The real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption. That,
Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terr...
Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form -- this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to sta...
Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal str...
Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economiesーbut to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause...
In the first century AD, for example, it was not uncommon for educated Greeks to have themselves sold into slavery to some wealthy Roman in need of a secretary, entrust the money to a close friend or...
Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people’s lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose g...
Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570–495 BC), the Buddha (563–483 BC), and Confucius (551–479 BC) were all contemporaries, and that Greece, India, and China, in that...
Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers’ own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed...
He started showing up to work drunk and taking paid business trips for nonexistent meetings:
One of the popular fallacies in connection with commerce is that in modern days a money-saving device has been introduced called credit and that, before this device was known, all purchases were paid...
Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds
Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor...
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 198os, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty p...
The self-actualization philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world arou...
The genealogy of the modern redistributive state—with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics—can be traced back not to any sort of primitive communism but ultimately to violence and war.
How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have se...
Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange.
But everywhere, managerial feudalism ensures that thousands of hours of creative effort will literally come to nothing. Take the domain of scientific research, or higher education once again. If a gra...
It is one of the great ironies of history that modern racism—probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries—had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to t...