Londoners returning to work this week were welcomed back to commuter life with a series of uplifting posters telling them just how useless their jobs are. The spoof adverts have appeared in tube carriages with responsibility being claimed by an anarchist collective calling themselves the Special Patrol Group (SPG), said to be affiliated to Strike! Magazine.
Eschewing the bourgeois concept of humour, the posters carry stroppy slogans such as: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.” And all of them feature the twitter hashtag #bullshitjobs which refers to an article published in Strike! by anthologist David Graeber. The magazine posted a slightly opaque message on its Facebook page saying that the SPG is (perhaps) its militant wing — beyond that it’s hard to verify too much since the success of the posters has crashed the mag’s website.
Whether the new posters are any more depressing than the usual adverts for dating websites and look-away-now charity scaremongering about homelessness and abuse is a matter of debate.
