Book Review: The Utopia of Rules — On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber
By: Hamza Sarfraz
Tags: David Graeber, Imagination, Book Review, Politics, Anarchism

Book Review: The Utopia of Rules — On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber Hamza Sarfraz Jun 8·4 min read

Image Credits: Melville House

The late David Graeber was one of his kind. An avowed anarchist and activist-academic, his writing was accessible and original. He generally refused to take most mainstream assertions about politics at face value. More importantly, with Graeber, nothing was the final word. He didn’t frame any discussion as a definitive answer to the topic at hand. Instead, he asked pointed questions for future exploration. This book is no different. It features his essays on the three main questions that define power and bureaucracy. He packs a lot of insights within 200 pages and 3.5 essays.

Graeber’s main thesis is that we live in what he calls the era of ‘Total Bureaucratization’. In the first essay, he talks about the financialization of the modern world and the blurring of lines between the public and private/corporate bureaucracies. He then discusses how bureaucracy is always utopian i.e. what is imagined as a functioning system cannot possibly be put to practice by a human being. He also coins the term “Iron Law of Liberalism” i.e. the more deregulated the market, the more structures needed to maintain it. The most insightful observation however is his argument on ‘interpretive labour’ and how the oppressed always have to imagine and empathize with their oppressors, and how that affects power dynamics. Graeber is happy to accept that he borrows this idea from feminist standpoint theory. For his analysis of power, he goes with neither Marxist materialism nor Foucauldian abstraction but instead picks from multiple sources to produce an original conception of the idea of ‘alienation’. The ultimate conclusion of his first essay though is that this whole system is predicated on violence. Good, old-fashioned boring violence underpins any further structural violence. His own experience with activism plays a part in formulating this argument.

In the second essay, he argues that we overestimate the negative impact of technology and how social forces (and violence) still underpin the direction those technologies take — technologies that are focused on social control and surveillance receive priority. They are essentially designed to make sure capitalism is the only imaginable alternative left. He looks at how humanity failed to produce a world that scifi had once imagined. We’ve been reduced to simulating the future, instead of creating it. Imagination is a recurring theme throughout the book, and Graeber is keen to demonstrate how the modern world has tried to negate, control, and limit (political) imaginations. The most salient node of discussion is when he calls out the difference between “bureaucratic technologies” and “poetic technologies”.

His third essay is possible the most fascinating of all. He begins by tracing the history of the social welfare state and demonstrates that in Europe, most of the key institutions of what later became the welfare state were not originally created by governments at all, but by people and groups engaged in a self-conscious revolutionary project. Social welfare states were essentially bribes to dull these movements. Then, the discussion shifts to the idea of ‘rationality’ and the flaws within the mainstream discourse on it. Finally, just as he did with sci-fi in the second essay, Graeber dissects heroic fantasy to show that fantasy literature is, in his own words, largely an attempt to “imagine a world utterly purged of bureaucracy, which readers enjoy both as a form of vicarious escapism and as reassurance that ultimately, a boring, administered world is probably preferable to any imaginable alternative”.

Like any anarchist worth their salt, Graeber ends his discussion with the play parable to show why people love bureaucracies after all. He demonstrates it by showing the difference between ‘play’ and ‘game’. This part is an excellent analysis of the idea of freedom, rationality, creativity, and ultimately the way these all interact with rules and violence. The world defined by bureaucracy is not the result of random chance or an outcome of some inevitable natural state of being. It is deliberate.

The appendix of the book is also a must-read for its analysis of the superhero genre which Graeber identifies as almost utterly lacking in imagination. For him, superhero stories are conservative at their core. He does a pretty solid deconstruction of The Dark Knight rises to argue this point. He shows the difference between genuine political imagination and creativity vs. managed imagination in late-capitalism.

This book is a delightful read because Graeber is never afraid to show his anarchist roots and the worldview that defines his understanding. Through this lens, he manages to reap insights that would otherwise be missed. We may have lost him, but his work will keep on giving. This book is most certainly a timely read.