When Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world. The obituaries all agreed on the breadth and eclecticism of his accomplishments: the graduate work he had done on the culture of Madagascar; his ultra-rapid attainment, then loss, of an associate professorship at Yale; the rumors that he had masterminded Occupy Wall Street; his uncanny knack for writing bestsellers on what, at first glance, seemed like some of the most mind-numbing subjects known to man.

Soon, however, a new, backhanded consensus took over in the academy. Yes, Graeber was “inventive” and “original”, but in the cold light of retrospection he was also ill-disciplined and unsystematic. Even worse, his footnotes were a mess. Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon to hear academics scoffing that for all his childlike imagination and rumpled charisma, David Graeber was not so much a thinker as a gadfly, a provocateur.

Perhaps the best illustration of Graeber’s PR problem is to be found in his most popular (and misunderstood) book: Bullshit Jobs. Bullshit Jobs was a full-length treatment of a viral article Graeber had written in 2013 to answer a simple question: why, given the advances in labor-saving technologies through the 20th century, have we not seen a comparable expansion of leisure time? Why do we not have robots to do our chores, computers to organize our lives, automated production lines to furnish us with every consumer good we could ever need? Graeber’s answer was that for various bureaucratic and political reasons, the gap has been plugged with millions of new, pointless jobs — compliance officers, telemarketers, middle managers, corporate lawyers, administrators of all types. Society was simply not geared towards being productive any more. We were all pencil pushers now.

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Within weeks of publication, the establishment had settled on an orthodox line of rebuttal. Graeber’s problem, argued The Economist, was that he had confused people not understanding their jobs with those jobs being pointless. He was just another social theorist with his own pet theory of alienation. And Left-wing academics with pet theories of alienation are not exactly rare. In other words, Graeber’s critics reacted to him in the way they had been taught to react to Marxists in the academy: by insisting that drudgery was an inevitable feature of a rational economy, and that the swarms of miserable worker bees he described would ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production.

But David Graeber was not a Marxist. He was an anarchist — something far rarer in academic life — and by the time Bullshit Jobs was released in 2018 had amassed a vast and subtle theoretical back-catalog that covered everything from Indian Ocean pirates and the German post office to West African fetishes, mid-century dreams of flying cars, and the entire history of Western metaphysics. All this Graeber could bring in to undergird his arguments: one 2015 book on the history of European bureaucratic institutions spent half a chapter offering a novel reading of Batman: The Dark Knight.

Behind Bullshit Jobs, in fact, lurked another book, in which most of the criticisms leveled at the later essay had already been answered: a little-known 2001 academic monograph called Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. Among other things, this was a kind of anarchist rejoinder to Marxism, with its tendency to justify social organization with reference to “production” and “surplus value”. In politics, Graeber instead argued, there was a vast number of things you could call valuable, not just key performance indicators and productivity statistics, but unquantifiable things, like happiness, fulfillment, care. “Production” was a recent fetish, popularized by bureaucrats; when you asked people what was really valuable in life, you would invariably get an answer that sounded something like “helping other people”.

With hindsight, though, what is perhaps most striking about Graeber’s thesis is how conservative it looks. These days, the one political constituency that reliably talks about “values” as distinct from “value” is the Right; if there is one group that can be relied upon to antagonize bureaucratic and managerial types, and hold people like government employees and contractors to account for their bullshit, it is the partisans of Milei or Trump. We live, now, in a topsy-turvy world, where the New Right style themselves as the champions of the common man, while progressives and liberals tend to couch their prescriptions for society in the language of enlightened paternalism.

So does this mean that Graeber was really a Tory in anarchist clothing? Not quite: Graeber was still deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation. What it does show, though, is that since his death, the political Left has managed to forget many of his most fascinating and resonant ideas. Take, for instance, the critique of bureaucracy. These days, the “b” word is hardly ever uttered by progressives; we are supposed, as Left-leaning people, to react to the shuttering of NGOs and government agencies with howls of uncritical lamentation. Here, too, Graeber offers an important corrective.

In The Utopia of Rules, published in 2015, Graeber gleefully acknowledged the horrors of modern bureaucracy stressed by the Right: the endless ID-verifying and form-filling that the modern citizen must engage in if they want to keep a job, move house, or check into a hospital. Crucially, though, he then added another radical step. Bureaucracy, he argued, wasn’t just the preserve of the government. Now, there were private bureaucracies, too. Inescapable call centers. Murky “public-private partnerships”. Vast corporate compliance offices operated by people with annoying vocal tics. One can only imagine the rhetorical potency this kind of critique would have had in the age of Trump — whose main constituency, it seems, is Americans fed up with lanyard-wearing functionaries telling them they haven’t got the right forms, or credentials, or grievances.

This old anarchist insight — the inarguable point that any vanguardist administration becomes its own kind of elite class, every bit as entrenched and corrupt as the ancien régime — seeped into the very foundations of Graeber’s thought. Towards the end of his life, he even seemed to be questioning the usefulness of the idea of “equality” as a Left-wing ambition altogether, and for precisely these reasons:

“[I]t’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve “eliminated inequality”?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.”

This, needless to say, is a remarkable statement for the rumored mastermind of Occupy Wall Street, not to mention the coiner of the slogan “We are the 99%”. In it, we glimpse a man who had realized that transforming the world would mean more than tinkering with numbers and arguing about Gini coefficients. At the deepest level, people don’t want to be thrown a few scraps by an administrator and told to shut up. They want to be free.

There is one Graeber video I have found myself coming back to again and again since his death. It is a debate he conducted in 2014 with Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir billionaire who has since become famous as the éminence grise of the New Right. Thiel is clearly fascinated by Graeber; he agrees with his points about bureaucratic stultification, and seems to find it rather novel to have a Left-wing interlocutor echoing his paeans to untrammeled human creativity.

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Watching the video, indeed, you get the sense that in many ways, Graeber’s anarchism is the result of Thiel’s impulses being carried to their most logical, most humane conclusion. Thiel wants coercive bureaucracies to stop meddling in the likes of SpaceX and PayPal; Graeber, meanwhile, wants them to leave everyone alone, from professors in London to peasants in Bihar, so that they all have enough time and space to figure out something worthwhile, and do it.

It is tempting to treat Graeberism (a term its originator would have hated) as a kind of “road not taken” for the political Left. Graeber’s most important books — Possibilities, Direct Action, Debt, Bullshit Jobs, The Utopia of Rules, The Dawn of Everything — are among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time. Certainly, they’re the only ones that manage to carry the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists. They manage this, moreover, without ever once canvassing coercion, intimidation, or brutality. But to lament roads not taken would be a mistake. Because if there was one thing Graeber stood for, it was the idea that, as he put it, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. You are always slightly freer than the world claims you are. There is no road, and there are no turnings. You can change direction any time you like.

Last week, the plight of an another maligned group — Instagram ‘influencers’ —  made the news. “Influencers’ glossy lifestyles lose their shine”, reported the BBC. The story was received with a mixture of schadenfreude and undisguised glee. “Hahaha time for social media ‘influencers’ to get a real fucking job like the rest of us,” read one not atypical tweet.

These influencers have gained enormous sway over the past years. Their greatest asset is a large social media following, which they use to promote certain products and get paid for doing so. It’s a similar sort of thing to sports stars being paid to wear a certain pair of boots or use a certain bat. But with Covid-19 hobbling many ‘lifestyle’ companies and international travel coming to a standstill, content sponsorship is drying up and marketing budgets are dwindling. And so the sun is setting on the influencer grift and everyone — everyone who isn’t an influencer, that is – is ecstatic.

My own feelings towards influencers are mixed. It’s true, the superficiality of Instagram culture can be wearing. The platform presents people as having perfect lives while the personalities that dominate it thirst for round-the-clock validation and elevate the moral value of ostentatious wealth. Men with chiselled bodies lounge around infinity pools surrounded by a bevy of young and gorgeous women. It purports to be aspirational yet it is a filtered and photoshopped world that is unattainable to the majority of people.

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And yet I cannot bring myself to celebrate thousands of (predominantly young) influencers losing their incomes almost overnight. All the jeering last week that they should ‘get a proper job’ doesn’t exactly feel like it comes from a wholesome place. And what is a ‘real job’, anyway? Must it be poorly paid and gruelling? I’m temperamentally inclined to admire those who’ve worked out a way to get paid for travelling around the world looking good.

Indeed, there is an attitude in this country that, as David Graeber wrote in his 2017 book Bullshit Jobs, “If you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right.” Get a real job is code for: get a job that makes you as miserable as I am. It’s a bit like the annoying auntie whose own marriage is the worst possible advert for the convention yet who constantly implores you to get married.

But of course, aspiration and envy are bedfellows. When the relationship between work and reward seems to break down, the scale tips towards envy. Many Instagrammers make themselves easy targets. It isn’t hard to hate those who implore us to #hustle and #grind as they do, when most of us know that the infinity pool and the $200,000 Birkin bag is always going to remain out of reach.

This was true before Covid-19; yet the decadent and glamorous lifestyles promoted by many influencers feel hopelessly out of kilter with the new reality of lockdown. We are heading into the mother of all recessions; death is everywhere; we are shuttered behind closed doors in our pyjamas eating comfort food and getting ever doughier. The last thing we want to look at is photoshopped fakery and motivational uplift, presented with a side  order of avocado toast. Each day is a struggle; nobody is a failure for not doing 100 push-ups and reading three pop-science books before breakfast.

The trouble is, as well as all the pouting models posting provocative snaps for an army of thirsty men, influence culture is dominated by self-help ‘gurus’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ who promote a value system where failure is a consequence of one not working one’s fingers to the bone. A quick search of the popular Instagram #hustle hashtag throws up thousands of representative memes: ‘Nobody cares about your degree when you drive a Lamborghini’; ‘Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him’; ‘You will never see this view [another Lamborghini] by working from 9-5’.

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This sort of pseudo-profundity is the digital equivalent of the ‘Live, Love, Laugh’ tat that hangs from the walls of some lower middle class homes, albeit with a neo-liberal slant. Materialism — fast cars, cartoonishly-sculpted women, jet-setting and bottle service — is the supreme value. It’s a value system that looks incongruent and rather perverse at a time when solidarity, compassion and collectivism are required to deal with a global pandemic. The perfect life was always unattainable. Now it is plain obnoxious.

Much of the online self-help genre had already come to resemble the old communist bloc billboards exhorting the proletariat to work harder for the rewards that were always just over the horizon. It encourages us to believe in the “imaginary universe” that the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu held up as an ideological tenet of neoliberalism, a world of “perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world in which… every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything”. It is yet another incarnation of the meritocratic illusion that keeps the system going — and keeps you working yourself into an early grave.

Despite the glamorous image and ubiquitous capitalist uplift of the influencers, YouTubers and podcasters, this is a precarious world in which one’s income can quickly dry up. It is also a world in which influencers are frequently exploited by the big digital platforms. The fitness personality Joe Delaney — someone whose entertaining and informative content has helped a large number of people to get fit — recently detailed how he received just £4,697, over many months, for a YouTube video which clocked up over 4.2 million views.

The gig-slash-digital economy has repackaged older forms of exploitation — while in the media it has created a landscape that is more hospitable to fake news and demagogues. But it has given more people than ever an opportunity to follow their dreams. I’m an example of that myself: were it not for blogging I would almost certainly not be a writer.

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Part of the appeal of the digital economy lies in the way it has undercut the power of stuffy establishment gatekeepers. Uber was embraced by cab drivers — despite its exploitative business model — because the algorithm does not discriminate (at least in theory). There isn’t the same degree of favouritism at any rate. As one private hire driver phrased it to me, under the old way of doing things if a [taxi] controller didn’t like your face or the sound of your voice “you wouldn’t eat that week”. Apps such as Instagram, along with other social media channels, have diversified the route to fame and recognition; nepotistic gatekeepers have been swept aside.

The era in which the baby boomers grew up has an obvious and lingering appeal: free education and healthcare, plentiful jobs, good pensions. But many younger people have looked at the lives of their parents — broken by fruitless toil in office cubicles and worn down by loveless marriages they got tangled up in far too young — and thought: no thanks. One manifestation of this is people forging their own path through the new social media platforms that have sprung up over recent years.

There is quite a lot that is wrong with the superficiality and validation-seeking that is ubiquitous on Instagram. Indeed, the lockdown has provided many of us with the impetus to take a much-needed digital detox. But those glibly celebrating the possibility that Instagram influencers will have to go back, cap in hand, to traditional employers are betraying their own limited horizons. Instagram’s hyper-capitalist porn may leave a bad taste in the mouth. But then, so does begrudging someone making a living doing something they enjoy.