The Utopia of Rules

Review

I didn't enjoy this as much as Bullshit Jobs, but it was still worth the read. I especially appreciated that Graeber's ideas were in essay format: they were as long as they needed to be, not stretched out to justify a book of their own. I found ‘Dead Zones of the Imagination’ the most thought-provoking, and the idea of interpretive labour felt very useful.

[S]tructural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them—including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top—while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them.