Bureaucracy, Violence, and Utopia: A Fun and Interesting Reminder

The highlight for me of David Graeber’s 2015 book, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, is his trenchant critique of the post office, which has fallen from its essential role in Western society formation and progress to something quite deadened indeed.

Postal services emerged to serve the needs of armies and empires, Graeber says. “One of the great innovations of eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century governance was to expand what had once been military courier systems into the basis for an emerging civil service whose primary purpose was providing services for the public,” he adds. In America, postal services bound a sprawling nation together. The American colonists used them to communicate ideas and plans; the founders enshrined the institution in the Constitution.

But over time, the role of the postal service has degraded. The German postal system inspired Lenin as a model for Soviet planning, predicting the inefficiency and bureaucracy that characterizes the modern post office. “We now associate national postal systems mainly with the arrival of things we never wanted in the first place: utility bills, overdraft alerts, mail-order catalogs, solicitations, sweepstakes, calls to jury duty, tax audits, one-time-only credit-card offers, and charity appeals,” Graeber says. “Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid.”

To summarize (and paraphrase) a new communications technology developed out of the military. It spread rapidly, reshaping life for many. It had a reputation in its time for dazzling efficiency, and it fostered radical ideas for remaking societies. But then it became a medium for government surveillance and the dissemination of endless new forms of advertising and unwanted paperwork.

Oh, wait. That’s the internet.

Graeber does a clever thing, which I’ve tried to emulate. The parallel he draws between postal systems and our favorite little packet-switched network caused a little light bulb to go on over my head—exactly like in the cartoons.

Graeber has other enlivening insights, such as one premised on the foundation of government bureaucracies in (hidden) violence. “Within relations of domination,” he says, “it is generally the subordinates who are effectively relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question really work.” That observation reminded me of many meetings I have attended in Washington, DC, in which accomplished, intelligent adults pore over the interests, characteristics, and life experiences of some senator in hopes of having the slightest edge in currying his or her favor. It’s embarrassing to watch for someone who dislikes toadying to authorities.

Graeber illustrates the observation about power relations with the example of the two sexes. Can you guess which spends time trying to understand the other, and which does not? Particularly in past decades, when women had little or no access to independent income, they had to put in all the work to understand men, whereas men persisted in understanding women quite poorly. (Now they are better positioned to understand each other equally poorly.)

Though he used sensible delineation between the sexes to make common-sense generalizations about them, Graeber was no conservative. He was a left-wing anarchist and a leader of the Occupy movement. He is credited with creating the slogan “We are the 99 percent.” Given his perspectives on power and dominance—and the role of institutions in transmitting them—you could see him choosing libertarianism as readily.

His leftist views makes it harder for one who doesn’t agree with them, but this Graeber book is a welcome reminder to preserve the internet as a freewheeling, decentralized tool for people to pursue their ends, not to “pin humans to governmental or economic machinery.” It would be a pity if the internet were to follow the course of postal services. Moreso because the internet is global, precise, and rather all-encompassing in the way postal services are not.

I’ve quoted Graeber a lot here, but the quote above about governmental machinery is from a summary of my book on identification (a summary I probably wrote). We resist unwarranted identity demands and national identification schemes (online or off) so that we do not have to live under bureaucracy or worse. Hopefully we can be forgiven for finding allies in left-wing anarchists, who can certainly be right about some things. If you disagree, there is a complaint form for you to fill out, in triplicate if you want it to have a chance of consideration.