The Utopia of Rules

by David Graeber

Information technology has allowed a financialization of capital that has driven workers ever more desperately into debt, while, at the same time, allowed employers to create new “flexible” work regimes that have destroyed traditional job security and led to a massive increase in overall working hours for almost all segments of the population. Along with the export of traditional factory jobs, this has put the union movement to rout and thus destroyed any real possibility of effective working-class politics.100 Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we still await cures for cancer or even of the common cold; instead, the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made, one might say, to ensure that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.