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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2c22a87 | Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange. | profit | David Graeber | |
| 3a9ef49 | Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid. But this didn't just happen. It is the result of intentional policy choices. Since the 1980s, legislators have led the way in systematically defunding the post office and encouraging private alternatives as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn't really work. | David Graeber | ||
| 56cb3cf | The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point--and it is no coincidence that the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English and Dutch East India companies, ones that pursued that very same combination of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the conquistadors. It is a structure designed to eliminate all moral imperatives but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue--and regularly do--t.. | David Graeber | ||
| fe38bb7 | Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 198os, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages. | nonsense | David Graeber | |
| 3d4cb2f | The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing." | David Graeber | ||
| 3f6078d | 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. | david graeber | ||
| 6b97a72 | 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 fo.. | David Graeber | ||
| 4a51599 | Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf. | David Graeber | ||
| 72acdce | one of the most effective ways for a system of authority to tout its virtues is not to speak of them directly, but to create a particularly vivid image of their absolute negation--of what it claims life would be like in the total absence of, say, patriarchal authority, or capitalism, or the state. | David Graeber | ||
| dc22cbf | 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. | David Graeber | ||
| 4d90c2e | But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men," but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even .. | David Graeber | ||
| 1afb2d4 | As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it's almost impossible to get rid of it. | David Graeber | ||
| c2de8ed | If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager's power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world. | David Graeber | ||
| 9474c6f | The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense. | common-sense | David Graeber | |
| a86fa44 | In Debt, the anthropologist David Graeber tells the story of Tei Reinga, a Maori villager and "notorious glutton" who used to wander up and down the New Zealand coast, badgering the local fishermen by asking for the best portions of their catch. Since it's impolite in Maori culture (as in many cultures) to refuse a direct request for food, the fishermen would oblige--but with ever-increasing reluctance. And so as Reinga continued to ask for.. | Kevin Simler | ||
| fa18d82 | What "the public," "the workforce," "the electorate," "consumers," and "the population" all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating." | David Graeber | ||
| 58645a8 | I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality n.. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 89bfa0e | So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like." In practice this can refer to almost anything. In the case of airlines or telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition be.. | David Graeber | ||
| 7c9a0ab | 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." | David Graeber | ||
| 3bca823 | All of this would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re-create and reimagine everything around them. | David Graeber | ||
| e85af89 | If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have? This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it's the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don't think a lot about what being f.. | David Graeber | ||
| ce97da1 | It's worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the picture of the schoolmarm rapping a child acro.. | David Graeber | ||
| 5863aa8 | The reasons why anthropologists haven't been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there's no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever "invented" than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human t.. | David Graeber | ||
| 2d54c6b | Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches--allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate j.. | David Graeber | ||
| ff3adc3 | Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media... | social-media | David Graeber | |
| 76d19c2 | Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds | David Graeber | ||
| f6599ac | Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world's population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities in recent decades ultimately turned us all into part or full-time administrators. | David Graeber | ||
| 726fde7 | It begins to be clear why there are no societies based on barter. Such a society could only be one in which everybody was an inch away from everybody else's throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poised to strike but never actually striking, forever. True, barter does sometimes occur between people who do not consider each other strangers, but they're usually people who might as well be strangers- that is, who feel no sense of mutual respo.. | David Graeber | ||
| 368e021 | If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover.105 That's pretty much the system we have now. | David Graeber | ||
| 4e21ffa | As the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight. | David Graeber | ||
| b506dd6 | TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH, NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD.... | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 783d533 | The verdict of this court is that the accused are guilty of witchcraft. The maximum penalty the law allows is to be burned to death.However, in view of your previous good background I am disposed to be lenient. I therefore sentence you to be burned alive. | humor satire witchcraft | Richard Curtis | |
| b1ac707 | Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation. RODERICK NASH, WILDERNESS AND THE AMERICAN MIND | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 3189247 | connoisseurs of geologic form, | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 9c28186 | Narcissists erupt with self-righteous indignation whenever they believe others are breaking rules, acting unfairly, or getting more than their fair share of the pie. They have no compunction about breaking the rules themselves, however, because they know they're special and the rules don't apply to them. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| f1dc382 | Pat was a serious listener. He was one of the first people who really challenged my ideas: 'Do you really believe that? Why? Don't accept everything you read. You should question it all, take what makes sense, and throw away the rest.' He was constantly asking, 'Did you ever consider this? What about that?' He changed the way I thought. (quoting Russell Baer, Army Ranger.) | Jon Krakauer | ||
| e0afb26 | but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.... | Jon Krakauer | ||
| c8c6941 | fkhr my khnm bh chyzy Htyj drm t bh an ftkhr khnm. dwst drm bh ayynh ngh khnm w bh chyzy khh my bynm Htrm bgdhrm. yn khr, Htrm bh khwdm st. | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| 090aae9 | rwyhy zndn bry dwbr shrw` khrdn w khwshbkht shdn. my dny, twy zndn tmm rwyh m w gry drd; gr yn tfq byftd y gr btwny z nw shrw` khny... | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| 6eb5230 | But have you noticed the slight curl at the end of Sam II's mouth, when he looks at you? It means that he didn't want you to name him Sam II, for one thing, and for two other things it means that he has a sawed-off in his left pant leg, and a baling hook in his right pant leg, and is ready to kill you with either one of them, given the opportunity. The father is taken aback. What he usually says, in such a confrontation, is "I changed your .. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 559dada | I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me. I saw that I had been selfish and unbending and a giant pain in the ass. He'd built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 0afd4cb | You'll never feel the joy of movement if you're struggling. You've got to get good enough and strong enough to reach the point where you can feel this quintessential lightness. - John Gill | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 28ab7b0 | I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more richly and intensely. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| a922667 | Queria movimiento, no una existencia sosegada. Queria emocion y peligro, asi como la oportunidad de sacrificarme por amor. Me sentia henchido de tanta energia que no podia canalizarla a traves de la vida tranquila que llevabamos. Leon | Jon Krakauer |