Digital humanities needs space to experiment and explore, but as David Graeber’s recent study reminds us university bureaucracies often make it hard to create or maintain that sort of sustained creative space (Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy). That means that to pursue digital humanities we need to understand bureaucracy and think about how to subvert it. In this session, I propose we use Graeber’s book as a starting point and brainstorm about ways to create successful spaces for experimentation, by carving out areas within the bureaucracy’s domain, by working at its margins, or acting outside its range.