This November we’ll welcome back Irina Podgorny and Wolfgang Schäffner, continuing the discussion of how technology is bound up with bureaucracy, violence, and the imposition of an “ideal” order. This time we’ll turn to David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.

The term “poetic technologies” that Graeber coins in The Utopia of Rules is inseparable from another distinction he draws in the same book — between play and game. Play, for Graeber, is free, creative, and open-ended, the domain of gods, sovereigns, and children, who can act however they like precisely because no one can hold them to account; game is the opposite — a closed space of transparent, pre-agreed rules, where responsibility can always be deflected onto the regulations themselves. Bureaucracy’s appeal, in Graeber’s account, ultimately rests on a fear of play — of that same unpredictable, creative, and therefore dangerous freedom. “Poetic technologies” are rigid in exactly this sense: they are not primarily technical inventions but attempts to take the uncontrollable force of play — the “wild fantasy” a technology is meant to realize — and force it into the closed frame of a game, a system of rules, forms, and procedures. It’s precisely at this junction — between a technology’s promise to realize something impossible and the fact that it can only be realized through rigid, impersonal rules — that the violence of bureaucracy is born.