Mere Ceremony

In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, anthropologist David Graeber addresses what he considers to be a fundamental issue with the way modern society operates and organizes: he believes that more than half the work modern humans do is pointless, and that engaging in such work—and treating it as if it's vital—is psychologically harmful for the humans being paid to engage in that sort unnecessary of labor.

There are several interesting threads contained in that core premise, but one of them—the idea that contemporary economics is weighed-down by pointless tasks that don't add value to anything or anyone—is compelling, because if this theory is true, there's a fair amount of time, energy, and resources that could be freed up if we could separate-out this type of labor and begin to replace it with more productive activities.

This supposition is backed by some evidence, but has been challenged: this may not be a slam-dunk solution to the world's ills.

But it does gesture at a potential focal point for increased efficiency that, if addressed appropriately, could theoretically free up all those people, all those human-hours and all that effort, to do other things; other types of labor, but also just non-tedious, non-pointless rest and relaxation, engaging in hobbies, and so on.

There's a concept within the world of organizational theory that's relevant here, I think: "mere ceremony" refers to tasks that we engage in out of tradition, or in order to adhere to tacitly understood social norms.

When we write elaborate and polite emails, and respond to the same, you could argue we're often engaging in mere ceremony because it would be more efficient to simply transmit information (questions, commands, sharing data, etc) without all the floweriness and asking about the other person's day—in cases where we don’t actually care about how the other person is doing, at least.

But within some industries and organizations and societies, these polite little flourishes have been baked into the milieu, which means it's difficult to deviate from those norms even if they're pointless (in the "generating value" sense), because if just one or a few people fail to live up to those implicit standards, they might be considered rude or antisocial or not team-players.

It's been theorized that some of these merely ceremonial tasks could be automated by software, freeing up that time and cognitive energy that might be otherwise spent on actually valuable things.

If you can click a button that will auto-generate a polite, human-sounding email using the information you want to communicate as the source material (this is something Google is already building into their apps), and the person on the other end can use their own software tools to parse the relevant data from that email, before clicking a button to create a friendly, flowery email response, that would seem to solve some of our mere ceremony-related issues, as it would basically outsource that component of our communications to AI.

That said, this could accidentally lead to the generation of even more ceremonial, ritualistic baggage, as although many people would no longer have to expend effort (beyond clicking a button) on this aspect of modern work-life, some people still would, and the machines responsible for this element of how we communicate wouldn't have any real incentive to tone things down and shift toward simpler, clearer, less ritualistic communications over time (they might even do the opposite, becoming more flowery and noisy rather than less).

While trying to solve this problem, then, we might accidentally amplify it if we’re not careful, and more resources (measured in computational and electrical power rather than human brain power, but still) might then be expended toward this (pointless, by some metrics) end.