(Notes) The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, by David Graeber

Introduction: The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization

…diverge — rather than falling back, the line would continue to climb; if anything, it would do so more precipitously, tracking how, in the late twentieth century, middle-class citizens spent ever more hours struggling with phone trees and web interfaces, while the less fortunate spent ever more hours of their day trying to jump through the increasingly elaborate hoops required to gain access to dwindling social services.

The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellions against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, rebellions against the bureaucratic mindset, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states. In the face of the gray functionaries of both state-capitalist and state-socialist regimes, sixties rebels stood for individual expression and spontaneous conviviality, and against (“ rules and regulations, who needs them?”) every form of social control.

…there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger? The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered-down version of the right-wing critique.

1944 book Bureaucracy argued that by definition, systems of government administration could never organize information with anything like the efficiency of impersonal market pricing mechanisms. However, extending the vote to the losers of the economic game would inevitably lead to calls for government intervention, framed as high-minded schemes for trying to solve social problems through administrative means. Von Mises was willing to admit that many of those who embraced such solutions were entirely well-meaning; however, their efforts could only make matters worse. In fact, he felt they would ultimately end up destroying the political basis of democracy itself, since the administrators of social programs would inevitably form power-blocs far more influential than the politicians elected to run the government, and support ever-more radical reforms.

First of all, historically, markets simply did not emerge as some autonomous domain of freedom independent of, and opposed to, state authorities. Exactly the opposite is the case. Historically, markets are generally either a side effect of government operations, especially military operations, or were directly created by government policy.

English liberalism, for instance, did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy, but the exact opposite: an endlessly ballooning array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials who made the liberal dream of a world of free contract between autonomous individuals possible.

It turned out that maintaining a free market economy required a thousand times more paperwork than a Louis XIV-style absolutist monarchy.

The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.

…people: “politicians,” who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and “bureaucrats,” who are condescending elitists almost impossible to uproot.

The rise of the modern corporation, in the late nineteenth century, was largely seen at the time as a matter of applying modern, bureaucratic techniques to the private sector — and these techniques were assumed to be required, when operating on a large scale, because they were more efficient than the networks of personal or informal connections that had dominated a world of small family firms. The pioneers of these new, private bureaucracies were the United States and Germany, and Max Weber, the German sociologist, observed that Americans in his day were particularly inclined to see public and private bureaucracies as essentially the same animal:

…around the turn of the century, rather than anyone complaining that government should be run more like a business, Americans simply assumed that governments and business — or big business, at any rate — were run the same way.

Arrighi makes another interesting point here. Unlike the British Empire, which had taken its free market rhetoric seriously, eliminating its own protective tariffs with the famous Anti– Corn Law Bill of 1846, neither the German or American regimes had ever been especially interested in free trade.

The Americans in particular were much more concerned with creating structures of international administration.

The British Empire had never attempted anything like this. They either conquered other nations, or traded with them. The Americans attempted to administer everything and everyone.

British people, I’ve observed, are quite proud that they are not especially skilled at bureaucracy; Americans, in contrast, seem embarrassed by the fact that on the whole, they’re really quite good at it. 14 It doesn’t fit the American self-image. We’re supposed to be self-reliant individualists. (This is precisely why the right-wing populist demonization of bureaucrats is so effective.) Yet the fact remains the United States is — and for a well over a century has been — a profoundly bureaucratic society.

The impression that the word “bureaucrat” should be treated as a synonym for “civil servant” can be traced back to the New Deal in the thirties, which was also the moment when bureaucratic structures and techniques first became dramatically visible in many ordinary people’s lives. But in fact, from the very beginning, Roosevelt’s New Dealers worked in close coordination with the battalions of lawyers, engineers, and corporate bureaucrats employed by firms like Ford, Coca Cola, or Proctor & Gamble, absorbing much of their style and sensibilities, and — as the United States shifted to war footing in the forties — so did the gargantuan bureaucracy of the U.S. military.

…the word “bureaucrat” came to attach itself almost exclusively to civil servants: even if what they do all day is sit at desks, fill out forms, and file reports, neither middle managers nor military officers are ever quite considered bureaucrats. (Neither for that matter are police, or employees of the NSA.)

In the United States, the lines between public and private have long been blurry.

The vast majority of the paperwork we do exists in just this sort of in-between zone — ostensibly private, but in fact entirely shaped by a government that provides the legal framework, underpins the rules with its courts and all of the elaborate mechanisms of enforcement that come with them, but — crucially — works closely with the private concerns to ensure that the results will guarantee a certain rate of private profit.

…employ — derived as it is from the right-wing critique — is completely inadequate. It tells us nothing about what is actually going on.

“deregulation”? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean “changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.”

This process — the gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits — does not yet have a name. That in itself is significant. These things can happen largely because we lack a way to talk about them.

“total bureaucratization.”

…think what happened is best considered as a kind of shift in class allegiances on the part of the managerial staff of major corporations, from an uneasy, de facto alliance with their own workers, to one with investors.

What’s more, since for most of the twentieth century, a job in a large bureaucratic mega-firm meant a lifetime promise of employment, everyone involved in the process — managers and workers alike — tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common interest in this regard, over and against meddling owners and investors. This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name: it was called “corporatism.” One mustn’t romanticize it. It was among other things the philosophical basis of fascism.

What began to happen in the seventies, and paved the way for what we see today, was a kind of strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy — away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually, towards the financial structure as a whole.

corporate management became more financialized, but at the same time, the financial sector became corporatized, with investment banks, hedge funds, and the like largely replacing individual investors.

Still, that extension was extremely important. No political revolution can succeed without allies, and bringing along a certain portion of the middle class — and, even more crucially, convincing the bulk of the middle classes that they had some kind of stake in finance-driven capitalism — was critical.

This was not just a political realignment. It was a cultural transformation. And it set the stage for the process whereby the bureaucratic techniques (performance reviews, focus groups, time allocation surveys …) developed in financial and corporate circles came to invade the rest of society — education, science, government — and eventually, to pervade almost every aspect of everyday life.

For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South.

Increasingly, corporate profits in America are not derived from commerce or industry at all, but from finance — which means, ultimately, from other people’s debts. These debts do not just happen by accident. To a large degree, they are engineered —

Another is to force the debtors themselves to bureaucratize ever-increasing dimensions of their own lives, which have to be managed as if they were themselves a tiny corporation measuring inputs and outputs and constantly struggling to balance its accounts.

It’s also important to emphasize that while this system of extraction comes dressed up in a language of rules and regulations, in its actual mode of operation, it has almost nothing to do with the rule of law. Rather, the legal system has itself become the means for a system of increasingly arbitrary extractions.

But I think there is something deeper going on here, and it turns on the very nature of bureaucratic systems. Such institutions always create a culture of complicity. It’s not just that some people get to break the rules — it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening. And insofar as bureaucratic logic is extended to the society as a whole, all of us start playing along.

Career advancement is not based on merit, and not even based necessarily on being someone’s cousin; above all, it’s based on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, even though everyone knows this not to be true. 27 Or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when, in fact, they are often deployed as a means for entirely arbitrary personal power.

what would a left-wing critique of total, or predatory, bureaucratization look like?

What’s more, its exponents endlessly insisted that despite protestations to the contrary, what the media was calling “globalization” had almost nothing to do with the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, products, and ideas. It was really about trapping increasingly large parts of the world’s population behind highly militarized national borders within which social protections could be systematically withdrawn, creating a pool of laborers so desperate that they would be willing to work for almost nothing.

The imagery worked because it showed everything people had been told about globalization to be a lie. This was not some natural process of peaceful trade, made possible by new technologies. What was being talked about in terms of “free trade” and the “free market” really entailed the self-conscious completion of the world’s first effective29 planetary-scale administrative bureaucratic system.

At the time, we didn’t talk about things in quite these terms — that “free trade” and “the free market” actually meant the creation of global administrative structures mainly aimed at ensuring the extraction of profits for investors, that “globalization” really meant bureaucratization.

The Global Justice Movement was, in its own way, the first major leftist antibureaucratic movement of the era of total bureaucratization.

History reveals that political policies that favor “the market” have always meant even more people in offices to administer things, but it also reveals that they also mean an increase of the range and density of social relations that are ultimately regulated by the threat of violence.

The bureaucratization of daily life means the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations; impersonal rules and regulations, in turn, can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.

…the perfect symbols of our age: stores selling pure abstraction — immaculate boxes containing little but glass and steel dividers, computer screens, and armed security.

Technological change is simply not an independent variable. Technology will advance, and often in surprising and unexpected ways. But the overall direction it takes depends on social factors.

…this possible are precisely those that I have been describing in this essay, that first took place in the seventies and eighties, with the alliance of finance and corporate bureaucrats, the new corporate culture that emerged from it, and its ability to invade educational, scientific, and government circles in such a way that public and private bureaucracies finally merged together in a mass of paperwork designed to facilitate the direct extraction of wealth.

Rather than causing our current situation, the direction that technological change has taken is itself largely a function of the power of finance.

…if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will, in a thousand subtle ways, reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true.

In the big picture it hardly matters, then, whether one seeks to reorganize the world around bureaucratic efficiency or market rationality: all the fundamental assumptions remain the same. This helps explain why it’s so easy to move back and forth between them, as with those ex-Soviet officials who so cheerfully switched hats from endorsing total state control of the economy, to total marketization — and in the process, true to the Iron Law, managed to increase the total number of bureaucrats employed in their country dramatically. 38 Or how the two can fuse into an almost seamless whole, as in the current era of total bureaucratization.

…critique of bureaucracy fit for the times would have to show how all these threads — financialization, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private — knit together into a single, self-sustaining web.

The process of financialization has meant that an ever-increasing proportion of corporate profits come in the form of rent extraction of one sort or another. Since this is ultimately little more than legalized extortion, it is accompanied by ever-increasing accumulation of rules and regulations, and ever-more sophisticated, and omnipresent, threats of physical force to enforce them. Indeed they become so omnipresent that we no longer realize we’re being threatened, since we cannot imagine what it would be like not to be. At the same time, some of the profits from rent extraction are recycled to select portions of the professional classes, or to create new cadres of paper-pushing corporate bureaucrats. This helps a phenomenon I have written about elsewhere: the continual growth, in recent decades, of apparently meaningless, make-work, “bullshit jobs” — strategic vision coordinators, human resources consultants, legal analysts, and the like — despite the fact that even those who hold such positions are half the time secretly convinced they contribute nothing to the enterprise. In the end, this is just an extension of the basic logic of class realignment that began in the seventies and eighties as corporate bureaucracies become extensions of the financial system.

Yet what did the owners do with the extra money? Did they give the workers a raise to reward them for increased productivity? In the old Keynesian days of the fifties and sixties they almost certainly would have. No longer. Did they hire more workers and expand production? No again. All they did was hire middle managers.

A left critique of bureaucracy, therefore, is sorely lacking.

1: Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity

Bureaucracies public and private appear — for whatever historical reasons — to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It’s in this sense that I’ve said one can fairly say that bureaucracies are utopian forms of organization. After all, is this not what we always say of utopians: that they have a naïve faith in the perfectibility of human nature and refuse to deal with humans as they actually are? Which is, are we not also told, what leads them to set impossible standards and then blame the individuals for not living up to them?

The problem, I realized, was not with the energy spent, but with the fact that most of this energy was being sunk into attempts to try to understand and influence whoever, at any moment, seemed to have some kind of bureaucratic power over me — when, in fact, all that was required was the accurate interpretation of one or two Latin words, and correct performance of certain purely mechanical functions.

Weber saw bureaucratic forms of organization as the very embodiment of Reason in human affairs, so obviously superior to any alternative form of organization that they threatened to engulf everything, locking humanity in a joyless “iron cage,” bereft of spirit and charisma.

Through concepts like governmentality and biopower, he argued that state bureaucracies end up shaping the parameters of human existence in ways far more intimate than anything Weber would have imagined. For Foucault, all forms of knowledge became forms of power, shaping our minds and bodies through largely administrative means.

violence. What I would like to argue is that situations created by violence — particularly structural violence, by which I mean forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm — invariably tend to create the kinds of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid — though they do do that — but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence.

All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force.

But instead of exacting tribute, they appropriate all the fertile land, and arrange for their children to have privileged access to most forms of practical education, at the same time initiating a religious ideology that holds that they are intrinsically superior beings, finer and more beautiful and more intelligent, and that the Omegas, now largely reduced to working on their estates, have been cursed by the divine powers for some terrible sin, and have become stupid, ugly, and base.

perhaps the Omegas internalize their disgrace and come to act as if they believe they really are guilty of something. In a sense perhaps they do believe it. But on a deeper level it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask whether they do or not. The whole arrangement is the fruit of violence and can only be maintained by the continual threat of violence: the fact that the Omegas are quite aware that if anyone directly challenged property arrangements, or access to education, swords would be drawn and people’s heads would almost certainly end up being lopped off. In a case like this, what we talk about in terms of “belief” are simply the psychological techniques people develop to accommodate themselves to this reality. We have no idea how they would act, or what they would think, if the Alphas’ command of the means of violence were to somehow disappear.

Most of these doors lead directly to the problem of what we call “the state” — and the bureaucratic structures through which it actually exercises power. Is the state’s claim to a monopoly of violence ultimately the problem, or is the state an essential part of any possible solution? Is the very practice of laying down rules and then threatening physical harm against anyone who does not follow them itself objectionable, or is it just that the authorities are not deploying such threats in the right way?

We are usually dealing with conquered populations of one sort or another — hence, with people who are keenly aware that current arrangements are the fruit of violence. As a result, it would never occur to anyone to deny that the government is a fundamentally coercive institution — even if they might also be perfectly willing to concede that in certain respects, it could also be a benevolent one.

that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political authorities with explanations and demands, the more authoritarian and repressive a regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything — which is why such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence agencies, and secret police.

But I am suggesting that this might not be the most important question. First of all, because it assumes that “violence” refers primarily to acts of violence — actual shovings, punchings, stabbings, or explosions — rather than to the threat of violence, and the kinds of social relations the pervasive threat of violence makes possible.

is, they automatically assume that what is most interesting about violence is also what’s most important.

It strikes me that what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be more precise: violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing.

Most human relations — particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies — are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view. This is what I’ve already referred to as “interpretive labor.” Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (“ cross this line and I will shoot you,” “one more word out of any of you and you’re going to jail”). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.

I do need to introduce one crucial qualification here. Everything, here, depends on the balance of forces. If two parties are engaged in a relatively equal contest of violence — say, generals commanding opposing armies — they have good reason to try to get inside each other’s heads. It is only when one side has an overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical harm that they no longer need to do so.

The first is the process of imaginative identification as a form of knowledge, the fact that within relations of domination, it is generally the subordinates who are effectively relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question really work.

…everyone knows that servants tend to know a great deal about their employers’ families, but the opposite almost never occurs.

The second element is the resultant pattern of sympathetic identification. Curiously, it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, who first observed the phenomenon we now refer to as “compassion fatigue.”

Whether one is dealing with masters and servants, men and women, employers and employees, rich and poor, structural inequality — what I’ve been calling structural violence — invariably creates highly lopsided structures of the imagination. Since I think Smith was right to observe that imagination tends to bring with it sympathy, the result is that victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries far more than those beneficiaries care about them. This might well be, after the violence itself, the single most powerful force preserving such relations.

I say “euphemistically” because generations of police sociologists have pointed out that only a very small proportion of what police actually do has anything to do with enforcing criminal law — or with criminal matters of any kind. Most of it has to do with regulations, or, to put it slightly more technically, with the scientific application of physical force, or the threat of physical force, to aid in the resolution of administrative problems.

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

Actually, as it turns out, bureaucratic society does indeed have a tendency to produce its own, unique forms of charismatic hero. These have, since the late nineteenth century, arrived in the form of an endless assortment of mythic detectives, police officers, and spies — all, significantly, figures whose job is to operate precisely where bureaucratic structures for ordering information encounter the actual application of physical violence.

Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical or statistical formulae.

…in either case it is a matter of applying very simple pre-existing templates to complex and often ambiguous situations.

One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural 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.

Bureaucracies, I’ve suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity — of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

In this sense, the Left’s current inability to formulate a critique of bureaucracy that actually speaks to its erstwhile constituents is synonymous with the decline of the Left itself. Without such a critique, radical thought loses its vital center — it collapses into a fragmented scatter of protests and demands.

When we speak of being “realistic,” exactly what reality is it we are referring to?

When one is asked to be “realistic,” then, the reality one is normally being asked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts, nor some supposed ugly truth about human nature. Being “realistic” usually means taking seriously the effects of the systematic threat of violence.

All land within a sovereign territory ultimately belongs to the sovereign — legally this is still the case. This is why the state has the right to impose its regulations. But sovereignty ultimately comes down to a monopoly on what is euphemistically referred to as “force” — that is, violence.

This is to my mind the essence of right-wing thought: a political ontology that through such subtle means allows violence to define the very parameters of social existence and common sense.

This is why I say that the Left has always been, in its essential inspiration, antibureaucratic. Because it has always been founded on a different set of assumptions about what is ultimately real — that is, about the very grounds of political being.

From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is — it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being.

This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this — to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?

“All power to the imagination.” Which imagination are we referring to? If one takes this to refer to the transcendent imagination — to an attempt to impose some sort of prefab utopian vision — the effects can be disastrous. Historically, it has often meant creating some vast bureaucratic machine designed to impose such utopian visions by violence.

…procedures, which have an uncanny ability to make even the smartest people act like idiots, are not so much forms of stupidity in themselves, as they are ways of managing situations already stupid because of the effects of structural violence. As a result, such procedures come to partake of the very blindness and foolishness they seek to manage. At their best, they become ways of turning stupidity against itself, much in the same way that revolutionary violence could be said to be. But stupidity in the name of fairness and decency is still stupidity, and violence in the name of human liberation is still violence. It’s no coincidence the two so often seem to arrive together.

..how does one affect fundamental change in society without setting in train a process that will end with the creation of some new, violent bureaucracy?

What is this but an elegant statement of the logic of direct action: the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free?

The most common historical explanations — that the revolutionaries didn’t really represent the public or its interests, but that elements of the public perhaps became caught up in some sort of irrational effervescence — seem obviously inadequate.

All these entities are the product of bureaucracies and institutional practices that, in turn, define certain horizons of possibility.

Doing so always seems to have the effect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open, which is only to be expected if one of the main things that that apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited horizons.

The question, of course, is how to ensure that those who go through this experience are not immediately reorganized under some new rubric — the people, the proletariat, the multitude, the nation, the ummah, whatever it may be — that then gives way to the construction of a new set of rules, regulations, and bureaucratic institutions around it, which will inevitably come to be enforced by new categories of police.

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratize this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalized laziness.

These territories present us with a kind of bureaucratic maze of blindness, ignorance, and absurdity, and it is perfectly understandable that decent people seek to avoid them — in fact, that the most effective strategy of political liberation yet discovered lies precisely in avoiding them — but at the same time, it is only at our peril that we simply pretend that they’re not there.

2: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

That last word, “simulate,” is key. What technological progress we have seen since the seventies has largely been in information technologies — that is, technologies of simulation.

They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco used to call the “hyper-real” — the ability to make imitations more realistic than the original.

Either our expectations about the pace of technological change were unrealistic, in which case, we need to ask ourselves why so many otherwise intelligent people felt they were not. Or our expectations were not inherently unrealistic, in which case, we need to ask what happened to throw the path of technological development off course.

…that both the Americans and Russians had been, in the century before, societies of pioneers, the one expanding across the Western frontier, the other, across Siberia? Was it not the same shared commitment to the myth of a limitless, expansive future, of human colonization of vast empty spaces, that helped convince the leaders of both superpowers they had entered into a new “space age” in which they were ultimately battling over control over the future itself? And did not that battle ultimate produce, on both sides, completely unrealistic conceptions of what that future would actually be like?

Toffler argued that almost all of the social problems of the 1960s could be traced back to the increasing pace of technological change. As an endless outpouring of new scientific breakthroughs continually transformed the very grounds of our daily existence, he wrote, Americans were left rudderless, without any clear idea of what normal life was supposed to be like.

Not only was everything around us changing, most of it — the sheer mass of human knowledge, the size of the population, industrial growth, the amount of energy being consumed — was changing at an exponential rate. Toffler insisted that the only solution was to begin to create some kind of democratic control over the process — institutions that could assess emerging technologies and the effects they were likely to have, ban those technologies likely to be too socially disruptive, and guide development in directions that would foster social harmony.

What their success does show is that the issues these men raised — the concern that existing patterns of technological development would lead to social upheaval, the need to guide technological development in directions that did not challenge existing structures of authority — found a receptive ear in the very highest corridors of power. There is every reason to believe that statesmen and captains of industry were indeed thinking about such questions, and had been for some time.

One is broadly political, having to do with conscious shifts in the allocation of research funding; the other bureaucratic, a change in the nature of the systems administering scientific and technological research.

There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control

Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the system that has come to be known as “industrial capitalism” has fostered an extremely rapid rate of scientific advance and technological innovation — one unparalleled in previous human history. Its advocates have always held this out as the ultimate justification for the exploitation, misery, and destruction of communities the system also produced. Even its most famous detractors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were willing to celebrate capitalism — if for nothing else — for its magnificent unleashing of the “productive forces.”

Is it possible that they were right? And is it also possible that in the sixties, capitalists, as a class, began to figure this out?

…“your communist ‘worker’s state’ may have beat us into outer space,” Nixon effectively argued, “but it’s capitalism that creates technology like washing machines that actually improve the lives of the toiling masses.”

It’s often said that the Apollo moon landing was the greatest historical achievement of Soviet communism.

We are used to thinking of the Politburo as a group of unimaginative grey bureaucrats, but while the Soviet Union was certainly run by bureaucrats, they were, from the beginning, bureaucrats who dared to dream astounding dreams. (The dream of world revolution was just the first.)

Of course, most of their grandiose projects — changing the course of mighty rivers, that sort of thing — either turned out to be ecologically and socially disastrous, or, like Stalin’s projected one-hundred-story Palace of the Soviets, which was to be topped by a twenty-story statue of Lenin, never got off the ground.

Because political problems are always addressed solely through administrative means.

The Federation, then, is Leninism brought to its full and absolute cosmic success — a society where secret police, reeducation camps, and show trials are not necessary because a happy conjuncture of material abundance and ideological conformity ensures the system can now run entirely by itself.

The standard line, of course, is that this shift of priorities was simply the natural result of the triumph of the market. The Apollo program was the quintessential Big Government project — Soviet-inspired in the sense that it required a vast national effort, coordinated by an equally vast government bureaucracy. As soon as the Soviet threat was safely out of the picture, this story goes, capitalism was free to revert to lines of technological development more in accord with its normal, decentralized, free-market imperatives — such as privately funded research into marketable products like touch-pad phones, adventurous little start-ups, and the like. This is, certainly, the line that men like Toffler and Gilder began taking in the late seventies and early eighties. But it’s obviously wrong.

Partly this is because of a change of tax regimes. The phone company was willing to invest so much of its profits in research because those profits were highly taxed —

At the same time, the U.S. government never did abandon gigantic state-controlled schemes of technological development. It just shifted their emphasis sharply away from civilian projects like the space program and in the direction of military research — not just Star Wars, which was Reagan’s version of a vast Soviet-scale project, but an endless variety of weapons projects, research in communications and surveillance technologies, and similar, “security-related” concerns.

Yet by the 1970s, even much basic research came to be conducted following essentially military priorities. The most immediate reason we don’t have robot factories is that, for the last several decades, some 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon,

A case could be made that even the shift into R& D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home.

Information technology has allowed a financialization of capital that has driven workers ever more desperately into debt, while, at the same time, allowed employers to create new “flexible” work regimes that have destroyed traditional job security and led to a massive increase in overall working hours for almost all segments of the population. Along with the export of traditional factory jobs, this has put the union movement to rout and thus destroyed any real possibility of effective working-class politics.

When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former.

It’s quite possible, in fact, that the very weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will itself ultimately sink it. But it’s also easy to see how, if the ultimate imperative of those running the world is choking off the possibility of any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that will be fundamentally different than the world today must be a crucial part of the neoliberal project.

The fading of the Soviet threat allowed for a massive reallocation of resources in directions seen as less challenging to social and economic arrangements — and ultimately, to ones that could support a campaign to sharply reverse the gains progressive social movements had made since the forties, thus achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites did indeed see as a global class war.

The change of priorities was touted as a withdrawal of big-government projects and a return to the market, but it actually involved a shift in the orientation of government-directed research, away from programs like NASA — or, say, alternative energy sources — and toward even more intense focus on military, information, and medical technologies.

He would almost certainly have pointed out that all we are really talking about here is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail order catalog.

the proportion of that funding that comes from the corporate sector has increased even more dramatically, to the point where private enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the government.

Even more — and I think this is really key — the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives (the Human Genome Project for instance had its own corporate-style logo) that make it increasingly unlikely that anything particularly revolutionary will result.

direction. It is still driven by giant, bureaucratic projects; what has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led all parties to adopt language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. While this might have helped somewhat in speeding up the creation of immediately marketable products — as this is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do — in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

The result is a sea of documents about the fostering of “imagination” and “creativity,” set in an environment that might as well have been designed to strangle any actual manifestations of imagination and creativity in the cradle.

In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can also add the creeping privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has recently reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open-source in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is, as he nicely puts it, “convivial”:

Obviously this is no longer true of scientists working in the corporate sector, where findings are jealously guarded, but the spread of the corporate ethos within the academy and research institutes themselves has increasingly caused even publicly funded scholars to treat their findings as personal property. Less is published. Academic publishers ensure that findings that are published are more difficult to access, further enclosing the intellectual commons.

As a result, convivial, open-source competition slides further into something much more like classic market competition.

contemporary, bureaucratic, corporate capitalism first arose in the United States and Germany. The two bloody wars these rivals fought culminated, appropriately enough, in vast government-sponsored scientific programs to see who would be the first to discover the atom bomb.

During the war, when matters were desperate, vast government projects like the Manhattan Project were still capable of accommodating a whole host of bizarre characters (Oppenheimer, Feynman, Fuchs …). But as American power grew more and more secure, the country’s bureaucracy became less and less tolerant of its outliers. And technological creativity declined.

Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats — quite the opposite, really — but, the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not really lead to the domination of “the market.” More than anything, it simply cemented the dominance of fundamentally conservative managerial elites —

It is the premise of this book that we live in a deeply bureaucratic society. If we do not notice it, it is largely because bureaucratic practices and requirements have become so all-pervasive that we can barely see them — or worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

Yet all of this is supposed to have happened after the overthrow of horrific, old-fashioned, bureaucratic socialism, and the triumph of freedom and the market. Certainly this is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary life, much though — like the broken promises of technology — we seem to have developed a profound reluctance to address the problem.

would put it this way: in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies. By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life.

the design of complex machinery was always to some degree an elaboration of principles originally developed to organize people.

It’s not that vision, creativity, and mad fantasies are no longer encouraged. It’s that our fantasies remain free-floating; there’s no longer even the pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. Meanwhile, in the few areas in which free, imaginative creativity actually is fostered, such as in open-source Internet software development, it is ultimately marshaled in order to create even more, and even more effective, platforms for the filling out of forms. This is what I mean by “bureaucratic technologies”: administrative imperatives have become not the means, but the end of technological development.

One is that capitalism is somehow identical to the market, and that both are therefore inimical to bureaucracy, which is a creature of the state. The second is that capitalism is in its nature technologically progressive.

If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.

could anyone seriously argue that current economic arrangements are also the only ones that will ever be viable under any possible future technological regime as well? Such a statement is self-evidently absurd. If nothing else, how could we possibly know?

in order to really start setting up domes on Mars, let alone develop the means to figure out if there actually are alien civilizations out there to contact — or what would actually happen if we shot something through a wormhole — we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system entirely. Does it really have to take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Perhaps it’s only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures that we’ll ever be able to get there. And if we’re going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power — one that no longer contains either the super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do their housework.

3: The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All

The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the “creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees” problem.

Weber’s reflections on the subject — is that a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolize access to certain key types of information.

The only real way to rid oneself of an established bureaucracy, according to Weber, is to simply kill them all, as Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome, or Genghis Khan in certain parts of the Middle East. Leave any significant number of functionaries alive, and within a few years, they will inevitably end up managing one’s kingdom.

The second possible explanation is that bureaucracy does not just make itself indispensable to rulers, but holds a genuine appeal to those it administers as well.

The simplest explanation for the appeal of bureaucratic procedures lies in their impersonality.

deeper. It’s not just that the impersonal relations bureaucracies afford are convenient; to some degree, at least, our very ideas of rationality, justice, and above all, freedom, are founded on them.

To understand how this could be, we need to understand a little of the real origins of the modern social welfare state, which we now largely think of — when we think of them at all — as having been created by benevolent democratic elites. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Europe, most of the key institutions of what later became the welfare state — everything from social insurance and pensions to public libraries and public health clinics — were not originally created by governments at all, but by trade unions, neighborhood associations, cooperatives, and working-class parties and organizations of one sort or another.

In Germany, the real model for this new administrative structure was, curiously, the post office — though when one understands the history of the postal service, it makes a great deal of sense. The post office was, essentially, one of the first attempts to apply top-down, military forms of organization to the public good. Historically, postal services first emerged from the organization of armies and empires. They were originally ways of conveying field reports and orders over long distances; later, by extension, a key means of keeping the resulting empires together.

But all this also implies that bureaucracy appeals to us — that it seems at its most liberating — precisely when it disappears: when it becomes so rational and reliable that we are able to just take it for granted that we can go to sleep on a bed of numbers and wake up with all those numbers still snugly in place…

…bureaucracy enchants when it can be seen as a species of what I’ve called poetic technology, that is, one where mechanical forms of organization, usually military in their ultimate inspiration, can be marshaled to the realization of impossible visions: to create cities out of nothing, scale the heavens, make the desert bloom.

Once, the privileged of waving one’s hand and having a vast invisible army of cogs and wheels organize themselves in such a way as to bring your whims into being was available only to the very most privileged few; in the modern world, it can be subdivided into millions of tiny portions and made available to everyone able to write a letter, or to flick a switch.

Appendix: On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power

Spiderman, too, broke left, just as Batman broke right. In a way this makes sense. Superheroes are a product of their historical origins.

Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, reidentify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the Superego pummel the errant Id back into submission.

The plot is always a simple story of transgression and punishment: the bad girls sin, they have sex, they fail to report a hit-and-run accident, maybe they’re just obnoxious, stupid teenagers; as a result, they are eviscerated. Then the virginal good girl eviscerates the culprit. It’s all very Christian and moralistic.

Costumed superheroes ultimately battle criminals in the name of the law — even if they themselves often operate outside a strictly legal framework. But in the modern state, the very status of law is a problem. This is because of a basic logical paradox: no system can generate itself. Any power capable of creating a system of laws cannot itself be bound by them.

So laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, or duly authorized private security, have the legal right to beat you up). It’s legitimate for the police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it’s rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then: How does one tell the difference between “the people” and a mere rampaging mob? There is no obvious answer.

It also means we base the legitimacy of the whole system on the consent of the people despite the fact that the only people who were ever really consulted on the matter lived over two hundred years ago. In America, at least, “the people” are all long since dead.

off the villains in the same way that police remain parasitical off criminals: without them, they would have no reason to exist. They remain defenders of a legal and political order which itself seems to have come out of nowhere, and which, however faulty or degraded, must be defended, because the only alternative is so much worse. They aren’t fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.

One might begin here by considering who are the core audience for superhero comics. Mainly, adolescent or preadolescent white boys. That is, individuals who are at a point in their lives where they are likely to be both maximally imaginative and at least a little bit rebellious; but who are also being groomed to eventually take on positions of authority and power in the world, to be fathers, sheriffs, small-business owners, middle managers, engineers. And what do they learn from these endless repeated dramas? Well, first off, that imagination and rebellion lead to violence; second, that, like imagination and rebellion, violence is a lot of fun; third, that, ultimately, violence must be directed back against any overflow of imagination and rebellion lest everything go askew. These things must be contained! This is why insofar as superheroes are allowed to be imaginative in any way, it could only be extended to the design of their clothes, their cars, maybe their homes, their various accessories.

If the message was that rebellious imagination was okay as long as it was kept out of politics and simply confined to consumer choices (clothes, cars, accessories again), this had become a message that even executive producers could easily get behind.

Unsurprisingly, psychedelic drugs turn out to play an important role here. So do severe mental health issues and bizarre religious cults.