The American novelist David Foster Wallace told this story about two fish meeting each other. “How’s the water?” the older fish asks. “What the hell is water?” the younger fish replies. Because water is everywhere, most fish don’t notice it.
My phone rings. “Can I confirm this is Reverend Giles A Fraser?” the voice asks. I am immediately irritated. I’m old-fashioned enough to think an unsolicited call ought to begin with caller telling me their name and reason for the call. But why did he call me Reverend Giles A Fraser? Why the A? I disrupt his script by asking him, why the A. Because “this is the information I have been provided with”, he replies, puzzled at my question. And that’s the problem. He doesn’t speak to me as one person to another. Instead, I have become “information provided”.
Some more random examples. Daughter breaks phone. It’s insured, but she needs to turn off an app before they will get her a new one. Phone company puts me through to insurance company. She doesn’t remember her password. They will give it to her only if she has documentation of purchase. She emails Apple. No response. And again. No response. Third time lucky. They will deliver phone tomorrow. I wait in, but they don’t. They will deliver again the next day. They don’t. I complain. It’s another company, they say. Not their fault.
Then the internet goes down. Daughter has run up £230 bill sorting out phone by calling 118118 and agreeing to let them put her through. So Sky have cut off my phone line because of an unusual bill. I call Sky and pay. Phone/internet will be up in an hour, they say. It isn’t. Over the next few days I phone over a dozen times, each time explaining to a different person. It becomes a task labyrinthine in its complexity.
Much more seriously. A parishioner comes to see me in tears. She went to social services about her terrible living conditions only to be ambushed by the Home Office with a densely typed form, slovenly filled in, telling her she is going to be deported. The signature is an indecipherable photocopied squiggle “on behalf of the Home Office”. It is as if the letter doesn’t come from anyone. Another parishioner goes to A&E with a serious emergency condition. He is told to take a number. He is in agony, but for ages his only interface is with a ticket machine. This, apparently, is efficiency.
All this is so tediously familiar, we hardly think it deserves mention. Which is why the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s new book The Utopia of Rules comes as the best sort of revelation: showing us that which is everywhere before our eyes but that we are unable to see. His fascinating critique of the ubiquity of contemporary bureaucracy asks how it is that we have allowed ourselves to be so fully enmeshed in a dehumanising nexus of forms and procedure without so much as a whisper of public debate.
Over a century ago, the likes of Max Weber were talking about the “iron cage” of technological efficiency. Since then, particularly with the internet’s development, bureaucracy has expanded exponentially – but with little accompanying critique, especially from the left. “I am not a number, I am a free man,” was Patrick McGoohan’s plea in the 60s TV series The Prisoner. That cry now seems as old-fashioned as the series itself.
The right has some semblance of critique: bureaucracy is the enemy of free enterprise, it is about jobsworth pen-pushers who work for the government, restricting the release of honest red-blooded capitalism. Perhaps in response to this, the left has assumed that defending (or being silent about) the smothering prevalence of bureaucracy is all about defending the state. Well, it’s certainly one of the best things about being rich that one is spared having to spend too much time dealing with the council or the government in general – the worst bureaucratic offenders.
So, “how’s the water?” We are so immersed in stultifying, life-denying, passive-aggressive, responsibility-shifting, automated bureaucracy, we mostly don’t notice it. Camouflaged by its ubiquity and its boring everydayness, we let it pass us by. It’s time for a much-needed fightback.