Graeber's weakness of not being a bean counter (and maybe at a deeper level also not a "systems" thinker) was also his incredible advantage: to be able to sense

Graeber's weakness of not being a bean counter (and maybe at a deeper level also not a "systems" thinker) was also his incredible advantage: to be able to sense and interpret the current "reality" of much of the western world but not be transfixed by it but rather place it the context of the far more diverse historical human experience. Have not read Bullshit Jobs but was deeply impressed by Debt and his debunking of centuries of ossified, self-serving dogma. The current low signal to noise cacophony around cryptocurrencies is just another validation of how deeply illiterate we are (collectively) about fairly fundamental aspects of how our societies function, even something like money that all of us handle daily and most of us think quite important. This is not just the confusion of the "common man", until 2008 all mainstream, Nobel prize winning, economists did not think the private banking system was important in economic development - being just "an intermediary" that can be factored out of the "equations". In the many comments to this post (which in itself is a good thing - may it inspire some smart cookies to carry Graeber's torch) the discussion quickly degenerates in the "markets versus state" caricature in a manifestation of the same inadequate interpretation framework. "Markets" existed since the first three-way encounter and exchange of some goods and associated exchange rates. However corporates (expressing the enforceable interest of an industrious subset of humanity) and states (purportedly expressing the interest of "all", at least within a "nation") did not. Markets have no morality: its an information technology that can facilitate trade in slaves, human organs, human labor or human personalities (=adtech), or nuclear and chemical (=CO2) waste. Who is the gatekeeper of the morality of what and how is produced and traded? Oligopolistic corporate interests corrupting puppet state entities? Entrenched autocracies with the organized private sector simply a puppet satellite constellation? We need to get to a better level of discourse before we hit terminal planetary and societal boundaries and that, my friends, is no bullshit job.