What an odd book. Brilliant but breezy. Random passages and bullets follow.
 

The Brits conquered or traded with foreign nations. The Americans wanted to administer them. US is profoundly bureaucratic, but we miss it because this is bureaucratic capitalism, i.e., private sector (Graeber 2015, 13). 

"Total bureaucratization" (Graeber 2015, 18): "the gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profit" (Graeber 2015, 17) 

there is an anthro lit on "cults of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world" (Graeber 2015, 22). Meyer, etc. Strong decoupling. These formed almost "magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience or training they are supposed to represent" (Graeber 2015, 22). 

Requiring pharmacists to be credentialed in all kind of elaborate and ongoing ways extracts from the students and gives to the financial interests that loan them money to pay for it. "This system of extraction comes dressed up in a language of rules and regulations" (Graeber 2015, 24). 

"Whenever someone starts talking about the 'free market', it's a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He's never far away" (Graeber 2015, 31). 

generic bank branches: "these are the perfect symbols of our age: stores selling pure abstraction -- immaculate boxes containing little but glass and steel dividers, computer screens, and armed security. They define the perfect point of conjuncture between guns and information, since that's really all that's there" (Graeber 2015, 33). 

fascinating observation: ATMs never dispense incorrect amount (pp. 35-36). 

DEF "structural violence": "forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm" (Graeber 2015, 57). 

banks, etc.: "All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force" (Graeber 2015, 58). 

"there is a direct relation ... between the level of violence employed in a bureaucratic system and the level of absurdity and ignorance it seems to produce" (Graeber 2015, 65). 

"what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative" (Graeber 2015, 67). "Any alternative form of action cannot, without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any predictable effects at all" (Graeber 2015, 68). Hmmm ... running and jumping into a lake. May not have social effects, but may well. 

"situations of structural violence invariably produced extremely lopsided structures of imaginative identification", (Graeber 2015, 69) i.e., interpretive labor (Graeber 2015, 67). "Within relations of domination, it is generally the subordinates who are effectively relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question actually work" (Graeber 2015, 71). Recall politeness, the V and T, etc. Contradicts himself p. 95 in saying "those on top relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks" 

"Police are bureaucrats with weapons" (Graeber 2015, 73). 

"Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization" (Graeber 2015, 75). 

"The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly of coercive force come together" (Graeber 2015, 80). 

the "real" in "real estate" is not derived from res as "thing", but form the Spanish real – whoa (Graeber 2015, 86). 

Marx: what makes people unlike bees is that we first raise structures in our imagination (Graeber 2015, 88). 

"The subjective experience of living inside … lopsided structures of imagination – the warping and shattering of imagination that results—is what we are referring to when we talk about 'alienation'" (Graeber 2015, 94). 

notions such as the public, the workforce, the electorate, consumers, the population "are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic" … they are "machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered" (Graeber 2015, 99). 

what happens to the working class struggle when there is no longer a traditional working class? It turns into identity politics (Graeber 2015, 112). 

"there appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment [in] technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control" (Graeber 2015, 120). 95% of robotics research funded by the Pentagon, which is why we have no Jetsons maids. Biggest medical breakthroughts are Prozac, Zoloft, Ritalin: "tailor made … to ensure that [our] new professional demands don't drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy" (Graeber 2015, 129). 

change of tax regimes: Bell used to invest in research because profits were so highly taxed (Graeber 2015, 127). 

"There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers" (pp. 134-135). See Strathern's Audit Cultures for an anthro look at this sort of thing. See also Sarah Kendzior 

great close to the chapter on declining rate of profit: free ourselves from bureaucracy, and "let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history" (Graeber 2015, 147). 

path dependence of bureaucracies: once created, they find other problems that need solving, they create new problems, and they move to make themselves indispensable (Graeber 2015, 150). "The only way to rid oneself of an established bureaucracy, according to Weber, is to simply kill them all, as Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome, or Genghis Khan in certain parts of the Middle East" (Graeber 2015, 151). 

#SMM high modernism is largely inspired by the German post office (Graeber 2015, 153). The Post Office created the German nation (Graeber 2015, 155). 

"games are pure rule-governed action" … they "allow us our only real experience of a situation where all ambiguity is swept away. Everyone knows exactly what the rules are" … "Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules", whereas play "implies a pure expression of creative energy" (Graeber 2015, 191). 

play is present "when the free expression of creative energies becomes an end in itself" (Graeber 2015, 192). 

"What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play" (Graeber 2015, 193). 

play is purely generative of rules, not constrained by them (Calvinball). In social theory, this logic finds expression in sovereignty (Graeber 2015, 193). 

Freedom is "the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating" (Graeber 2015, 199). Language really exemplifies this. We love to play around with different formulations, but we also write a grammar book. 

"no system can generate itself. Any power capable of creating a system of laws cannot itself be bound by them" (Graeber 2015, 213). 

Galtung on structural violence 

Jonathan L. Katz "Don't Become a Scientist" at wustl 

Victorian era sci-fi futures "last moment before the carnage of WWI, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible" (Graeber 2015, 251) #SMM