Bureaucracy &

Bureaucracy &#IofT

Wednesday 3G

Convener: Phil Windley

Notes-taker(s): Dave Sanford

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Phil started with review of the ‘Utopia of Rules’ book by David Graeber: Bureaucracies create perfect places that throw out imperfect people, because they won’t follow the rules. Bureaucracies create structure and efficiency using rules and regulations. This is not limited to government, but includes typically any organization that creates hierarchy and rules.

Phil indicated that he wanted to stay away from partisan policy discussions and indicated that political parties as well all or most organizations are pushing some kind of bureaucracy and some may be objectively better than others.

Relationships are based on queues, reciprocity, even for trivial relationships. In power relationships, this occurs only or primarily in one direction (e.g. slaves need to know everything they can about their master in order to survive, however the master does not needs to know much or anything about the slave). Much of business involves more nuanced “interpretive labor”, to influence you need to think about who the party you are trying to influence is and what they want.

Alternatively if you simply hit them over the head to enforce your will – most of this communication becomes immaterial. It is in this sense that David Graeber believes that all bureaucracy is literally based on force. Business and Government in this model are in collusion. Businesses use the available force of government to enforce its goals. We as unforced individuals outside bureaucracy and force have the capacity to cooperate – but to do so we have to take the effort to understand each other mutually. The implicit or explicit threat of force is required whenever individuals bypass cooperation, often because the work to cooperate and understand is too much work.

Phil indicated that one of the cases of force over cooperation in the Internet space is the ‘contract of adhesion’. All of our talks on relationships in the VRM space are predicated on all parties having to be in “interpretative relationships”. Vendors often think they are in a relationship with customers, but they want the benefits without doing the work that is required. To be fair to vendors, they may really want to understand and respond to customers – but in many environments that appears to them to be not cost effective.

Phil cited another book “Seeing Like a State”; which indicated that early census was to determine the soldiers (young men) and tax base available to support war. Doc cited Corey Doctorow’s review of the Graeber book as saying that everyone knows that rules are not uniformly applied; bureaucracies are supposed to be meritocracies, but everyone knows that is false.

The conversation moved back to VRM and goals of less violence i.e. less reliance on contracts of adhesion – Doc quoted his long standing assertion that free customers are worth more. Nittan asserted that current business models want caged customers because their bureaucratic model is all about independently minimizing the costs of Acquisition, Retention and Efficiency.

Doc argued that there is more that can be had by moving past this static bureaucratic view of the one road to profits and that a one-way relationship erodes trust, and therefore profits over time. We are emotionally attached to our stuff (reference to George Carlin skit). In an Internet of Our Stuff – that matters. With my shirt it is just me and the shirt once I’ve purchased it. With Fitbit – that organization is still in the on-going relationship after the sale. If we take the current model, all my connected stuff will be partially owned by a wide variety of bureaucratic entities which will continue to want to define and limit how I use it. Vehicle-to-vehicle mechanisms (like airplane collision avoidance systems (TCAS) for cars) may provide great safety benefits – but they also may decide where I can drive, stop my car, etc.

There followed some discussion of what is the ability and what are the precursors for information technology to build non-bureaucratic systems. Nittan quoted Peter Drucker as saying that “all knowledge work is volunteer” in the sense that management will in general not understand the nature of the work that the workers do. There is some movement by bureaucratic organizations to return to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “defined outcome work” of measuring acquisition, retention and efficiency – because they know how to control it and do not have to have the costs of the relationship with workers. They are trying to move from unstructured data coming in from customers to defined outcomes. When a business has defined and rewards the outcome they are expecting from the worker (e.g. in a call center), they may simply not care who is sitting in the seat.

Conversation continued about the origins of the Internet – is it a fluke? Some discussion indicating that defined outcomes are not necessarily bad – the key question being, ‘Who gets to define the outcome?’ We can envision a world that looks like the original Internet, but we don’t know how to build it in this society.

Doc asserted that Phil’s and other systems being developed by IIW community members are non-hierarchical and that with block chain we have non-hierarchical ways to manage a directory. Audio is available for this session.