David Graeber is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I’m reading with great interest.  But he is a man of many parts.

In the first place, he is described as an “anarchist activist”.  He was involved with Occupy Wall Street and is a card-carrying member (if they carry cards) of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World (their slogan is terrific: “An Injury to One is an Injury to All”).

And these interests have prompted two recent books, which I discovered the other day and now have on order:

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is a great title.  I’m looking forward to reading it.

And Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is an even more terrific title.

I’m guessing that the two books are following a new thread for Graeber: the meaninglessness and folly of work in the “advanced” countries.

His thesis, or one of them, seems to be that instead of shortening the work week as work becomes less necessary, our captains of industry are draining the meaning out of jobs but insisting that people show up in costume regardless.

I’ve been interested in two memes about the world of work, in the past as a VC but now as an author: 1) the “Mechanical Turk-ization” of work (Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s work-by-the-drink project for turning people into computer-like clones) and 2) the Millenial-driven quest for meaning in work, which is a reaction and a hopeful sign.

I’ll be interested to see what Graeber has to say about these.

(I’m calling him a trans-national treasure because he is currently evidently in London teaching at the LSE.)