[vundercind]

A consistent problem I’ve noticed with Graeber is that he seems to attract strident critics who don’t appear to have done more than skim the book they’re criticizing—and maybe not even all of it. It’s as if they read some sentence they don’t like, then red-out from anger for a few pages, then keep going and soon it happens again.

It’s really inconvenient if you’re actually interested in reading good-faith commentary on his work.

[notahacker]

I quite liked the book actually, but a consistent problem with it is that if you have a half-decent familiarity with some of the relevant background it's basically impossible not to spot that it's full of errors, some of them pretty innocuous and others pretty glaring. Thing is, if you can't help noticing that Apple Computer wasn't, in fact, a non-hierarchical organization formed by ex-IBM engineers working in groups of 20-40 using laptops(!) in their garages and know enough about bond trading to realise than investors aren't getting involved as a means of paying tribute to governments, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether some of the stuff about ancient coinage and unusual tribal approaches to indebtedness might also be embellishments of misunderstood anecdotes or completely the wrong way round.

It's really inconvenient that the general response to this by Graeber and his acolytes has been to insist that anyone with the temerity to suggest it might be flawed must be doing so in bad faith.