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!
