Abstract Systems, Social Trust, and Institutional Legitimacy

The Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary recently de­scribed a nightmare experience dealing with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).¹ “My husband and I received a notice from the IRS in November indicating that we owed an additional $11,786 in income taxes for the 2018 tax year,” Singletary explained. “We did not—not even close.” They hired a tax expert to make sense of the notice’s eleven pages of legalese. They contacted the IRS by fax and email, estimated what they believed they really owed, and sent a check. These efforts earned them a second letter correcting some errors in the initial bill but still demanding over $7,000.

Singletary thought her issue could be quickly resolved, if only she could talk to an actual human being. “But many attempts end[ed] in being routed electronically through a maze of prompts that [left] me wanting to smash my phone.” In fact, just about no Americans get the privilege of resolving their issue personally: Singletary discovered that, at the time, only 3 percent of the eighty-five million calls coming into the IRS’s main 1040 help line were being answered.

Singletary’s experience with the IRS exemplifies a much wider cate­gory of events that is increasingly central to American experience—our interaction with what can be described as predatory abstract systems. Many factors have conspired to shake Americans’ faith in their society—stark and growing inequality, political polarization, inability to solve major problems through political action. But I wish to argue for an underlying and perhaps more foundational trend. We are now subject to risks and harassment radiating from a critical mass of large-scale systems that operate based on thickets of rules, procedures, algorithms, habits, and laws so dense no average American can comprehend them. They are in one sense stifling bureaucracies which generate the classic hallmarks of bureaucratic life: confusion, frustration, and inefficiency. But these systems can also generate major systemic risk, impose or threaten sig­nificant penalties, or become the playground of malicious actors who use them to abuse individuals. And all too often, contesting their out­comes is a grueling, financially ruinous enterprise outside the capacity of most people.

Such abstract systems come in at least three types: public (govern­mental bureaucratic structures), private (corporate and nongovernmental bureaucracies and broader webs of activity), and digital (social media, big data, and algorithmic decision-making, typically associated with the private sector). This variation means that the problem is not with either “big government” or “big business”—it is about emerging patterns that characterize both. These systems have come to embody the risk of sudden assaults or adverse events in ways that deepen fear and anxiety, discriminate against all but the most well-off, and constitute an ongoing insult to social justice and human dignity. They place at risk arguably the central achievement of modern rule of law—the right of autonomous individuals to be judged on the merits of their individual cases. As a result, these abstract systems generate an insistent fear of being vulnerable and powerless and a resentment that the wealthy and powerful face few such risks. Such a perception, if widely held, would poison Ameri­cans’ view of their society in ways hazardous to the future of democracy.

The Rise of Bureaucratic Society

The forerunner of abstract systems was the widely studied social phe­nomenon of large-scale bureaucracy, whose tightening grip on modern life has long been one of the dominant themes of modern political and sociological analysis.² Max Weber conceptualized the phe­nomenon as “the organizational manifestation of a formal techno-scientific rationality that in part defined modernity,”³ and fore­cast the coming of a new era of “universal rationalization” in which tech­nocratic bureaucracy would prove its efficiency. Weber was concerned mainly with the public sector: the rise of the modern state apparatus was well underway, whereas private sector actors had not achieved their current degree of institutional scale. He viewed public bureaucracies as an essential support system for a giant modern society, but he was clear-eyed about their risks. Famously, he referred to “the iron cage of bureaucracy” and feared that “bureaucracy would enslave us all.”⁴

But the concept of bureaucracy that most closely describes today’s emerging predatory institutions may be Franz Kafka’s.⁵ Kafka’s bureau­cracies are inherently secretive, absurd, and ultimately senseless. Its victims, cast into a “mechanism that they cannot comprehend,” experi­ence “senselessness, disorientation, and helplessness, lacking any clear course of action with which to escape perceived injustice, organizational perversity, personal disorientation and power abuse.”⁶ Kafka was de­scribing an even more arbitrary and irrational form of bureaucracy than Weber’s feared iron cage.

The psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm took these themes a step further, offering a portrait of modern alienation in the face of the “impersonal giants” of modern organizational life. “Due to the bigness of the apparatus to be administered, and the resulting abstractification,” Fromm argued, “the bureaucrats’ relationship to the people is one of complete alienation.”⁷ The person under the shadow of such organizational hegemony, Fromm argued,

must lose a good deal of the sense of dignity which is so characteristic of man even in the most primitive cultures. He must lose almost all sense of self, of himself as a unique and induplicable entity. The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling, my decision, my judgment, my action. It presupposes that my experience is my own, and not an alienated one. Things have no self and men who have become things can have no self.⁸

This growth of bureaucratic-administrative functions relative to the size of creative and productive activities turns out to be a generalized trend of modern industrial societies. The management theorists Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimate that almost 18 percent of the U.S. private sector workforce consists of managers and administrators—almost 24 million people (as of their 2016 calculations), or a ratio of one manager/administrator to every 4.7 employees. The problem, they believed, was getting worse: between 1983 and 2016, the number of managerial, supervisory, or administrative positions in the U.S. econo­my almost doubled while the number of other jobs rose just 40 percent.⁹ In American colleges and universities, administrative positions have grown notably faster than teaching jobs, so that from the early 1980s to 2015, administrative expenditures rose from 26 percent of higher educa­tion spending to 41 percent.¹⁰ Up to a third of health care spending now goes not to care but to maintain the immense administrative architecture of the system.¹¹

The result of these broad trends is one of the paradigmatic features of bureaucracy: people are increasingly trapped in webs of busywork. In a subsequent survey, Hamel and Zanini found that readers of Harvard Business Review reported spending 28 percent of their time doing “bureaucratic chores such as preparing reports, attending meetings, complying with internal requests, securing sign-offs and interacting with staff functions.”¹² A 2018 survey found “mind-boggling” administrative demands confronting doctors, with over a third reporting that they spent more than twenty hours a week on paperwork.¹³ A later survey found that the burgeoning demands of electronic medical records re­quired doctors to spend more than half of their working hours entering data rather than interacting with patients. One doctor grappling with this reality concluded that “Medicine has devolved into a busywork-laden field that is slowly ceasing to function.”¹⁴ Professors, researchers, military commanders, lawyers, insurance adjusters, and others across a host of professions now complain that their careers have become more about serving process and paperwork than productive endeavors.

From Bureaucracy to Abstract Systems

The concept of bureaucracy and its effect on human psychology and social life is thus a central aspect of life in postmodern industrial society. But it is only halfway to the broader and more telling idea of “abstract systems.” These can be bureaucratic, but some are not restricted to an institution. They can be actual organizations (like a government agency or a company) or less tangible collective webs of activity or function.

The British sociologist Anthony Giddens is the leading theorist of this phenomenon. By abstract systems, he refers to the large structures that manage and operate modern life: the banking system that makes ATM cards work; the engineering mysteries behind a car’s engine or a home’s air conditioning; health care systems of diagnosis and care. We might add to the list the financial system, and all of its various tendrils in credit and mortgages and banking; the criminal justice system; education at its various levels; federal and state taxation systems; telecommunications in its various guises; the insurance industry—all of these can be seen as abstract systems. They are immense, they govern our lives, and for the most part we have no clue how they work. Giddens describes an inevitably resulting “disorientation,” which comes from the nagging feeling “of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part out of our control.”¹⁵

Any analytical category that can include the IRS, Facebook, health insurance companies, and the web of services and expertise surrounding a major economic sector like computers or auto repair may seem imprecise. Yet I would argue that abstract systems have several major characteristics in common. They are vast and sprawling, existing on a massive scale whether reflected in a single organization or a web of activity or domain of expertise. They are highly impersonal, interacting with people as data points or generic users according to universal rules of engagement. They hold some responsibility for the management of a major social function, whether an economic sector or a governance function or a slice of our infrastructure. And they are obscure: even their practitioners do not grasp all the details of how they work, and to an uninformed user they will seem incomprehensible. It is indeed through their hidden features and operating systems, their vagueness and mys­tery, that abstract systems acquire much of their power and menace.

This concept further intersects with two other important themes of our age. One is the role of expertise. Giddens argues that abstract sys­tems depend on the knowledge of a handful of true experts who know how they work and can ride to the rescue—or try to—should they fail. We don’t understand how our car works these days, or our thermostat, or computer or phone. Instead, we rely on highly trained specialists to maintain the structures and processes essential to our lives. “Simply by sitting in my house,” Giddens explains, “I am involved in an expert system, or a series of such systems, in which I place my reliance.”¹⁶

A second related theme is trust. Marinating in a context of enigmatic abstract systems, we trust that they will be kept working, in fair and appropriate ways. Giddens suggests that such trust has special resonance at what he calls “access points,” the nodes where interactions between citizens and experts or managers of abstract systems take place. Such encounters can go well—they can “take on characteristics of trustworthiness associated with friendship and intimacy. This may be the case, for example, with a doctor, dentist, or travel agent dealt with regularly over a period of years.”¹⁷ But they can also go very badly, with the representative at the access point proving unable to help, or even using the authority and implied threat of the system to bully and repress. This is one reason why the degradation of help and customer service lines—with many layers of prerecorded pablum standing between you and an actual human being, who then often has neither the expertise nor the authority to solve your problem—is more than a mere annoyance. These dependencies, Giddens contends, create “novel forms of psychological vulnerability, and trust in abstract systems is not psychologically re­warding in the way in which trust in persons is.”¹⁸

The psychological significance of such points of engagement hints at one very specific source of our social disquiet: the steep decline in the proportion of human-scale access points and interactions relative to impersonal, bureaucratized, or automated ones. Equally important, though, is the worsening loss of faith in expertise,¹⁹ and the increasingly common concern that the so-called experts—the managers of the finan­cial architecture, planners of wars, engineers of major energy systems, providers of pandemic responses—are losing their grip on these systems. Faith in the experts maintaining our world is more than just a pleasant sensation; it is now essential to our psychological well-being.

Looking across the trajectory of postmodern society, Giddens sees a “juggernaut—a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder. The juggernaut crushes those who resist it, and while it sometimes seems to have a steady path, there are times when it veers away erratically in directions we cannot foresee.”

At a certain point, the citizens of advanced industrial democracies can be forgiven for viewing this corpus of abstract systems as functionally equivalent to their society. An American in 1890 or 1950 might have thought of their social world as the sum of surrounding human connec­tions and elements—their neighborhood, children’s schools and sports teams, local government, workplace, clubs, and so forth. Distant, face­less systems, public as well as private, might have intruded on occasion but would be limited in their effect. But when people understand their society as little more than an interlocking throng of abstract systems, their basic conception of reality becomes dependent on the quality of their relationships with and degree of faith in the stability of those sys­tems.

The image of a juggernaut seems timely, overwhelmed as we are by the steamroller of information structures that increasingly define our data-driven world. Yet Gidden’s description of abstract systems was published in 1990—three years before the source code for the public internet was released, and almost fifteen years before Facebook was founded. Since then, the overhanging architecture of digital life, and in particular the exploding world of social media platforms, has added a potent and dangerous layer to the abstract systems surrounding us, one that operates as a sort of filter between individuals and the world around them. In the case of social media, it is a filter with its own goals (profit through addictive attention) which can generate predatory events at scale.

In eagerly building our modern “infosphere”—our reliance on com­puting systems for every activity, the internet, e-mail, the “cloud,” social media, and all the rest—we have thus unwittingly conspired in the creation of the mother of all abstract systems. Increasingly, it is the system on which all others depend, the set of networks into which all other systems—finance, medicine, education, even appliance operation and repair—must connect. It is abstract, obscure, and unknowable in the extreme. And through the emerging Internet of Things, connecting billions of “smart” devices into webs of interaction and mutual aware­ness, this realm is lashing together multiple organizations, webs, and processes into a sort of meta-system. What properties this ends up having, beyond the perils and threats of existing systems, we can only guess.

No wonder people are sympathetic to claims of an encroaching Deep State. When trapped in an ever-constricting web of vague, sometimes threatening systems, the idea that there are malign forces tugging on those web strings is not a great leap. But the idea of abstract systems rejects any need for conspiring wizards behind the curtain. At a certain point, the webs of structured interaction become so dense and self-perpetuating that any malign elites or overlords could leave the scene and the machine would keep churning along. In many recent systemic failures—from the 2008 financial crisis to the pandemic response, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and more discrete disasters like the Deepwater Horizon explosion or Boeing’s 737 max debacle—the elites and experts had no interest in failure. The problem wasn’t that they were malicious. It was that they had lost control of their systems.

The Systems Become Predatory

Like bureaucracies, then, abstract systems can infuriate, oppress, and disempower strictly through their size, impersonal character, arbitrariness, and inefficiency. But abstract systems are not merely constricting or debilitating—they are also, to a significant degree, menacing. They constitute a looming background condition threatening sudden adverse events, punishments, or judgments that jeopardize economic and psychological security.

Some of these perils emerge from intentional choices by staff or managers within the systems—a police raid, an arbitrarily denied insur­ance claim, an IRS notice, a foreclosure. Others represent assaults undertaken by criminal or malign individuals using the channel of abstract systems to perpetrate their attacks, such as identity theft or ransomware attacks or bullying on social media. Meanwhile, these same systems are also spawning systemic risk in the form of unintended but unavoidable failures in the form of financial crises, environmental disasters, and major accidents. Through all of these mechanisms, the security, autonomy, and dignity of individuals are increasingly at risk, not only of the generalized psychological toll of a highly bureaucratized world, but being victimized by abrupt, ruinous events and targeted assaults that spill from these systems in ever-increasing numbers.

Part of the problem is the mind-boggling complexity of the legal scaffolding holding up many of these systems. The U.S. tax code runs to thousands of pages; major legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act, is typically just as elaborate and incomprehensible to the average person. We are often accused of breaking rules we didn’t even know existed, and even when we seek help, our advocates often cannot comprehend the structures. In the digital world, the operating mechanics of the algorithms that run social media platform engagement strategies, and which increasingly govern critical social decisions, are often a mystery even to their designers. The coders know they “work”—they can generate higher use interaction rates, for example—but have no idea of the precise calculations that generate these outcomes. They are, quite literally, black boxes.

Of course, not every interaction with a thoughtless or impersonal abstract system is equally dehumanizing. The occasional inconvenience—having to wait thirty minutes on hold to get internet access restored, spending a few hours to reverse a denial of benefits—is not a mortal threat to human autonomy and dignity. Some customer service, public as well as private, is personal, humane, and effective. The question is whether these systems are becoming more threatening and dehumanizing over time. There is substantial evidence that this is the case.

Theory Becomes Real:
Predatory Abstract Systems in Operation

Examples of persistent vulnerability to sudden and arbitrary judgments from unaccountable systems now seem to appear everywhere. Some involve classic public sector actions. The Institute for Justice is a nonprofit legal defense organization with a libertarian reputation dedi­cated to defending individual Americans against excesses of state power, many of which take archetypal forms of bureaucratic predation. The case list on its web site is a veritable catalogue of such predation: local business laws that demand a small-scale auto mechanic provide almost thirty parking spaces; yoga teachers forced to undergo thousands of dollars’ worth of “certification” training to teach other aspiring teachers; home bakers denied the ability to sell their goods by state law. In terms of federal taxation alone, tens of thousands of Americans face peremptory action from the IRS every year, though no one really knows the scale, because privacy laws obscure individual interactions.²⁰

In the private sector, one common way in which Americans interact with abstract systems is in the health care and health insurance sectors. The paradigmatic risk is the letter or email announcing that some medical coverage has been denied.²¹ Some of these denials are surely justified, but anecdotal evidence suggests that many thousands are not, and trying to resolve disputes can be infuriating. A hulk of byzantine rules, regulations, requirements, and procedures hang over the system, incomprehensible to average Americans (and to most of those who work within it). A Los Angeles Times reporter described a case of being denied an insulin pump for “lack of medical necessity”—despite having type 1 diabetes and using a pump for almost a decade. As the reporter argued, “It’s unacceptable for patients to have to do battle with monolithic corporations that are seemingly determined not to use common sense (or simple decency) in deciding what treatments to cover.”²²

A third major category of predatory abstract systems is law enforcement agencies. One 2015 report indicated that there were over twenty thousand no-knock raids, some executed by heavily armed SWAT and FBI teams, on Americans per year.²³ Many—no one knows what per­centage—are targeted at the wrong people. A New York Times investigation documented dozens of federal lawsuits launched by citizens wrongly targeted in such raids and concluded that “The no-knock process often begins with unreliable informants and cursory investigations that produce affidavits signed by unquestioning low-level judges. It is not uncommon for the searches to yield only misdemeanor-level stashes, or to come up empty.”²⁴ In many cases, citizens are left without recourse, unable to sue the police or local jurisdictions involved.²⁵

Another category of predatory actions issuing from large public as well as private systems is property seizure. The Washington Post report­ed the case of Stephen Lara, pulled over in Nevada for following a tanker truck too closely—an obscure traffic citation that officers later admitted motorists “may not realize they’re committing.” Regardless, the stop was a ruse to search Lara’s car as part of an effort to counter drug and weapons smuggling. The police found a bag with $87,000 in cash and seized it, using a Drug Enforcement Agency policy called “adoptive forfeiture” to confiscate goods merely suspected of being connected to criminal activity. Prompted by the Post’s involvement, Lara’s money was returned, and a DEA spokesman promised a fresh review of the forfeiture policy. But as the story noted, “advocates say the case shows how the federal government abuses its asset forfeiture authority, by requiring those whose property is taken to prove their innocence to get it back.”²⁶

Turning to the private sector, in terms of the scale of harassment and lives disrupted, it is hard to rival the predatory menace of the U.S. student loan system. Multiple recent reports have chronicled an ava­lanche of abuses by some firms within this industry, ranging from obscure terms, unnecessary fees, excessive interest, and failing to correct errors.²⁷ One of the most depressing examples was the infamous Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which until recently denied relief to over 90 percent of those who applied and forced military and civilian public servants to wade through years of Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmares.²⁸ (In October 2021, the U.S. Department of Education did finally reform this program, but only in part.²⁹)

Perhaps the fastest growing category of private sector abstract systems is the increasingly widespread use of algorithmic decision-making. Companies and governments employ algorithms to assess and direct judgments toward a wide range of critical social domains, from education to finance to hiring to justice. All too often, they represent fatally simplified versions of reality and generate arbitrary and irrational decisions. As Cathy O’Neil explained in one of the best studies of this growing risk, Weapons of Math Destruction:

oceans of behavioral data . . . will feed straight into artificial intelligence systems. And these will remain, to human eyes, black boxes. . . . These automatic programs will increasingly determine how we are treated by the other machines, the ones that choose the ads we see, set prices for us, line us up for a dermatologist appointment, or map our routes. They will be highly efficient, seemingly arbitrary, and utterly unaccountable.³⁰

O’Neil describes one especially infuriating case in which an educational assessment algorithm assigned a punitive annual rating of 6 out of 100 to an experienced teacher—and a 96 the following year, with no apparent difference in the teacher’s approach.

O’Neil also catalogues a more widespread trend: the growing use by private firms of algorithmically calculated credit scores to judge peoples’ fitness. She contends that the scoring systems are often “arbitrary, unaccountable, unregulated, and often unfair.”³¹ Algorithmic systems are increasingly used in hir­ing,³² melding an automated assessment of resumes, personality tests, facial recognition, and verbal appraisal tools to predict applicants’ skills, honesty, and collegiality. Scholars have questioned the accuracy of these algorithms, and they have repeatedly displayed various forms of bias. Even at their best, such tools illustrate the essential flaw, in terms of justice, of abstract systems: they do not treat each human being as an individual case worthy of unique judgment, but rather as a collective data point.

Beyond the role of algorithmic decision-making, digital abstract systems pose other predatory threats. One example is the ever-expanding risk of identity theft. Millions of Americans face this potentially catastrophic risk every year. In 2020, there were 1.4 million reports of such theft, having tripled since 2018.³³ Some 10 percent of Americans are estimated to be victims of such scams.³⁴ Other threatening aspects of the digital realm include classic cyber attacks and ransomware as well as assaults that crop up in social media, including individual or group bullying—something that reportedly affects over half of American teens.³⁵

The Price of Predatory Abstract Systems

Some might downplay these risks. While all Americans deal, in some way, with the crushing weight of bureaucracies and abstract systems, only a minority of us feel their direct sting in the form of a significant predatory act. Most of the problems that do take place are more annoying than catastrophic. In fact, the purpose of modern abstract systems (as Giddens recognized) is to reduce risk and provide rich new avenues of social organization and personal expression. Trading the modest peril of an arbitrary IRS bill or trouble servicing a student loan for reliable food, basic human safety, and the global interconnective magic of the internet seems like a decent bargain. And in fact, abstract systems do work most of the time—nearly every time, if we include the ability to process ATM withdrawals and credit card charges. The under­lying financial system is invisible but efficient, and somewhat magical.

The danger, though, is that an accumulating roster of predatory acts and the growing size and reach of abstract systems will breed a sense of generalized menace and injustice. The constant potential for victimization, combined with the widespread reporting of such events and a deeply felt sense of dependence, could produce a gnawing anxiety and sense of distrust. Because we do not (and cannot) understand their workings, they generate a sense of confusion and powerlessness, a sense that our fates are in the hands of people we cannot hold accountable, or even identify.

The evil of totalitarian systems was that their people came to live in fear of the midnight knock at the door or the secret police thugs barging into an office to haul someone away on shadowy charges without due process. Predatory abstract systems may be replicating the same dynam­ic, in diluted but still intimidating form, in open societies.

Such systems also threaten to institutionalize a baseline level of social injustice. Such unfairness is unavoidable, and a perception of basic injustice inevitable, in a system where the wealthy and powerful are not subject to the predatory encroachments of abstract systems in the same way, or at all. As the late anthropologist David Graeber explains, it takes the poor vastly more mental energy to navigate the mazes of forms and paperwork associated with a highly bureaucratized society, whereas the wealthy “can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them,” because they have an implicit confidence that they will wriggle out of whatever comes up.³⁶ Rich people don’t generally fear the IRS, or their insurance company, or the police. They have stacks of ready cash to fall back on and battalions of lawyers to deploy. They can pay to have their social media accounts scrubbed or professionalized and insulate themselves and their families from many malign implications of the digital world; they can have their children trained to be expert test-takers or pay to build résumés more likely to win the approval of hiring algorithms. They can hire a company to fast-track their passport renewal or expedite new business permitting requirements.

Again, a major source of this imbalance, and to some extent the institutional core around which the universe of abstract systems re­volves, is the modern legal system—vast, complex, and expensive, a battlefield where the weight of money can be decisive regardless of the truth. All too often, massive institutions, whether public or private, simply cow people into submission with the threat of long-term legal action. Even if the targeted citizen ends up winning, they may face financial ruin in the process. A rule of law system cannot be fair if the primary arena for contesting differences is so catastrophically unbalanced.

The growing power of abstract systems has a final pernicious effect: it robs power, judgment, and ultimately dignity and autonomy from those doing the facework within its systems. A common refrain among teachers, professors, doctors, and other front-line practitioners is that their freedom to pursue their professions has been fatally compromised by the structures in which they work. Treating the subjects of abstract systems as categories rather than individuals demands such theft of independent judgment. But we should not underestimate its effect: it badly dilutes the meaning and value inherent in these professions.

The question now is whether the sum of these effects might produce a precipitous loss of faith in American society. Twenty-first-century American life has become, in important ways, a parade of interactions with the abstract systems that manage most societal functions. At some point, people could stop thinking of a bolt-from-the-blue health care company bill or an asset seizure or an identity theft as discrete events and come instead to view such predatory assaults as symptomatic of the operation of American society—all the while reading accounts of how the rich and famous are inoculated against such worries. Such a degree of baseline loss in the essential legitimacy of a society is profoundly destabilizing.

On the other hand—because many futures are possible under the influence of abstract systems—the result could merely be a dismal new variety of social immobility. The threat of arbitrary bureaucratic power, David Graeber has argued, tends to manufacture compliance and lack of dissent.³⁷ The way to stay out of trouble is to go along with the pretense that it is working. Citizens fearful of arbitrary government action, denial of benefits, being punished for bad credit scores, and a dozen other predatory threats may have little energy or motivation left for active citizenship. The result is bad news for the mindsets required of democracy.

It is also bad news for economic dynamism. This sort of systemic miasma—both the generalized social quicksand of bureaucracy and the predatory threat to individuals, including, perhaps especially, entrepreneurs—suppresses the striving agitation essential to innovation and vitality. Local, state, or federal rules can, despite worthy objectives, erect an impenetrable web of barriers in the face of would-be innovators.³⁸ But the elaborate crank-turning inside the abstract systems may ulti­mately do more than obstruct legitimate social activity. It may also substitute for it, manufacturing a sort of performative simulation of accomplishment that reflects only the resolution of bureaucratic dis­putes. The writer Tim Parks, bemoaning the effect of bureaucracy on universities, has described the “propensity in modern life to substitute cataloguing and recording for actual doing, to create for ourselves an illusion of responsible action by endlessly multiplying the work, so-called, that precedes and—in the rare cases where it actually occurs—follows responsible action.”³⁹

What to Do?

The answer to the threat posed by predatory abstract systems is anything but simple. It is not, to begin with, a renewed war against public administration. The IRS example makes clear that “defunding the bureaucracy” can easily worsen the problem. An IRS subjected to a decade of partisan attacks and shorn of over 20 percent of its workforce since 2010 cannot be responsive to taxpayers (let alone systematically pursue big companies or rich individuals who dodge their tax obligations).⁴⁰ Muscular public institutions are indispensable to empower average citizens against the massed wealth and power of private firms. But neither is the solution a simpleminded campaign against capitalism or the private sector; not all of its abstract systems are predatory, and many bring benefits and efficiencies that people crave. What is required is something more complex and challenging—a campaign to empower individuals against the specifically predatory inclinations of large sys­tems, whether public or private.

Any such agenda will have to grapple with many practical difficulties, some of which are inherent in the massive scale of modern nations and not easily solved. It is unclear what would happen, for example, if we unleashed a requirement for more intense individual case review on an under-resourced IRS. Likewise, corporations will surely fight legal requirements for expanded customer engagement. Part of the solution may be to break the problem into more digestible parts: not every aspect of predatory bureaucracy poses the same threat to individual autonomy. The fact that people may need to wait on hold for an hour to get customer service is an annoyance but not a threat to peoples’ fundamental well-being; not all people denied insurance coverage or placed into foreclosure have been preyed upon.

Weber was right: large bureaucratic systems are essential to the operation of modern society, and a reform agenda must limit rapacious habits without undermining their larger purpose. The law professor Jonathan Weinberg explains that generic standards are sometimes em­powering rather than predatory: A person can use a common identity in many places without reestablishing their identity each time. Sometimes, being treated like everyone else rather than a special case is the whole point. Generic standards are a form of impartiality, and it is when cases can be decided entirely on individual grounds that corruption and nepotism are likely to set in.⁴¹ Any effort at reform will have to navigate these complexities.

How it will do so can only emerge over time, through dialogue, experimentation, and trial and error. But any such agenda is likely to need at least three basic components. The first would be the most general and encompassing, involving steps to reshape the basic operation of abstract systems and their role in society over time. These reforms, being the most fundamental, would of necessity be the most long-term and gradual. They will likely have to include a movement toward a radical simplification of the laws, regulations, and agreements governing many of these abstract systems. Everything from major legislation to user agreements and tax law must be as simple, and written in as commonsensical a language, as possible.⁴² Other charges could target excessive scale in our social systems, seeking, in Gidden’s terms, to increase the number of human access points within the limits of the possible in an unavoidably large and complex society. This will demand a powerful emphasis in public law and policy toward local community service providers.

Revising the basic character of abstract systems is also likely to demand new legal requirements for what David Graeber has called “interpretive labor”—doing the hard work to give unique attention to each case, as opposed to treating people as part of a mass set or class. The absence of such interpretive labor is where bureaucracy goes wrong, Graeber contends, “Ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence and reducing everything to preconceived . . . formulae.”⁴³ Such a principle could, for example, strictly limit the application of algorithmic judgments in education, health care, or justice. It could provide broad new foundations for individuals to appeal the rote application of a generic rule to their case.

A second broad component of a reform agenda would seek to shore up defenses against threats from malign actors who use abstract systems to do harm, as well as the more generic risks inherent to such systems. This will require an intensified program of societal and individual resilience. Such efforts could build on many starting points already in place: post-2008 laws to strengthen the financial system; improved oversight of digital currencies and automated trading; better resourced cybersecurity efforts and more stringent laws; and more coherent and formalized support for people victimized by various forms of digital harassment. The goal would be an overlapping set of systemic protections to mitigate potential risks and provide enhanced institutional support—legal, financial and otherwise—for those who fall victim to systemic risk.

The third component of an agenda to combat the excesses of abstract systems would be the most important, seeking to recalibrate the essential power balance involved in these transactions and to empower citizens contesting the judgments of such systems. Such a principle would arm Americans with law and rules that ensure their fair treatment, including some broadly applicable presumption of innocence in these relationships. It would arm them with legal assistance and access to temporary finances to weather a harassing attack. This would imply, Jonathan Weinberg has suggested, a rehabilitated version of the classic right to petition, the legal principle which guarantees “an affirmative right that government hear, fairly consider, and respond to the issues each petition raised. It thus reflect[s] a need deeply encoded in American DNA for government to listen to its citizens, to take them seriously and treat them with respect.”⁴⁴

Pursuing this goal could take various forms, but one basic theme should inform all of them: expanding the role of average Americans in checking the power of abstract systems. One set of steps could focus on the predatory potential of public institutions and expand both the burden of proof required to engage public enforcement powers and the capacity of citizens to win timely and effective redress. Citizens targeted by federal, state, or local action could be guaranteed a rapid appeal, heard not by technocrats steeped in regulatory procedure but by fellow citizens, people from the community called to serve for a short period of time on something analogous to a jury. Such citizen review boards would operate under one dominant principle of resolution—to enforce commonsense standards of justice and fairness regardless of the technical details of any law or private agreement.

These are, of course, broad-brush recommendations. Working our way to answers will be a gradual, drawn-out process full of compromise and political constraint. It will require, as much as anything, experimentation—trial-and-error processes of working our way to various ap­proaches that empower individuals against massive abstract systems.

Yet the need to address these questions is clear. The ability of liberal democratic societies to provide dignity and recognition to their populations is a function of how well they control these predatory abstract systems and empower their citizens to claim autonomy and dignity in the face of such systems. It may be the single most important and difficult challenge facing democracies today—reining in the predatory aspects of their bureaucratic and institutional life and restoring legitimacy to the abstract systems that must, unavoidably, provide the substructure for modern life. This is breaking down in the United States, and along with the related trend of embedded and rising inequality, it is one of the reasons for the profound disquiet in the current state of American life.

Dialogue and experimentation to discover solutions, already under­way on the margins of so many of these abstract systems, must accelerate, and our policy responses become more decisive before it is too late. The major systems of twenty-first-century American life are at risk of metastasizing into a menacing and rapacious baseline condition, one that risks corroding Americans’ faith in their society. It is long past time we began to attend to this most essential requirement for our democracy.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 1 (Spring 2022): 62–81.

Notes