Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.

Honestly this is how every critique of Graeber goes in my experience: As soon as his works are discussed beyond surface level, the goalposts start zooming around so fast that nothing productive can be discussed.

I tried to respond to the specific conversation about Bullshit Jobs above. In my experience, the way this book is brought up so frequently in online conversations is used as a prop for whatever the commenter wants it to mean, not what the book actually says.

I think Graeber did a fantastic job of picking "bullshit jobs" as a topic because it sounds like something that everyone implicitly understands, but how it's used in conversation and how Graeber actually wrote about the topic are basically two different things