After AI, Coordination

Years ago, I heard the late David Graeber speak about his Bullshit Jobs theory at a San Francisco bookstore. The audience, being the crowd that shows up at City Lights on a weekday evening, had not come to be persuaded so much as to nod along. They wanted to believe that vast categories of white-collar work, particularly the kinds they did not do themselves, were fake. If administrators, lawyers, and compliance teams, along with managers and middlemen of every kind disappeared tomorrow, the world would keep spinning, and spin better. The mistake in both Graeber's critique and today's AI-flattened-org fantasy is the same: confusing work that produces no visible artifact with work that produces no value. Anyone who has worked inside a company with more than a handful of people has seen the ritual forms of Graeber's work rant: meetings whose only output is other meetings, dashboards no one acts on (or even looks at), and strategy docs that work backward to memorialize decisions already…