This really sucks. Just a tremendous thinker and gone seemingly in his prime.
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This really sucks. Just a tremendous thinker and gone seemingly in his prime. -
Why is it so hard to link to a tweet on this website? For Christ sake. -
What issue are you having?Originally posted by Flynnie View Post
I have no problem as long as I type out the tags and rice everything from the question mark on in the link. And that's only because I find that getting the cursor in the right place after using the button is hard for my laws on a phone or tablet; I use the button on the PC
And yes, this is yet another of 2020's spirit crushing lossesComment
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some articles he wrote
https://twitter.com/GavJacobson/status/1301510645645541380?s=20
https://twitter.com/samwetherell/status/1301514961102008322?s=20
Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”Those who grew up at the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H.G. Wells imagined the world of, say, 1960 with flying machines, rocket ships, submarines, radio, and television—and that was pretty much what they got. If it wasn’t unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to the moon, then why was it unrealistic in the sixties to dream of jet-packs and robot laundry-maids?
In fact, even as those dreams were being outlined, the material base for their achievement was beginning to be whittled away. There is reason to believe that even by the fifties and sixties, the pace of technological innovation was slowing down from the heady pace of the first half of the century. There was a last spate in the fifties when microwave ovens (1954), the Pill (1957), and lasers (1958) all appeared in rapid succession. But since then, technological advances have taken the form of clever new ways of combining existing technologies (as in the space race) and new ways of putting existing technologies to consumer use (the most famous example is television, invented in 1926, but mass produced only after the war.) Yet, in part because the space race gave everyone the impression that remarkable advances were happening, the popular impression during the sixties was that the pace of technological change was speeding up in terrifying, uncontrollable ways.Last edited by Nefertiti2; 03-09-2020, 14:28.Comment
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I think at lesat 50 percent of the Office Annoyances thread is a tribute to David Graeber.
https://twitter.com/freddiestuart12/status/1301520611232157698?s=20
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Here's Debt as a Radio4 show/podcast
https://twitter.com/CitizenMetcalf/status/1301537873439621122?s=20
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Very sad about this. A huge loss.Comment
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Ash Sarkar's tribute
Message for David Graeber
David Graeber’s political activism (if a life’s work spanning both iconoclastic bestsellers and staying up late into the night doing the grunt work of legal support can merely be called ‘activism’) extends far beyond the period of post-crisis insurgency he’s known for. It’s for someone who was blessed to know him for longer than me to write this with the detail it deserves, but here’s the gist. His parents were working-class autodidacts; his mother, a garment worker, and his father a Communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War. David was calling himself an anarchist by 16, wrote his PhD on magic, slavery and politics, and in 1999 participated in the WTO protests in Seattle. While other leftish writers praised the puppets and condemned the vandalism, David launched a typically mischievous defence of black bloc.
“Powers of the state hardly even pretend to respond to the needs of local communities,” he wrote, “and are simply put at the service of multinational corporations. How could mere words bring this home so vividly as the spectacle of the mayor of Seattle declaring martial law in order to protect Starbucks?”
In 2004, David published Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and was doing well as a junior professor, teaching for the past 6 years at Yale University. By 2005 he’d been told his chances of contract renewal had been booted to Row Z, after he defended a student union organiser who was facing pressure to leave the institution “on obviously fabricated grounds.” David later recalled that the department’s staging of a kangaroo court was, in part, a test of his loyalty - would he side with the institution that paid him, or the politics he espoused? “I failed the test spectacularly.”
By the time I met David in 2010, at a university occupation during the volatile days of the student movement, he was a left celebrity. His book Direct Action: An Ethnography was a touchstone for us. In the draughty halls of UCL, we endeavoured to replicate the ‘wavy hands' consensus decision-making and find something of Seattle in the smashed glass of Millbank. When David (collar askew, feathery hair that defied the laws of physics) addressed us in the Jeremy Bentham Room, he - and we - were fizzing with excitement. We thought he’d come to teach us. He was just as keen to get swept up in whatever we had to offer. For David, moments of insurgency were also crucibles of intense creativity. He became involved with Arts Against Cuts, and would later speak in glowing terms of a sculptor friend of his whose “best work” was a giant carrot that was set alight and flung through the window of the Tory Party HQ.
I can’t remember exactly what it was David spoke about that day. But I remember the kindness and patience he had for a bunch of first-years who were in the moment of their politicisation, any enchantment with How Things Are Meant To Work stripped away baton strike by baton strike in the melee of Parliament Square. And this exceptional generosity with his time didn’t change after his role in Occupy (credited, though he claims otherwise, with coining 'we are the 99%') and the release of his seminal work Debt: The First 5,000 Years. While other writers might retreat to the lofty heights of a regular column and a private members’ club, David could most often be found at meetings in the basement of SOAS - for cleaners’ pay, against cops on campus, for Rojava or a student facing expulsion for graffiti. Under that horrible fluorescent strip lighting, munching away on gluey hummus, it was easy to forget that David Graeber was a properly famous intellectual.
It’s for others to give a fuller account of the intellectual contributions he gave to the movement. David produced for us the tools to understand, with unflinching clarity, the social conditions around us for what they were, without ever collapsing into nihilism. With Debt, he cleaved out space for the return of heterodox economic thinking. But with Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David guided a generation of graduates without a future toward a revived critique of work, its drudgery and petty fiefdoms, its futile rituals of busyness. He took seriously the questions of care, freedom and play. After 2015 David fought hard for Corbynism, yet stubbornly refused to be penned in by the horizons of mere labourism. The 2010 generation stand on David Graeber’s shoulders. It is wrenching to have lost him just when, after defeat, our need for his work is most acute.
But it’s not the David of book-jackets that I’ll miss the most. It’s the David who always had wonky buttons, who loped around London laughing that laugh which gave seagulls a run for their money. It’s the David who considered no one disposable, or unworthy of his time. It’s the David who a few years ago, after having spotted me outside a pub, bounded up and asked if I wanted to see “something crazy” - then pulled an engagement ring out of his coat pocket. “I’m going to ask someone to marry me!”
N.D. has lost a husband. We have lost a friend and a comrade. The movement has lost a teacher, a beloved agitator. David, we were not done needing you, even though you already had given us a lifetime’s worth of gifts.
Rest in power.Comment
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Here's a piece he wrote about a visit to Nablus
Back in the ‘90s, [Israel] had the opportunity to peace with its neighbors. The terms offered were extremely advantageous, both economically and politically. No one was even really expecting Israel to allow any significant number of the ‘48 refugees to return; all it would have taken was the clearing out of what were then a handful of settlements inhabited by what most Israeli citizens then considered to be violent religious lunatics, and handing the PLO some kind of toothless rump state. Instead Israeli governments have used the diplomatic cover of a two-state solution—a solution nobody now believes could ever possibly happen, even as hundreds of lucrative bureaucratic careers have been created under the pretense that it will—to turn the West Bank into a maze of military bases and Jewish-only planned communities, condemned by almost every country on earth as illegal under international law. It is extremely difficult to imagine how this project will not, ultimately, lead to catastrophe. Already it has transformed the image of the country in most of the world from a group of idealistic holocaust survivors making the desert bloom, into a collection of snarling bigots who have made a science out of techniques for brutalizing 12-year-olds. They have ensured they will remain a nation surrounded by bitter enemies, even as economically and politically, they have become almost entirely dependent on the unquestioning support a single rapidly declining imperial power.
Last edited by Nefertiti2; 06-09-2020, 20:03.Comment
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That’s too bad. Sad for his family. But it looks like he produced several lifetimes of work.
I never read any of his books, because I have no patience or energy, but he seemed to have a lot of good ideas.
I think I recently read about another academic who studied “bullshit jobs,” but I forget who it was and I can’t find it. As I recall, he was more pessimistic about it because he (I think it was a he) didn’t think it could just be nearly blamed on capitalism. Maybe that was Graeber too.
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The books are fairly easy to read, Hot Pepsi. From some of your comments on here I think "Bullshit Jobs" would strike a chord. There are lots of shorter pieces and journalism too. some linked on this thread,
Here's the New York Review of Books tributeComment
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live tribute, will work afterwards I think too.
Great piece by John McDonnellComment
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Yes, it works, great stuff.Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View Post
live tribute, will work afterwards I think too.
Great piece by John McDonnellComment
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Just bumping this because Inca and Nef both professed to not be able to find it.
Thanks Inca for the hint on the other Books thread that this one existed.Comment
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Thanks for the bump. I missed this totally at the time.Comment
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For anyone who's read The Dawn of Everything and was interested in the stuff about Cahokia: Cambridge University Press have made Sarah E Baires's text Cahokia and the North American Worlds available for free to download as a PDF until 4 March. To be clear, Graeber doesn't have anything to do with this paper, but given the discussion of The Dawn of Everything this thread felt like the most relevant place to put it.
Get it here while you can. Click on 'Save PDF' just beneath the summary (which I've pasted below).
The City of Cahokia provides a unique case study to review what draws people to a place and why. This Element examines not only the emergence and decline of this great American city but its intersection with the broader Native American world during this period. Cahokia was not an isolated complex but a place vivid on the landscape where people made pilgrimages to and from Cahokia for trade and religious practices. Cahokia was a centre-place with expansive reach and cultural influence. This Element analyses the social and political processes that helped create this city while also reflecting on the trajectory of Native American history in North America.Comment
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Thanks so much for that. I have always found Cahokia to be fascinating.Comment
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Since reading TDoE it has shot to somewhere near the top of my list of places I'd like to visit if I ever make a trip to the continental USA.Comment
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Last time I checked, they were planning a major expansion of the interpretative facilities, which hopefully will be completed by the time you make itComment
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