SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

I'm seeing a lot of posts about prediction algorithms being used to do things like, say, dodge all human accountability and responsibility by pushing things onto machines, or driving capital into a spiral to the bottom. the latter's kinda funny cause people are reinventing, just from logical observation of reality, Marx's Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall.

but the former... well, lemme drop a semi relevant anecdote. I got up early today to call the department of human services about my and my girlfriends' food stamps. I did this because we got a letter saying that we had NOT SUBMITTED our mid term certification (pointless busywork) and we would lose our foodstamps. the website, however, said that it HAD been submitted, received, and evaluated... two days after the letter had been mailed (so, three days before the letter arrived at our apartment, because mail takes five to six days to get from the government of the state we live in to us through the government run mail service). I called yesterday to see if I could get clarity that way, and the automated system told me that the certification had been submitted... but not reviewed. at that point wait times were too long, so I resolved to get up early today to try and get a real person.

now.

the real person I got today clarified for me that 1. I should have ignored the letter and 2. I should have ignored the phone because 3. I should always be checking the website. "well that's weird," I offered. "it seems like the system is very confused." "Well," she replied in the tone one uses to explain things to a particularly stupid and annoying child, "you have to check the right place".

fuck me for believing official communication sent on official letterhead paper from the government wasn't lying, I guess. sorry for wasting your time ma'am.

David Graeber describes bureaucracy rather compellingly as a system for allowing people in one strata of society to never have to think about the subjectivity of those in another strata of society, while compelling those subjects to create a detailed mental model of the internal state of the system. in a way I guess you could call this a kind of artificial intelligence, in the sense that those of us subject to bureaucracy have to treat the bureaucracy as a kind of fickle and semi-deranged intelligence or possibly very large wild animal that can do things like lie when communicating through one medium and telling the truth through another. we have to model the intelligence sufficiently to understand what "the right place to look" is. the organs of the bureaucracy (the people who administer it) will be incensed by our time wasting stupidity if we don't spend this time modeling this internal state. and it's gotten worse--I don't think I've done a single bureaucratic task public or private since the pandemic started that didn't get fucked up at least one time in some way like this.

the injection of statistical model algorithms into everything on earth doesn't seem like a deviation from where we already are, is what I'm saying. it slots pretty perfectly into Graeber's critique of bureaucracy in The Utopia of Rules. we already have plenty of ways for humans to dodge decision making responsibility, that's what all the paperwork is for. this isn't to say that slapping gpt on everything isn't a miserable new hell, I just suspect it's a different, like, color palette of hell, rather than a significant innovation on the form, if you get me.

and also, I'm going to spend the rest of the day dwelling on whether I'm somehow the asshole in this exchange and I wanted an excuse to bitch about it. 🤷‍♀️ sometimes a woman's just gotta whine for a bit, idk!


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in reply to @SamKeeper's post:

it's not just you ftr. literally every interaction with DSHS has been the most annoying possible thing, and i feel like it's on purpose. we just got a letter in the mail today detailing that the letter they sent us two days ago was incorrect and that our food stamp benefits are FINE and NOT about to get totally deleted forever unless we call immediately. fucking amazing

also we've been trying to get a second card under my name for like five years at this point, lol

lolololol. you'd think if they're struggling this much to keep their shit together they'd, I don't know, not require all these recertifications and shit, but god forbid like 2 people in the state get $50 they aren't "entitled" to I guess.

it's wild, Pennsylvania was a mess but somehow it was still better than supposedly advanced tech utopia Washington. like you could do everything--health care, fuel assistance, food stamps, voter registration iirc--all through ONE state portal and application process. I genuinely don't understand why it's such a shitshow here but I'm glad to hear it's not the Bureaucracy Overmind singling me specifically for punishment!

you're not in the wrong, if the intent is for the letter and phone system to defer to the website as the source of truth, they should explicitly say so. I get why an overworked and underpaid lady in the office would wish everyone could just read her mind so she didn't have to say the same thing seventeen thousand times per day, but just because she has to say it again and again doesn't mean any given person should have heard it by now. Clear communication on the letter and phone system's part would relieve this burden, and is what she should get exasperated about, not the people who have to follow the ridiculous rules under threat of starvation.

yeah something I've noticed a lot and was thinking about earlier is how people within bureaucracies tend to get very irate if you suggest that maybe there's a systemic fault. and I sort of get it because they don't have individual control over these busted systems, but there's also this reflexive attitude of like... if the system is producing all these broken results it's because the human beings going through them are broken in some way, please don't impugn the honor of the paperwork Sir. very weird!

but I mean, even taking that on face value, this is a system meant to help "broken" humans anyway! if someone comes along barely able to string three words together and the system denies them for not being able to complete form 732a with a long enough essay question or whatever, something has gone very wrong here!

well anyway I'm in the middle of an interview process for an adjacent job to this system, maybe I'll get to see how the sausage is made...

Not quite bureaucracy but something adjacent to it, I did support for a major testing company for a few years, before my vision went south further (and then had to deal with the behemoth that is the disability and other state programs), and I ended up with an unofficial, self-appointed job of pointing out to managers and corporate how complicated their stuff was for regular users.

Things like contradictory information, out of date state laws that we received notice of in our emails, but haven't been reflected on the site, straight up broken links... And hearing myself and others explaining these issues to callers because of something that couldn't be controlled on our end is a big part of it. And it got frustrating for us because as the phone operators, we're the first line of contact, so if anyone has any complaints, there's nobody for them to go to but us.

It's terrible how slow these organizations are at making things clear or understandable, and it's even worse how they're practically incentivized to leave things just complicated enough to stall some people out of the process or weed them out entirely, while still allowing some people to use the services so they can say they're not blocking access.

Heh, I'm struggling through getting our home retitled with my new name, and was just thinking about the pain of bureaucracy. And, yeah, in a way it's about mechanizing human input and output to minimize subjectivity. You have to fill out the forms with what the designer of the forms has decided they should include, and the forms can only do what they're designed to do.
On the one hand, I get it, because without the process rules of bureaucracy you'd have a bunch of people, of varying talent and empathy levels, all doing things different ways and to different standards, and it would quickly turn into an absolute mess that would be extremely unjust and inaccessible.
But obviously, bureaucracy isn't a golden solution either, because it requires users to understand vast amounts of complexity to use it, which creates access problems in its own right, and it's also wildly inflexible and can make simple things nightmarish to accomplish.
If I knew an actual workable solution other than a benevolent AI overlord, that'd be great.

yeah I don't think bureaucracy per se is necessarily bad (which is maybe a break from Graeber along the traditional marxist vs anarchist split haha) but it feels significant that I haven't had (much) trouble with voting in Washington, which is all done by mail, includes voter information packets, "democracy vouchers" that just came in the mail recently (!), and just generally seems to be a pretty functional and developed machine. meanwhile getting any kind of benefits, applying to rent controlled housing, navigating what private doctors will and won't take medicaid... all of THAT has been a shitshow.

I think these systems CAN work at least better and more humanely, but it's obvious that there's a whole bunch of probably predictable sectors where no one WANTS them to work better and more humanely.

also I haven't done any name change shit because I'm dreading all the bureaucratic shit I imagine going through for that 😩 good luck with your retitling

Under-funding & resourcing of bureaucracy is, imho, what makes it so life-draining. It makes the people working there overwhelmed and exhausted, so they're understandably not interested in doing more than the minimum... which is what leads to inflexible, unresponsive systems that become barriers instead of guaranteeors of fairness.

Yes! This was actually something I was considering saying more explicitly in the conversation we had on Mastodon about the nature of human consciousness.

We already have AI overlords who control the human population through biopolitics, they're just called "states" or "corporations".

And just like AI, that doesn't mean I think we need to just toss the idea of those types of things out (well no, fuck corporations), but that our nightmare world was here before AI actually got good, and the reason the AI we have is so bad is because of them nightmare world in which it was created.

Depressing, yet true.