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Comment by andsoitis

10 days ago

What’s an example of work that does not deal with actual problems?

Online influencers, podcasters, advertisers, social media product managers, political lobbyists, cryptocurrency protocol programmers, digital/NFT artists, most of the media production industry, those people w/ leaf blowers moving dust around, political commentators (e.g. fox & friends), super PACs, most NGOs, "professional" sports, various 3 letter agencies & their associated online "influence" campaigns, think tanks about machine consciousness, autonomous weapon manufacturers, & so on. Just a few off the top of my head but anything to do w/ shuffling numbers in databases is in that category as well. I haven't read "Bullshit Jobs" yet but it's on the list & I'll get to it eventually so I'm sure I can come up w/ a few more after reading it.

  • It's curious that you only list digital/NFT artists, and fail to see the problems that many of these solve.

    In a world re-calibrated to pure problem-solving, presumably we'd ask a mime or other non-digital artist for news on what our government is doing (instead of the Fake News Media), and then an interpretive dancer, not a lobbyist, would intermediate between government and industry? The trombone players would investigate financial crimes, the bassists would monitor our airspace, and the guy currently painting a mural on a wall would be responsible for DoorDashing a cargo ship's worth of food and supplies to a disaster zone (not the bad NGOs)?

    Yeah, this is just a list of jobs you don't understand and/or make you feel sad.