Graeber David: Bureaucracy

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The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy - David Graeber. Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And just how much are our lives being ruined by all this nonstop documentation? To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice. Is the inane, annoying paperwork we confront every day really a cipher for state violence? And is the capitalist promise of salvation-through-technology just a tool for the powerful to exert more control? Graeber provides a forceful, radical answer to these questions, though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics in the second half of the twentieth century to the hidden meanings behind James Bond, 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 Žižek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule our lives—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy - David Graeber od nakladatelství Melville House (US) v kategorii English literature za skvělé ceny na e-shopu Knihydobrovsky.cz A follow-up to David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years , which has sold 100,000 copies for Melville House and been published in 26 foreign editions§§Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms?§§To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber - one of the most prominent and provocative thinkers working today - takes a journey through ancient and modern history to trace the peculiar and fascinating evolution of bureaucracy over the ages.§§He starts in the ancient world, looking at how early civilizations were organized and what traces early bureaucratic systems have left in the ethnographic literature. He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life - like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France - these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own "utopia of rules," freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly underst