Thread by @doctorow

The incredible writer, activist, academic and speaker @DavidGraeber has died in a hospital in Venice of undisclosed causes. He was only 59.

I'm devastated.

https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1301504647769792512

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I first encountered Graeber's work through his magesterial book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," which ripped through my circle, especially the science fiction writers, inspiring entirely a subgenre of "debtpunk," like @cstross's "Neptune's Brood."

boingboing.net/2013/07/02/str…

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Debt - along with Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell" - was the major inspiration for my own 2017 novel Walkaway:

edgeryders.eu/t/the-economic…

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Graeber's political radicalism was the result, in part, of his anthropological view of economics, which gave him insight both into how we interact with one another, but also why economists' views of those interactions are so often wrong.

nybooks.com/articles/2019/…

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Graeber wasn't just a master of crossing academic disciplines: he was also brilliant at crossing between the academic and nonacademic worlds, and as a result, he had an outsized, activist's impact on the world.

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His 2015 essay collection "The Utopia of Rules" remains a profoundly observed, brilliantly written and terribly relevant anthropological critique of capitalism that is aimed at making a better, smarter, more effective anti-authoritarian left.

boingboing.net/2015/02/02/dav…

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But it was his 2018 breakout book, Bullshit Jobs, that arguably reached the largest audience and smuggled his critique of capitalism into an ascerbic and darkly hilarious view of employment:

boingboing.net/2018/06/20/on-…

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Graeber and I had corresponded for years before Bullshit Jobs was published, but it wasn't until his tour for the book that we finally met face to face, when I interviewed him onstage in LA:

c-span.org/video/?446716-…

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I was delighted to learn that he was charming and gentle in person - still recognizably that acerbic, lightning-witted blade that he was online, but tempered with a deep, human compassion that shone through during the signing afterwards.

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The last time I saw Graeber was shortly after the crisis started, when we were on a panel on radical economics together (alas, no video seems to be online from that event). I remember that I made him laugh several times and felt obscenely proud to have done so.

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Graeber lived his principles and bore the cost: his activism with Occupy Wall Street triggered vicious retaliation from NYPD intelligence, leading to him being evicted from his childhood home:

nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ar…

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He inspired millions and died too young. As @owenjones84 wrote, "Rest In Power, David Graeber."

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1301511984916189186

eof/