outside the United States).
Here I can speak from experience. My own knowledge comes largely from universities, both in the United States and the UK. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative paperwork, at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have not only more administrative staff than faculty, but the faculty, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administrative responsibilities as on teaching and research combined. This is more or less par for the course for universities worldwide. The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of our students’ job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.
It's also worth considering how this has funneled downward in the education industry, how it has become commonplace among K-12 teachers and has been introduced in numerous ways (purchasing corporate services, the development of charters and academies, hiring corporate outsiders, etc). PR and marketing are core to a lot of schools, including public ones.
The result is a sea of documents about the fostering of “imagination” and “creativity,” set in an environment that might as well have been designed to strangle any actual manifestations of imagination and creativity in the cradle. I am not a scientist. I work in social theory. But I have seen the results in my own field of endeavor. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have, instead, been largely reduced to the equivalent of Medieval scholastics, scribbling endless annotations on French theory from the 1970s, despite the guilty awareness that if contemporary incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or even Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the U.S. academy, they would be unlikely to even make it through grad school, and if they somehow did make it, they would almost certainly be denied tenure.
Why is it that everyone looks at these people as being so great when a lot of their work was definitely on the backs of people far more vulnerable than they ever would've been? And also for their relationships to harmful individuals (like pederasts)? It's perplexing.
Also perplexing is this idea of one person who will come up with these ideas in the way that Graeber talks about. Perhaps his time in academia got to him, but he often focuses in on one person when he should've been more aware of the collective endeavour.
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.
And who was allowed to be eccentric, brilliant, and impractical? Because it really feels, as always, your work aims to recognise your position within whiteness and patriarchy and suddenly drops those balls during analysis.
In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can also add the creeping privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has recently reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open-source in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is, as he nicely puts it, “convivial”:
Convivial for whom? I feel like I might lose my mind asking this because we know that it wasn't "convivial" for people who were overtly harmed by academia and the competition of scientific discovery in the past. Was it "convivial" for Rosalind Franklin, whose work went largely unrecognised while the men who stole it from here was recognised? Was it "convivial" for the many Black women who were NASA computers and mathematicians when their work was obscured for all the white people (usually men)?
Who was this field convivial for? And how dare you even claim that. You should have known better by the time you published this piece.
Not only that, the person he quoted in this piece said this:
Convivial competition is where I (or my team) wish to be the first to prove a particular conjecture, to explain a particular phenomenon, to discover a particular species, star or particle, in the same way that if I race my bike against my friend I wish to win. But convivial competition does not exclude cooperation, in that rival researchers (or research teams) will share preliminary results, experience of techniques and so on … Of course, the shared knowledge, accessible through books, articles, computer software and directly, through dialogue with other scientists, forms an intellectual commons.
Did you ask your friend if they wanted to race you? Similarly, did you ask anyone if they wanted to compete with you in these "convivial competitions?" Or did you just do them? And for what purpose? It's absolute horse shit to ever talk like this, and it's even worse when the person doing so just outright uses this quote as if that's how everyone felt. Truly, it feels like only people who have structural power over everyone else feel this way.
It is worth discussing what "convivial competition" looks like, but it's also worth figuring out if it's consensual. If everyone has agreed to it (e.g., friendly ribbing between two people), fine. But often times, people (usually cis white men) perceive their "friendly" and "convivial" competition without considering the realities of the non-white people and non-cis men they're competing with. Many of us do not agree to those terms and have a different understanding of the world. It's necessary to consider that.