The Dawn of Everything

An essential reminder that we are in charge of our own destiny.

Cory Doctorow
6 min readMar 8, 2022

--

We’ve lost so much to the pandemic. Every day I wake up and think of all the lives snuffed out, all the plans smashed, all the stories never told. I think about poor David Graeber, whom I spoke with just a few weeks before his sudden and tragic death in September 2020.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rip-david-graeber

David was a superb writer and an insightful scholar and activist. He helped formulate Occupy’s rallying cry, “We are the 99%” and he wrote magisterial popular works of anthropology like “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and the incredible “Bullshit Jobs.”

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/20/david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-why-does-the-economy-sustain-jobs-that-no-one-values/

Last autumn, Macmillan published David’s final book, a collaboration with the equally brilliant archaeologist David Wengrow, which they worked on together for a decade and finished shortly before Graeber’s untimely death.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything

I’ve been reading the book since its publication, taking it slowly and digesting the wealth of beautifully presented evidence for its core argument: that the shape…

--

--