David Graeber: On Bureaucratic Technologies and the Future as Dream-Time

David's comparison of an Iphone to a stupid toy was the most lovely, sincere and ideology-smashing phrase of his entire talk. His will be missed

This is a summation of a wonderful essay in "The Utopia of Rules". I never met David, but still I miss him terribly. RIP

One thing I really don't miss about university is that people, instead of asking a question, give a barely coherent monologue as a comment.

Unbelievably dim Q&A question section. The idea that modern capitalist re-organization is making us dumb holds a lot of water.

An anecdotal aside: the Somali pirates weren't a 'thing' until foreign factory fishing fleets wiped out their coastal fishery resources.

Just finished The Dawn of Everything. The world lost so much.

The algorithm by which this fellow decides when to take a sip of coffee is so complex that youtube engineers are even stumped

I still can't believe he has passed away, just devastating! :(

I love the way he giggles out of pure joy. It seems like he is amazed he can even have these discussions.

We play this game with a Graeber lecture - try to guess when he'll actually take a drink from his cup or how many times he'll pick up the cup.

Legend. Just read the hist of everything and it is gona help reframe my whole PhD in more hopeful light.

I miss David graeber

Ah, why do the Q&A sections of every interesting talk always turn into a line of people just wanting to share their opinion?

thanks, this upload is a great pretext to relistening to this years after - and so much of it is still so relevant

Thanks for sharing this, his insights are like a breath of fresh air.

1:12:38 "So this has nothing to do with human need. It has to do of maintaining a system of radical inequality." Graeber's point is the only reason we don't have technological advances that replace work is because the Elite decided it would undermine their means of social control. So they've stymied growth. Yet no one is really challenging them on it because Americans have been dumbed down enough to believe a new iPhone version with slight changes is somehow progress. Sidenote: I was disappointed with the Q&A session in which no one seemed to grasp his idea and people kept asking irrelevant questions. What a waste. Now sadly he's no longer here to ask...rest his soul.

Great talk! This makes me think of Richard Battin: the guy who led the development of the Apollo Guidance System. Battin was an amazing engineer; if you read the Space Guidance Analysis (SGA) Memos, and his astrodynamics textbook, you can see just how technically involved he was. He personally contributed techniques and methods that were actually used during the missions. Often working by himself. If you compare Battin with modern-day "leaders" (actually "managers") of large engineering projects; he's totally different! Modern managers have nowhere near the kind of technical expertise and raw mathematical talent that Battin had... like, not even close. In today's world, a quirky, super-intelligent, hands-on guy like Battin would never make it to a leadership position... he'd be skipped over for some pushy go-getter who "delivers" (what they deliver isn't to be questioned, of course). Battin is someone from that idealisitic age of technology, when the leaders were truly THE LEADERS, and not the "people leaders" of today.

Thank god this man existed

Here here. Thank-you! "Technology emphasis on social control" is absolutely right.

1930's: Cars, Machine Guns. 2020's: Faster Cars, Faster Machine Guns.