THE BULLSHIT MACHINE: RACE, LABOR, AND CHINESE EXPATS IN TANZANIA
Creators: name: Siegel, Jacob Joseph
Publisher: name: University of Chicago
Year: 2022

description: I met Pei in October 2021 completely by accident through a Chinese classmate in a seminar on the state in Africa. After she heard me talk about my research, this classmate mentioned that she had some friends who had spent time working in various African countries. Eventually, she referred me to Pei, who was willing to participate in an interview. As it turned out, Pei had spent the previous year in Tanzania, working as a manager for Star Media Tanzania LLC (hereafter Star Media). Star Media is the local subsidiary of StarTimes, a Chinese multinational tech company involved in digital television software, hardware, and content. In our very first conversation over WhatsApp, Pei explained that he had read Jane Guyer’s work and he was a great fan of James Ferguson and David Graeber; he even intended to apply to the same program in which I currently work, the MA Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. In line with his anthropological interests, he had travelled to Tanzania in order to do amateur fieldwork. Two months after our original WhatsApp conversation, we talked via Zoom for over two and a half hours about his findings. My invocation of David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs in this essay is deliberately based upon his own labelling of his work: “[Me: How do you feel about the work that you were doing for the company?] The work? Ah, it’s definitely a bullshit job. I cannot help anyone…What I do is just– I believe you also have this experience: someone knocking at your door, ‘Please buy this, please buy this, our product is very good, it will be helpful to you,’ but indeed you really don’t want it. But they keep begging you, ‘Please buy this,’…Yeah I think I just disturb people and I have done nothing meaningful.” Graeber defines a “bullshit job” as, “…a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” (Graeber 2018, 9-10). Pei’s description certainly meets Graeber’s understanding of what constitutes a bullshit job; he feels his work is not meaningful, perhaps even irritating to customers, but he must pretend otherwise. However, unlike most of Graeber’s interlocutors, he is not working a bullshit job in his country of residence, he is not working a bullshit job in the Europe or North America, and he entered into this job with a unique willingness to confront its bullshittiness. Pei says of the other employees, “Personally, for me, I think my job is a bullshit job. But for most of my colleagues, the company gives them money and that’s enough…” Given Graeber’s adamance about the methodological seriousness of self-reported bullshit work, I do not doubt that Pei’s job was actually bullshit, but Pei also distinguished himself from his colleagues, who may not have felt their jobs to be bullshit. On this subjective element, Graeber writes, “All I'm really saying here is that since there is such a thing as social value, as apart from mere market value, but since no one has ever figured out an adequate way to measure it, the worker's perspective is about as close as one is likely to get to an accurate assessment of the situation.” (Graeber 2018, 10). This observation holds true as long as most workers doing a given bullshit job have a similar common sense of social value. Yet, as Pei maintains, he did not necessarily have the same sense of social value as his colleagues and this distinction allowed him to perceive bullshit where his colleagues saw a paycheck. So, why was he there? Why were his colleagues there? And why did I want to know?