Only One Company Makes the Game Monopoly

Revisiting David Graeber's theories of bureaucracy, violence, and interpretative labor.

In passing, I mentioned a new book by C. Thi Nguyen, The Score, which asks the question: Why are numerical scores fun in video games yet oppressive in social metrics? Or, more succinctly: Why do we love games and hate rules?

The Score is simultaneously a philosophy book, a self-help book, and a gentle introduction to the contemporary academic study of institutions. I applaud Nguyen for recognizing that a philosophy of games and rules needs to engage with ethnographic disciplines to make sense of why metric chasing is core to our current condition. His book makes the tension between individuals and populations more visible for those less willing to immerse themselves in the vast literature of science and technology studies.

Nguyen clearly summarizes the work on bureaucracy, statistics, and rules by scholars like Lorraine Daston, Theodore Porter, and anarchist anthropologist James Scott, whose classic Seeing Like a State is beloved by both the left and the reactionary right. But there’s another anarchist anthropologist who I think has already solved the core dilemma of The Score: David Graeber.

Graeber was not only an academic but a dedicated political activist. He was one of the central figures of the Occupy Movement, credited with helping coin its iconic slogan, “We are the 99%.” Though best known for his books Debt and Bullshit Jobs, my personal favorite is The Utopia of Rules. I like to think the subtitle was microtargeted to me: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. The book is a collection of five essays that, though readable separately, together provide a unified answer to Nguyen’s central question.

Graeber frames games and bureaucracy as offering similar utopian fantasies of fairness and equality. In games, everyone plays by the same rules. The outcomes are transparent. We know what it means to win and lose. Since everything is written down, we can all evaluate if we think it’s fair and argue for rule changes if it’s not. But bureaucracy promises the same thing. It has no shortage of written rules! We only have all of those rules to maintain transparency and fairness. We want everyone to be treated equally under the law, don’t we?

Score-based games let us escape in temporary fantasy, and yet, in their complex scoring systems, Graeber writes, they “reinforce the sense we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality.” Video games and bureaucratic mechanisms are two reflections of the same reality. Ironically, the score-based games that Nguyen celebrates close off the imagination of alternative forms of governance.

Still, we love our board games and video games, and we hate going to the DMV. Why is that? What explains how getting enmeshed in a battle with HR or the IRS is terrifying and emotionally crippling? What explains why our popular imagination paints bureaucracy in surrealist, existential nightmares like in The Trial, Brazil, or Andor?

For Graeber, the main difference between games and bureaucracy is what he calls structural violence—“forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm.” Graeber argues that bureaucratic systems of endless, stupid paperwork are the defining example of structural violence in our society.

“Now, I admit that this emphasis on violence might seem odd. We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not abstract. I am not speaking of conceptual violence. I am speaking of violence in the literal sense: the kind that involves, say, one person hitting another over the head with a wooden stick. 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. ‘Force’ in turn is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence: that is, the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten to hit others over the head with wooden sticks.”

It is this threat of force that makes bureaucracies so stupid. To see why, begin with violence itself. It is one of the only forms of human interaction that requires no interpersonal interpretation. We know exactly what happens with the conditional command: “Cross this line and I’ll shoot.” When you issue this edict, you are running a mechanical algorithm of violence that needs no understanding of the person who is coming at you. If they cross the line, you shoot them. Both you and your counterparty have a precise expectation of what happens after you pull the trigger.

This lack of interpretation is afforded only to those who have power and can actualize violence without repercussion. This consequent ability to harm makes those in power lazy. And the structures built to maintain these power structures become lazy with them.

Indeed, bureaucratic rules let those in power remain oblivious to what’s actually happening to everyone else. The stupidity of bureaucracy is a feature for those in power. It removes their need to understand those who are subject to the rules. Graeber’s argument is completely consistent with the views of stout institutionalists who tout the benefits and necessity of bureaucracy. Part of the benefit of bureaucratic systems is how they abstract complexity up a hierarchy, allowing people at each level to act without knowing all the details of what’s happening below them.

However, Graeber foregrounds the people at the bottom who are erased by quantified summaries. The erasure of those individuals into statistics means that those in power have no need to do the interpretive labor of thinking what it must be like to be them. Those who set the rules are privileged to not have to think about those forced to abide by them. By sharp contrast, those who have to deal with the rules are obliged to empathize with the powerful. They must constantly imagine how the powerful might act and react to avoid the persistent threat of violence. This is how normally intelligent people are forced to act like idiots when dealing with bureaucratic procedures.

Summarization and bureaucratization do not have to be stupid. You can read my architecture lecture from a few weeks back to see how well-designed hierarchical rule systems can create amazing outcomes. Graeber, to his credit, doesn’t disagree.

“To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid—though they do do that—but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence.”

Bureaucracy is stupid when it is used as a system of deempathization and structural violence. When rule-based systems reduce the interpretative labor of those in power, “such procedures come to partake of the very blindness and foolishness they seek to manage.”

Now, I don’t think you’re going to reach Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson listeners with Graeber’s far-left radicalism. You’re definitely not going to reach the staunch institutionalist liberals of Bluesky who hate David Graeber with every ounce of their being. I don’t mean this cynically: I think Nguyen wants to reach out to both of those audiences, and that’s his prerogative.

However, I think we are best off not forgetting Graeber and the left-wing movements that arose in the wake of the financial crisis. Though the stock market is soaring, it’s hard to argue the world is in a better place today than it was after 2008. The economist Joseph Stiglitz’s so-called 1% has lost some of its power, but only because it has ceded it to the 0.001%. There’s less faith in institutions than ever. The financialization and gamification of everything have put us all in the awkward position where every aspect of our lives is now connected to a risky set of dehumanizing rules. The radical critiques from the 2010s don’t have simple answers for our current polycrisis, but ignoring them walls off imagining better worlds.