Andrew Work

[Germaine Greenweig]

Hewas the founder and Editor in Chief of the politics journal Harbour Times (est. 2014) and exited it in February 2021. This former Executive Director of The Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong worked for The Economist Group, Penton Media and on Parliament Hill with a senior Cabinet Minister in Ottawa. He holds a Bachelor of Science from McGill University and an MBA from the University of Victoria.

My colleague discovered this while filling out a form at the University of Cambridge that required her to declare all the committees she sits on (ostensibly to keep an eye on conflicts of interest). I had to complete the form too because I am a Trustee of the University. This means that committees play a substantial role in my working life. Too substantial in fact. As of December 2021, I sit on about 20 of them.

Like so many aspects of human social life, Graeber has an idea about this experience. It is an idea about that feeling of wasting your time on tasks that are not worth doing. The idea is called Bullshit Jobs (Graeber 2013, 2018). It says that most of us spend our time doing jobs are unsatisfying and serve no real purpose for society. Graeber says that capitalism has given us these jobs to keep us busy.

Imagine that you are the absurd character of a (once) working class, Marxist academic in an elite university, spending hours a week trawling through committee papers. Perhaps your soul aches with the suspicion that you are wasting your time and have sold out. Until you find an innocuous line of text tucked away in a committee paper; a text that if unchallenged would quietly remove permanent employment status from everybody in your university that changed their institutional role at any point in the future. Suddenly it seems important that somebody is there to read all these papers. And it seems especially important that the people doing the reading should not assume that the work is bullshit.

Modern capitalism lacks the concerted agency to create mass pointless work for reasons of social engineering. It principally strives towards the economic exploitation of mass populations, and is content to abandon those that it cannot readily exploit.

Graeber (2013) says that the only societies that used to give people pointless work were state socialist ones. They did this to redistribute wealth and keep people out of trouble. However, he argues that in the late 20th century increasing mechanisation and the shifting of production to the developing world left much of the working population in wealthy capitalist societies with nothing to do. That population was a threat to the established social order, and needed to be given bullshit jobs to distract them and tire them out.

I appreciate anthropological attention to the discursive and moral life of neoliberalism, and I have written about how neoliberal actors may feel that they are doing good in the world (Sanchez 2012). However, for a structural analysis like Bullshit Jobs what matters is the core motivation of capitalism, which is profit. The notion of a world of pointless employment that does not exist to make money, simply does not fit with what we know about most of economic life. More broadly, there is the lingering issue that capitalism is untroubled by the fact that plenty of people in wealthy societies have not been given pointless work.

Capitalism has not found ways of giving dangerous populations bullshit jobs to keep them out of trouble. Rather, capitalism is all too often immune to the trouble that they might cause, and indeed routinely finds them to be a useful area of exploitation.

Anthropology is often mired in citations and pedestrianism. Or else we are that other type of Anthropologist (my least favourite): the one mired in pretentious, performative theorising. As a consequence, we are a discipline that often struggles to say anything original and of wider social significance. But in Bullshit Jobs we have a work that is imaginative, fun to read, and about issues that most people can relate to. It is the voice of a man speaking to the reader not as an academic showing off or trying to intimidate you, but as though he had met you at a party, and you were lucky enough to be chatting to somebody that really made you think.

Andrew Sanchez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination co-edited with Catherine Alexander.

I recently spoke with Martin about his book via FaceTime. We discussed, among other things, the literary archetypes he was working from, the authors that influenced him, and the intersection of self-awareness and guilt. He was in his apartment in Boston. His dog, Bonnie, most likely a Collie-Retriever mix, occasionally entered the shot to offer input and affection.

It was less of a decision than a calling. I recognized the problems of the world and the capacity for creative and positive solutions. I wanted to do work that made sense and would enhance my life and the lives of those around me.

Not in any official capacity, although I have several topics I am always working on. One is research into the world's best Permaculture sites. I am always studying what is going on and where and how. I also do a lot of experimenting with plants architecture, creating living fences of willow or hazelnut, trellising grapes on living arbors of apple or plum. I continue to learn more every season that I prune and manage my gardens.

It's incredible to get people from all over the world together in one forum. Students design their own properties in my class, so we have people from temperate Europe, tropical Central America, the Arid Western US and more, all doing the same assignments and posting and sharing their work. It's very fascinating.

The thing I like about online learning is that it is distilled down. It's all about content. All we have to judge a student by is their actual work and participation in the class. There is no time lost in transit or idle talk. We just get right down to business! Now, this could also be the worst thing about online learning for some, but for me, it is an efficiency of time and energy versus an in-person class.

But that is only valuable for a particular kind of student. Some people really need face-to-face learning, and I respect that venue as well. I teach in-person classes and enjoy them for different reasons.

My class is unique in that students are designing a site for the main activity that is a culmination of all their assignments. So we really do get to know students on somewhat of a personal level; where they live and what their dreams and visions are for their lives. So the connection with students is inherent in the course structure and content.

As I mentioned before, my classes are high-connection between instructor and student, and I have a number of other very competent people working on the class with me, who are all fairly masterful at the design process and guide the student through it.

My course structure has evolved a lot to handle the wide diversity of people who come through the courses. I have a much more smooth and structured learning system then I did seven years ago when I started with OSU. And I'm proud of that!

I don't want to sound cliche, but 'do your best.' I've been doing this for a while, and I've seen many students move through, of all different levels of abilities, experience, and available time and energy. Instructors can see when a student is putting their all into a course, regardless of what they come into the course with. The effort and determination of a sincere student comes through.

My hobbies overlap with my work tremendously. I love gardening and building my Permaculture homestead. I also love to hike in nature, float down the river, and spend time with my kids. I play guitar every day, and I also like cooking.

I have a lot of students who have stood out, honestly. I have had a lot of really amazing people come through my courses. One student who already had a farm and just took the information and ran with it is Marianne Cicala. Check out her work at Crickets Cove Farm.

Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society featuring my conversation with Andrew McLuhan. I can\u2019t recall how or when I first encountered the work of Marshall McLuhan, I think it might\u2019ve been through the writing of one of his most notable students, Neil Postman. I do know, however, that McLuhan, and others like Postman and Walter Ong who built on his work, became a cornerstone of my own thinking about media and technology. So it was a great pleasure to speak with his grandson Andrew, who is now stewarding and expanding the work of his grandfather and his father, Eric McLuhan, through the McLuhan Institute, of which he is the founder and director.

I learned a lot about McLuhan through this conversation and I think you\u2019ll find it worth your time. A variety of resources and sites were mentioned throughout the conversation, and I\u2019ve tried to provide links to all of those below. Above all, make sure you check out the McLuhan Institute and consider supporting Andrew\u2019s work through his Patreon page.

My work is really a microcosm of all the work the Veterans History Project (VHP) does. Ultimately, what I and my fellow liaison specialists do is introduce people to VHP and teach them how to participate and create collections materials. Our processing team catalogues and preserves those collections, and our librarians and archivists make them available to Library patrons.

This takes many forms and is almost never a solo effort. One day we may be briefing a congressional office so they can do VHP interviews in their district. The next, we might be behind a table at a local veterans resource fair or leading online workshops teaching volunteers how to do oral history. Some days we are in our studio conducting interviews. Many are spent entirely on the phone or writing emails, chasing leads and making arrangements to make all those things happen.

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