When my new driver’s license failed to arrive, I spent about four hours trying to reach a human being who could rubber stamp the act of sending a replacement. Four hours of automated menus, hold times, connections to other departments, and dozens of hang-ups on the part of the DMV, due to high call volume, before I could even get to the aforementioned menus. There’s a strange feeling the process gives me. It’s maddening, dirty, and dehumanizing. The feeling passed within a few hours, because it’s impossible to guess how many times I’ve been through the same hoops to accomplish something trivial with any number of organizations, public and private.
Michael Sacasas recently described bureaucracies as machines in an essay that’s extremely valuable and makes much deeper points about our trajectory as a people. I recommend reading the whole thing. But it was the almost offhand remark about bureaucracy that rung my bell. I’m sure he’s not the first to say it, and it seems too obvious to give a second thought, but for whatever reason, the notion of a human organization as a machine—not like a machine, but a literal machine—shook me. There’s no more concise and accurate way to describe these routine experiences than to imagine, whatever humans I may encounter, I’m interacting with an unwieldy contraption that can’t even sense me beyond a few stereotyped inputs and corresponding outputs.
Assembly Line Virtues
In the essay, Sacasas argues that our society has a mythical reverence for goals such as objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality. These have become the forgotten commandments for us, just as hard to follow as the previous batch. Where did they come from? I’m sure we could argue there are roots in the democratic process, in justice, in techniques that strive to level disparity. They’re traits we like to see in a community leader, or a good parent—though it’s hard to find historical examples of truly level playing fields. In that sense, they’re ideals. A perfection we seek to approach to the nearest decimal place.
There are few men who can claim to wield these powers, but they’re true of just about every single machine. The lawnmower works exactly the same for whosoever yanks the cord. Even when a machine breaks down, it does so equally and for everyone.
We’ve had things that could count as machines for thousands of years, but our zeal strengthened noticeably in the 18th century when we found that fossil fuels can run machines of exceptional power and variety. This isn’t the place to trace the philosophical roots of our love of machines, but if our values are anything to go by, it borders on worship. It’s understandable. Measured in terms of miracles granted, machines seem pretty high up in the pantheon. What interests me is that we have come to love them so much that, having created them, we hold them up as models of ourselves. Who in a zoom meeting would dare suggest we take anything but the most “efficient” course, even in actions that involve nothing beyond unaided human beings? We love to “save time and energy.” People have made lucrative careers selling us “life hacks,” the very term transforming life into something mechanical that can be reprogrammed to our benefit.
The Structure of the Machine
What does a machine look like? It’s actually hard to define. I’ll try to stick to characteristics shared by a large number of things a large number of people call “machines.” Our favorites make possible things we couldn’t do, or they speed or scale them up. There’s an input that can be anything from a fuel source to manpower, and may also require other inputs in the case of raw materials to be processed. There’s an output. Something different comes of it. This happens not via the machine’s personal whimsy, but through an algorithmic process. One kind of input always equals one kind of output, as long as the parts hold up. Even something made of iron and worked by hand can be thought of as operating under a series of if/then statements. If I pull this lever, then that happens. There are parts, and those parts interact in narrowly-defined ways.
We tend to think of them as being made of inorganic substances like metal, but machines can also be made of wood, and in some cases organic materials like leather and bone. Really, anything that uses energy to do work can qualify. What separates the bureaucratic machine from our standard notion is that most of the parts are humans. Am I speaking metaphorically? I’m not so sure.
Why Do We Build Machines?
Machines are useful. They do things that we can’t do, or don’t want to do. They’re often better at it, and if we think purely in terms of dollars and time (hint: this is deceptive), they’re cheaper. Sometimes there’s work to do and not enough people for the task.
When there’s a small amount of work—say, putting a box on a shelf—we don’t tend to build or purchase a machine. Make the box weigh several hundred pounds and add 100,000 more, and we may resort to a forklift. Machines can handle repetitive tasks on large scales. They never tire, though they may shut down for weekends and federal holidays.
The modern bureaucracy arises out of a need. Someone wants something done, and to a certain standard. The work is too much for one person. Then there’s no other choice but to begin the bureaucratic process, right? Well, no. There could be others hired to do the same job, each their own independent agent who sees a process through from start to finish. The problem is that they have different personalities and ways of working. The results are inconsistent. It’s done differently in Toledo and Pensacola. One person got too much leeway, while another was held to severe criteria. The question we forget to ask is, who cares? Why does it matter that everything turns out the same for everyone? The existence of any machine implies a maker. Whatever the standard of work, it’s determined by the hands that built the machine.
Schematics of Bureaucracy
In a large, complex society, there will be social needs to fulfill on a scale much grander than a few loosely-organized individuals can handle. That doesn’t mean the powers that organize will decide to fulfill them, or that they are fundamental to survival. It’s possible that our needs go ignored, and that other needs are forced upon us because they are cultural values rather than biological necessities. But to the extent that a lot of people need something similar and it’s within the power and inclination of some group to administer that thing, a bureaucracy may arise.
The stated intention will be for the welfare of the people, and in many cases, this is indeed the motivating factor, if not the result. Some organization sets up a system of handling a process so that the work is done more consistently and efficiently, either for the organization, the clients, or both. But it’s also possible for bureaucracies to arise where no need exists—where people are perfectly capable of carrying on as they always have—because someone realized they could take their cut out of the middle by passing the bread from the farmer to the hungry mouth. I might differentiate these as functional versus parasitic bureaucracies. For the sake of this essay, both can act as machines.
How is it that I can compare a group of humans to a single mechanical entity? Remember that the definition of “machine” has nothing to do with what it’s made of. These organizations, right down to the departments and roles that make them up, perform narrow functions based on specific inputs that result in specific outputs. Don’t believe me? Call up your favorite bureaucracy and try to order off-menu. The people working there are humans, but the parameters of their job limit the actions they can take, even if they know how to do a better job and have the inclination. They function algothrimically. This form is filled out in a certain way, goes through this process with these people, is stamped, and returned to grant the recipient some well-defined privilege, with algorithmic compassion.
The parts (i.e. the people) are interchangeable. If one breaks down, just plug in another. That’s because personal discretion is limited or eliminated. If there’s anything that separates a human from a machine, it’s agency. We all act in habitual ways according to preferences at times, but we have the power to consider context and change our actions if we see fit. A machine is incapable of such consideration. In a bureaucracy, the agency is forfeited by individuals. Crucially, it doesn’t rise to the level of the organization, but to the maker. Whoever sets the rules of the organization, two orders of magnitude above the people performing the duties, is the only one capable to reorganizing the machine. They exist outside of it, and the efficacy will reflect their skill just as a car purrs to the skill of its mechanic. Feedback is difficult, and as with other machines, takes the form of noticeable dysfunction.
Our dependence on the machine is ultimately a dependence on its designer. If the lawnmower store sells a number of models, and one brand is a lemon, we can opt for another. If it only sells one, it’s wrangle that contraption or do without. But in the case of bureaucracies, we often aren’t allowed to do without. In order to live freely in society with our neighbors, there are a certain minimum number of bureaucracies we have to address. Some have a monopoly on our inputs, and their outputs are required by law. If it’s broken, and there is no alternative, the incentive to fix it only arises when the designer becomes unsatisfied, not the user.
The Lure of the Average
If agency separates humans and machines, what defines a craftsman from a component might be non-fungibility—being irreplaceable. Even if I might find another artisan, or a new friend, I will never find that one. No two people are alike. Not so with the employees of bureaucracies. The nature of a machine doesn’t allow for great personal skill. It operates like an assembly line. Everyone has their lever to pull, and if they won’t do it, it’s easy to find someone else who will. They might be clever enough to do any job within the organization, and to handle problems creatively, but they aren’t allowed to for the sake of efficiency. A human being is thus stripped to those bare traits that are shared by many. Workers are dehumanized, or selected for inhumanity.
I don’t think this is evil, only necessary. Once a decision is made to scale up a process with a desired consistent output, something mechanical is the result. That means while it excels at efficiency, it fails with outliers. A nice lady I know has been to the DMV for hours on four occasions now trying to register her vehicle (without success), which happens to be a rare three-wheeled electric car. Is it a car? A motorcycle? A trike? Where is the number it’s supposed to have if it was made between certain years, except maybe not, since it’s an import? A human being would shrug and sell her a tag for a motorized street-legal vehicle. The machine has no sense of context. It can deal only with categories, never with Sara. Nothing is an individual. There must be many like it, and individuality is made to suffer itself into compliance. A good bureaucracy oversees a process of dilution. Not only must the inputs be fair, equal, consistent. The people who use it slowly have to adapt themselves to conform to the device, or do without it under penalty of law.
Faust the Engineer
We’ve seen there are good reasons for bureaucracies to arise. They do, in fact, serve purposes, however dysfunctional some may be, and those purposes are similar to the ones that bring us to build machines. But is it simply a matter of doing more things faster, with predictable results?
Having made machines, we now look upon them as exemplars of virtue. We strive in our own actions for efficiency, fairness, objectivity. On paper, these are fine things. We would hardly like to face a judge who abhors those traits. But what counts as fair, for example? When we submit ourselves to that standard, we forfeit whatever parts of ourselves fall outside the borders. The question becomes, “Who built the machine?” Who decided the parameters to begin with? Whatever it is that stands in judgment of us can only consider certain isolated data, devoid of context.
Whatever its origins, the worship of the machine seems to answer only to the cultural level of Western society at this point. There is no man or committee punching the cards. I’m sure you could find something like a bureaucracy in almost all human cultures in recorded history. In America, bureaucracy is an obsession. It pervades public and private domains at every level. We even apply them in cases where traditionally none were required—small scales where everyone knows everyone else and looks one another in the eye.
Individual humans can be petty and cruel, and there’s no guarantee they’re any more sensitive to context than the lawnmower. I understand the desire to insulate ourselves from those interactions, but doing so also insulates us from the entire spectrum, including the angelic, and the person of average intelligence and inconsistent mood who nevertheless listens and does their damnedest. We may have first tried to eliminate all three of them in order spread our energy farther, or to spare us abuse. I don’t think that’s still the driving force.
Mechanical values have replaced human ones in many cases, probably because of the prosperity we’ve seen these last few hundred years with the bounty of fossil fuels. Having delivered on its miracles, we’ve consented to a secular worship of the mechanical, and a remolding of ourselves in its image. I wonder if part of the reason we create so many bureaucracies is that becoming a part of the machine feels like some holy sacrifice of individuality. A more prominent factor is that the great labor that used to go into basic needs like producing food and building things can now be done quickly by so few. We have a million specialties. It’s no longer the work of the household, or skilled individuals in the community that our survival hinges on, but processes on grand scales, the components of which are all interchangeable.
Machines come about because of, and thrive on, scale. Cheap energy and easy supper allowed the population to boom at the same time that it diminished each individual’s role in his own upkeep. With more complexity to manage and distribute, it makes sense that bureaucracy would swell. But there are also a lot of people whose livelihoods have nothing to do with providing basic goods and services to their neighbors, mine included. The default option to keep these folks employed seems to have become a role in some bureaucracy, corporate or otherwise. So it’s off to a management gig, or to consult on some bureaucratic subcommittee that enforces equality within a larger bureaucracy. The “developed” world has become mostly an array of machines administering to other machines.
A Human Wrench in the Works
When was the last time you heard some manager extol his organization’s commitment to the virtues of chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility? If it happened, I doubt it was convincing. The seven traditional virtues hardly describe a good machine. Sacasas’ charge of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality are more likely the ones we hear, whether or not they manifest. For my own part, I’m happy to let everyone name their own set of virtues to aspire to. I would only note how many of them are characteristic of humans rather than machines.
Humanity itself has a hard time scaling up. Name any human virtue, and try to apply it to the whole population. To the extent you can, it would be through some bureaucracy that suffers all the problems just mentioned, while doing a serviceable job of hitting quotas and goals set by its designer. The most exemplary acts will come from individuals, and they will affect small numbers of people in ways that are messy, wonderful, and hard to reproduce.
Those of us who prefer human interaction are faced with a sacrifice: there is no way to deliver widespread, objective, consistent, and fair anything without bowing to the algorithm, and perhaps subjugating ourselves to some fungible role within the machine. That’s no small concession. Much of our safety and prosperity is maintained mechanically. And certain bureaucracies, as I mentioned, can’t be quit without severe penalty. What waits for us instead is the individual, irreducible chaos of humanity. We have to be willing to embrace the spectrum between beauty and ugliness, richness and poverty, safety and danger. Dependable processes may break down, and if we check and stamp for a living, we will have to find new ways to matter enough to be fed. What we get in return is the possibility of being considered beyond our basic metrics, even beyond our selves to include the world in which we live, and every way it presses and shifts around us.
Is it possible? I already noted that our love of the mechanical is so ingrained that it answers not to influential people, but culture itself. I’m skeptical that we can quit our machines so easily, or that everyone would like or benefit from the alternative. But every time we opt out of a bureaucratic process, we recapture whatever parts of our humanity were too complicated to measure. And every time we cast aside categories to deal with the person in front of us as an individual, incomparable to others and inextricable from their circumstances, some small gear rumbles to a halt.
We build machines because they have value. But to whom, and for what purpose? At what cost? Do they serve our needs, or do we mold ourselves to theirs? The answers are as varied as the objects we consider. I don’t propose a simplistic, “people good, bureaucracy bad” position. Only that we ask these sorts of questions, and as with all good machines, have the power to turn them off if we don’t like the answers.