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David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
- vishnugupta 5y agoA related thread just a day ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29170642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29170642
- ncmncm 5y agoMy pre-ordered copy of "The Dawn of Humanity", hot off the press, just arrived yesterday, from Bookshop.org, right on schedule. I am preparing to experience all my cherished preconceptions exploding.
- orthecreedence 5y agoI'm ashamed to admit I've never actually read any of Graeber's books, even though I'm fairly anarchist-leaning. I really need to change that. I didn't even know that he finished another one before he died, so I guess I'll have to add that to my list as well.
- bob229 5y agoDon’t waste your time with his nonsense
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoHe’s got a lot of great talks and other appearances on YouTube. I don’t read much but I listen to stuff like this on Bluetooth headphones while I clean the house and do other physical work. Often instead of reading an authors book I will listen to them give the same book talk at three different venues. I don’t claim it’s as good as reading the book but compared to buying the book and watching it collect dust on my shelf it’s a winner.
- andrepd 5y agoAha, I see I'm not the only one who listens to talks while doing housework or working out. I've been on a Varoufakis binge for a while, perhaps I'll check Graber now ;)
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoYah and if you like those two also check out Jason Hickel and Vijay Prashad[1]. [1] For example this one is great: https://youtu.be/M-frUMXKcEw https://youtu.be/M-frUMXKcEw
- JasonCannon 5y agoI recommend Debt the first 5000 years as well as The Democracy Project. Both of which were absolutely fascinating to me. Solidarity forever and rest in power Graeber.
- 0xBABAD00C 5y agoI've seen quite a bit of criticism of the Debt book of basically being a giant exercise in cherry-picking and sort of a politically motivated narrative. However, history and economics are topics where neutrality and objectivity of authors are hardly the norm.
- d3nj4l 5y agoIt's an interesting read despite that IMO. When I first read it as a teen it blew my mind, and over time I read a bunch of critiques that corrected beliefes I'd had based on it, but I still think it was a good read, because even a cherry picked tour through history and philosophy is a tour through history and philosophy. For those looking for a left-wing critique, I like Aufheben's: https://libcom.org/library/5000-years-or-debt https://libcom.org/library/5000-years-or-debt
- socialdemocrat 5y agoSure, but it is like that with a lot of stuff you read. I read the economist weekly and they constantly cherry pick whatever makes capitalism and deregulation look great. Still the economist is high quality journalism and has many insights worth reading. Graeber also obviously has an angle but three are still many interesting insights and angles. I don’t think anyone is ever going to give e complete unbiased version of anything. Better to read different perspectives with an open mind and a healthy does of scepticism.
- pydry 5y agoThe Economist has plenty of elite respectability but its journalism is pretty bad. The breathless article about copilot replacing programming labour is fairly indicative of both their accuracy and attitude on most things.
- socialdemocrat 5y agoI am not an anarchist at all but I think he has some very good criticisms of a lot of fundamental beliefs among modern day economists. Economics as a profession is built upon a set of axioms or premises about human nature and society. Graeber cannot go toe to toe with modern economists with their equations but he does a brilliant job of tearing apart the assumptions of economists within the classical school of though. I lived “Debt: first 5000 years” and “Bullshit jobs” Both challenge a lot of truthisms about our modern capitalist world. I am surprised the ideas in these books have not become more widely known on the political left.
- bluecheese33 5y agoI think modern economists have been acknowledging and quantifying the flaws in simplifying assumptions in economic models for decades [1]. That being said, I do think there is a serious problem in the way economics is often taught, and things like debt (and more broadly, anthropology) is part of the cure [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics [2] https://ravik.substack.com/p/does-learning-economics-make-you https://ravik.substack.com/p/does-learning-economics-make-yo...
- rsj_hn 5y agoEconomics is hard. Behavioral economics is having a hard time right now with many of the core hypothesis (loss aversion) and key interventions (priming) turning out to be experimentally not-reproducible. See https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-death-of-behavioral-economics https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-death-of... - for an overview.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago> modern economists have been acknowledging and quantifying the flaws in simplifying assumptions in economic models for decades Just FYI, both Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, not economists.
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- docmechanic 5y agoBakunin-reading anarchist here admits to the same ignorance. Fascinated to learn that he was an early supporter of the Kurdish struggle in northern Syria.
- pxc 5y agoSome of them were popular enough to get audiobook versions, which can help you get started if sitting down to read big tomes is something you find difficult
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- forgotmypw17 5y agohttps://archive.md/dTHGn https://archive.md/dTHGn
- marnett 5y agoThanks for sharing this. Graeber’s name came up many times during a recent a deep dive on ancient Mesoamerican societies. I had seen his new book The Dawn of Everything as well as an older text, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, and was eager to pick them up. I was unaware he had passed, however. Nearly all of his previous topics of research and publishing were of interest to me; it is a shame to realize this most recent book will be the last.
- culi 5y agoWhat a way to go to. The book, cowritten with archeologist David Wengrow, ties together so many different developments within archeology and anthropology that are driving some major paradigm shifts. These massively important paradigm shifts have mostly been confined to academia so far and I don't there's been such a broad attempt to tie them altogether like this. Especially not one geared towards the public This book will undoubtedly change the way we talk about non-industrial peoples and lifestyles for decades to come. Rest in power, David Graeber
- Robotbeat 5y agoCan you summarize three of these paradigm shifts?
- culi 5y agoLol this sounds like a class assignment. E.g. the origins of agriculture. It's going from the idea of having a single point of origin to multiple (~15-20) points of origins around the world. Another major shift in thinking about agriculture is realizing it wasn't so much of a technological advancement (indeed agricultural people had radically reduced lifespans, less leisure time, more disease, etc) as something people were likely forced into. And most people around the world grew at least part of their food or at least had the knowledge to do it so people shifted in and out of agriculture commonly. Another major shift in thinking is around cities. In anthropology the concept of cities have actually been defined by hierarchical social structures. We have more and more examples of many very large rural places that very much go against the idea and drive a big hole in the idea that hierarchy is a natural biproduct of increasing populations. I could go on. One that I wish got covered more in the book was the relationships between cultures and ecologies. This is more of a major shift in archaeobotany and will probably take a while to be fully fleshed out and reach the wider public, but archeologists are increasingly seeing, for example, the Amazon rainforest as a manufactured landscape. One that was very heavily shaped by the indigenous peoples that lived in them and would not be around in the way that it is without them. Same for California and it's deep dependence on cultural burning practices and also for most of Australia that early colonists often described as looking like a "giant well-managed park".
- petermcneeley 5y agoGraber vs Thiel discussion 2020: https://youtu.be/eF0cz9OmCGw https://youtu.be/eF0cz9OmCGw
- hunterb123 5y agoThis is one of my favorite Peter Thiel talks, the uploader certainly didn't seem to think so haha.
- quadrangle 5y agoThanks, that was interesting. They actually largely agreed in that exchange, not really "vs". That was possible because of not being people who just do or say the caricature of some particular political dogma. If there's any chance to progress our discourse as a society, we have to overcome the pattern where if I say "Graeber and Thiel were in agreement", people stop imagining that it means they both are effectively the caricature of whatever Thiel-critics make him out to be. I would love to have this sort of dialogue be the norm. I would love to have this sort of reasoned intellectual rapport with others, including those who I might have significant disagreements with. P.S. Oops, I looked at the YouTube comments. We're F'ed. People don't know how to engage with ideas and respectful discourse anymore.
- petermcneeley 5y agoThe issue with this dialogue was that it was not long enough. I think there are very real disagreements between Thiel and Graeber. I think the two stand on opposite sides of the egalitarianism debate. Is this rift completely insurmountable? Perhaps a kind of horseshoe theory can bring them together. I am not even sure that bringing them together is entirely the goal. It would be nice if a diverse set of beliefs could be practiced in relative isolation to prove out the viability of these concepts. This is why the YouTube comments dont really matter. Not everyone needs to participate in these experiments.
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- skybrian 5y agoIt's a well-written biography and Graeber comes across as a great guy but on the other hand the Brad DeLong takedown linked in the article [1] is quite something. I'm wondering how he wrote a 500 page book on debt without really understanding banking? [1] https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-graeber-post.html https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-g...
- steppi 5y agoDavid Graeber had an account here and defended himself from DeLong's accusations in a comment [1]. They even had an exchange in that thread. At best I think DeLong has been pretty uncharitable to Graeber. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163449
- specialist 5y agoOnce I read Debt, I decided DeLong criticized a book which Graeber had not written. Like @heydenberk, I unfollowed DeLong.
- paganel 5y agoThanks for that link, I somehow missed it when DeLong's article was discussed in here, it helps explain lots of stuff.
- notahacker 5y agoDeLong was definitely trolling Graeber, but Graeber brought it on himself with overreaction to reviews which brought up the error. (A reviewer opened an article by saying it was an impressive book he was considering setting as a text for his students and a few paragraphs of summary of points Graeber made which are good, before highlighting a mistake and another argument he considered weak. Graeber wrote a screed about how the reviewer was "part of a strategy of deligitimization... without even being aware he was doing so" and insisted the Apple quote was the only error in his book and it was actually the editors' fault...) Debt is a thought-provoking book, but it's a book with no shortage of sloppy errors and dubious ancillary claims mostly incidental to its actual arguments. One DeLong probably should have picked up when he was compiling his lists is referring to Keynes' Treatise on Money his "most famous work", which is a bit like calling Wings Paul McCartney's most famous band.
- bob229 5y agoGraeber was a talentless crackpot if you wasted your time reading his nonsense
- cossatot 5y agoGraeber's posts on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber
- dgb23 5y agoI never knew he was getting trolled by someone who one could classify as a stalker (see: 2018 comments). In any case, thanks for the link.
- diego_moita 5y agoBegan "The Dawn of Everything" about a week ago, still on chapter 3. Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, solid and mind-blowing. Sometimes the book gets too much into petty fights. I didn't like its takes on Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" or Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". But that's a matter of my personal taste.
- wott 5y ago> It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture Well, La Boétie's "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" dates back to 200 years before Rousseau, and I wouldn't say it was inspired by American Indians. I am not saying that the discovery and then the deep relations that France did have with American Indians did not play an important in the literature and reflections: on the contrary just a bit after La Boétie's time, Montaigne integrated them in his thinking. That was still over 150 years before Rousseau. Edit: There were other major transformations at work, like the fact that before 1500, writers would either be lords or strongly depend on King or lords both for their income and for being allowed to publish. It was a Middle Age organisation, with a chivalry based nobility; writing essays was not a thing, the number of themes was as reduced as the number of forms. Then society organisation changed, bourgeoisie and nobles started mixing more and more; writing was more long-form (technical reasons come into play too) and of course expanded the number of themes it dealt with.
- jhbadger 5y agoThere were plenty of Westerners who were concerned with inequality -- there were numerous failed peasant rebellions throughout Europe ever since the Middle Ages.
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- paulpauper 5y agoHe epitomized, embodied how and what public intellectuals should be, should aspire to: the a willingness to ask hard questions, to challenge conventional preconceived notions. It seems like academia these days is more about maintaining the status quo. If your ideas are engineering debate, it means you're doing your job.
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoHe didn’t challenge any conventional preconceived notions. His parents were leftists and he grew up in a commune and all his views literally revolved around this political ideology.
- hacksnewer 5y agoThis is a very HN way of looking at academia. The vast majority of academics aren't looking to be "public", they quietly do great work for decades, passing their knowledge down to their students. You don't hear about them because their main job is to educate not bloviate. Not saying Graber does this, but there are academics (I can think of a Canadian professor) who are very much "public intellectuals" but whose entire career is popular due to controversy. Is that person educating or is he leading a social movement? I guess that's up for debate, but that's hwy people know who he is, not because of great work.
- AussieWog93 5y ago>I can think of a Canadian professor If we're thinking of the same professor/Kermit the Frog impersonator, he was definitely somewhat of a public figure before he got involved with the C-16 controversy. If you look at his public appearances from before this viral clip (and even for a year or two after), most of it is fairly well grounded and uncontroversial (or at least, not controversial for controversy's sake).
- socialdemocrat 5y agoVery different perspective from the debate here in Norway . Here is is seen more as a duty of academics to engage with the public and a push to get them to do that more. What value is knowledge if it is not known? We live in a media world increasingly dominated by quacks and pseudo science. The need for real experts to make themselves heard is bigger than ever. Thus at least hear in Norway the academics who popularized knowledge and engage with the public are celebrated. Politicians have started to put more pressure on academics to speak up. I know from a mother who was a life long journalist that it was always very hard to get experts to talk to media. They are so focused on a level of accuracy and formality that often is entirely unsuitable to address the public at large. But that does not mean that the alternative is to let quacks dominate public discourse.
- agumonkey 5y agoHow do people on HN deal with the potential disappearance of work altogether ? physical labour -> boston dynamics office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7) it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of tasks will just vanish and i'm saying this with a human life approach. How do we organize cities / nations around that. Do we plan for smooth transition, say 40 years of gradually smarter tooling so people stay in charge but with advanced assist ? do we go UBI ? do we convert every human as a space tourist ?
- beckman466 5y ago> i'm saying this with a human life approach what does this mean?
- agumonkey 5y agoThat I mostly care about people existence and well being, above the contemporary economic systems (because some can say, we can't sustain GDP without that style of work and that I believe our system is quite unhealthy and that deviating from it can lead to very different but better lives)
- jiggawatts 5y agoI'm not worried in the same way because I think all such work automation is subject to Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox What I've seen is that increased efficiencies have massively increased the amount of "things" being done by the same number of people. As a random example, I'm dealing with a large government department on a semi regular basis as a consultant, so I get to see lots of parts of their business and in some ways I know them better than their own staff do. It's madness. They have the same sized team of admins in charge of an exponentially growing set of business applications. Decades ago large enterprises like this department would have had maybe 2-3 core applications, typically running on a mainframe. Then they'd have a few dozen peripheral applications in the sense that "email" counted as one of those apps! Now? Their single sign on system has hundreds, and that's not including hundreds more non-SSO applications. They're almost certainly over a thousand if you count things like Google Maps (which they use heavily!) and the long tail of developer tools, system admin platforms, and whatnot. In the past, people like me would have had a dedicated secretary. Now? I'm expected to not just manage my own calendar, but do my own project management, organise my own hotel rooms, and so forth. It has become "so easy" that "anyone can do it", so everyone does. This just means that instead of one or two meetings a week, now we have many per day. Being able to organise a meeting doesn't mean that the same number of meetings have less organisation overhead. It means many more meetings. Work hasn't be reduced. We're doing more of it than ever before...
- ocschwar 5y agoDavid Graeber had a wonderful talent for finding innovative and fascinating ways to be wrong about something. That will always make his writings worth reading and rereading. But before thinking he's right, remember he's guy behind the Occupy movement's rules of order, which is why the meetings took so torturously long. I remain a little irked by it, because a whole cohort of 18 year old activists sat at Occupy meetings before being introduced to Robert's Rules of Order, and some of them are ruined for life by it. Good guy. Fascinating explorations into ideas. And so, so, wrong.
- specialist 5y agoRobert's Rules of Order is not the pinnacle of human achievement. It's just a tool. New forms of collective decision making require new tools. I wouldn't ever run an endorsement meeting using joint application design (JAD). Just like I wouldn't use RRO for eliciting user requirements. Source: 8 years on exec board for local party, former UI designer. PS- In fact, we're always tweaking our bylaws. To be more fair, more efficient, more representative, etc. For instance, we now use approval voting to stack rank motions to endorse, for maximal fairness. Doing so completely short circuits gaming RRO and mostly eliminated drama around the process. PS2- OMG, experiencing traumatic flashbacks. Using RRO to craft platforms, amend bylaws, etc is literally hell on earth. Transmuting trivial activities using any other conceivable methodology into soul sucking unending torture. Last time we amended our bylaws, we had rapid response team from suicide prevention hotline physically present to monitor our members and preemptively intervene as necessary.
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- allworknoplay 5y agoSurprise, organizing takes an enormous amount of work, which anyone who's involved in any participatory, decentralized, leftist, or anarchist space will tell you. You may know this! Not clear from your response. Do you have a point about something he's factually incorrect about in his writings, or just that you (unlike many other Occupy participants) didn't like processes he created as much as others?
- Robotbeat 5y agoInteresting. Makes me want to actually read Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens. I watched the GG&S documentary & enjoyed it, but I should read the book. What single book of Graeber should I read that has his most important ideas? Is it this one?
- SaberTail 5y agoI'd recommend Debt. It made me rethink a lot of what I "knew" about money and economics. Bullshit Jobs is also interesting, but it's a much lighter, much more "pop" book. I haven't read this one yet to know if it's on the same level as Debt, but the reviews so far have suggested it is.
- thundergolfer 5y agoDebt is incredible, and I don't use that work lightly. For me I came away not with answers, but feeling like I could for the first time actually think about its big issues (money, economics, morality, community).
- f0e4c2f7 5y agoI enjoy Graeber's work including Debt: a 5000 year history, but I know that feeling you mean of the book leaving you with more questions than answers. If you haven't read it you might enjoy Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty as an interesting follow up to it.
- thundergolfer 5y agoI've got a copy of that one, but I find it's a more intimidating and taxing read than Debt. I do mean to get through it though.
- diego_moita 5y ago> What single book of Graeber should I read that has his most important ideas? Is it this one? I read both Diamond's and Harari's and am reading this one. All three are very, very good. Graeber makes heavy criticism of Harari and Diamond, but I found his criticism to be marginal. He really doesn't touch the core of those 2 books.
- amar-laksh 5y agoRecently had a throwaway thought while reading The Dawn of Everything. The formation of cultural norms fundamentally sit on the idea of recollection of the distant past and not of that which has just happened in front of you. Example: The reason for wearing ties is part of the western cultural code not because each person distinctly and has first-hand witnessed how it started, it's just being shaped by historical precedent. So what happens, over time, to cultural norms when the recollection can be made in first-person, distinct ways? (Think the internet, VR)
- ruined 5y agoThis has happened to some extent forever, through oral tradition, but manufactured media certainly accelerates the process. If you’re interested in this kind of thing i’d recommend Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, in which the author analyzes the way nationalism developed with the invention of the printing press. It's a classic text of anthropology and absolutely blew my mind when i read it as a teenager.
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- atdrummond 5y agoI felt like sharing this comment I left here when he passed, as it confirms for me the adoration many of us apparently felt for him. “David saved my academic career, if not my life. When I faced expulsion from the LSE, having already left the University of Chicago due to the health issues, he wrote a compelling letter on my behalf when there was no reason for him to do so. I wasn’t even in his department. Although he and I disagreed about a number of things, I will forever appreciate him sticking his neck out for me when there was little evidence to suggest it was worth doing. Thanks David.”
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- rini17 5y agoSeems to me people such as Graeber are concentrated in the USA and only fight entrenched hierarchy there. And the US academia keeps attracting excellent people from all over the world. Is that really the best place to influence history? I think they could have bigger impact elsewhere, for example the fall of Iron Curtain was incredible opportunity but neocons snatched that quickly. Going to war zone like Rojava is other extreme. Why all the rest of the world between these extremes is not interesting for anarchists?
- kwhitefoot 5y agoHe was at Goldsmiths from 2008 to 2013 and professor at the LSE after that, hardly only in the US.
- rini17 5y agoFrom my POV London may as well be in the US. Same kind of deeply entrenched system, not amenable toward anarchy at all.