Bureaucracies Eat Hope and Crap Paper

What Hath Xerox Wrought?

Back in early 1966, I was working as a young programmer for RCA Victor at their data center in Indianapolis. The whole computer revolution was not even really a revolution at this point, at least not so far as the average worker was concerned. But there were glimmers. Executives knew that the computer would be good for something, they just weren’t entirely sure what.

Which was not so odd, given that the eventual giant of computers, IBM, was similarly uncertain, or at least apocryphally said to be: “According to a quote attributed to the then CEO of IBM, Thomas J Watson Jr, in 1943 he believed that ‘…there is a world market for about five computers.’ “

Now, whether he actually said those exact words, or, assuming that he did, what he really meant by them, may be up in the air. Around fifteen years ago, computer visionaries were saying that, if by “computer” he meant “vast cloud networks” like Google, or Amazon, he might turn out to have been right all alone.

"The world needs only five computers," Papadopoulos said on his blog. He then listed seven--Google, eBay, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo, Salesforce.com, and what he called the Great Computer of China--but let's not split hairs. He was trying to make the point that "there will be, more or less, five hyperscale, pan-global broadband computing services giants."

My opinion is that these revisionists are torturing the Watson example a bit too painfully, if they expect that Mister IBM was thinking in terms of clouds of millions of computer servers linked together into individual global entities called clouds, especially in 1943.

That being said, I was involved with the “big iron” mainframes well before the PC arrived and began to make any sort of dent in the overall concept of the computer. Yet even back then, some of the digital prognosticators were starting to think about the concept of “the paperless office.” This was interesting, as we were still using punch cards - essentially large boxes of paper - to program our machines.

At any rate, this was at the dawn of the computer as arbiter of the corporate environment, when the status quo was for every office environment to feature rank upon rank of dark green, gray, or beige filing cabinets stuffed full of paper - the “memory banks” of the companies of the day, although how efficient they were at that function was open to question. “File and forget” didn’t become a maxim by accident.

Max Weber, the famous German thinker generally known as the father of modern sociology, was probably the first to codify the nature of modern bureaucracy as well.

Weber’s ideal bureaucracy is characterized by the following:

• hierarchical organization

• delineated lines of authority with fixed areas of activity

• action taken on the basis of, and recorded in, written rules

• bureaucratic officials with expert training

• rules implemented by neutral officials

• and career advancement depending on technical qualifications judged by organization, not individuals

Hence, taken on its face, one can reasonably consider the western notion of a global “rules based order” as simply a euphemism for a gigantic, pervasive world bureaucracy.

Weber described three forms of bureaucracy: Logical-rational, that is, a system of administration based on those precepts, operating in service to a leadership rather than on its own behalf; Traditional, in which the bureaucracy is legitimated by past history and practice, and charismatic, in which a bureaucracy rules on behalf of a heroic figure or said figure’s heroic teachings - the USSR is considered to be an example of this form. Weber himself believed that charismatic bureaucracies would eventually evolve into logical-rational bureaucracies, although his rationale for this belief is sketchily documented in his own work.

Unfortunately, Weber’s conceptualization of bureaucracy runs headlong into, and succumbs to, Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

• First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

• Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

In other words, according to Pournelle, all bureaucracies will eventually become dedicated to their own preservation and supremacy, and any “rules based orders” they create will put their own survival and power first, ahead even of the ostensible goals and beliefs they purport to serve.

Weber foresaw potential problems with bureaucracies, particularly charismatic bureaucracies, but he was nowhere near as dour as Pournelle. Unfortunately, the growing historical experience with bureaucracies seems to validate Pournelle’s views far more so than Weber’s, even as our own D.C. nomenklatura takes on more and more of the characteristics of its Soviet forebearer, and the massively interlinked bureaucracies of the western “rules based order” does likewise.

At any rate, we come now to today, in which the “paperless office” not only does not exist, but the efficiency of computers at creating paper documentation of everything and then sending it to hapless customers, consumers, or simply massive cohorts of spammees probably produces more dead tree effluvia than was ever dreamed by those long gone executives who had their secretaries print out or even type out their email so they could read it as they felt God intended - on real by-damn paper.

Those times, along with the secretaries themselves, and the typing pools from which they spawned, are also long departed, but the bureaucracies they created and supported live on, more robust today than anything the most anal German or Soviet record keeper could have hoped for. But today those bureaucracies are self-replicating and concerned primarily with their own survival and prospering, however they determine those metrics to be constructed. And for most of them, no human intervention is actually required. Like the dinosaurs of old, they possess vast bodies but almost no governing brains, beyond the thousands, or millions, of tiny human brain-cogs that serve only as meat-extensions of the governing software.

Which is why our world today seems to possess a decreasing amount of human hope in direct proportion to the increasing amount of bureaucratic order whose primary byproduct is a vast defecation of paper.

Never mind that we have always wiped our defecations away with paper. Today’s bureaucratic orders wipe their crap away with us.