The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Summary
Essays on how market societies multiply bureaucracy, how bureaucratic power depends on implicit violence, and how technological progress has shifted from poetic to bureaucratic technologies.
Why it’s useful here
A lens for terms of service, content moderation, and account lockouts as bureaucracy without recourse. It also warns that community governance can turn into the same thing.
Key ideas
- “Iron law of liberalism”: market reforms increase bureaucracy
- Poetic vs. bureaucratic technologies
- Structural violence and “dead zones of the imagination”
Related
- graeber-wengrow-2021-dawn-of-everything.md