Bureaucratization

Hannah Arendt infamously called bureaucracy the ‘rule of nobody,’ since it favors sets of impersonal protocols as an organizing principle, to the disavowal of responsibility (and thinking). As a rule-driven system, bureaucracy operates in an algorithmic logic – even when performed manually, allowing actors to withdraw from accountability, since they are ‘merely’ enacting rules. With computational systems increasingly performing automated decisions, the problem of responsibility (legal and otherwise) is pressing. This is particularly so with algorithmic warfare and the adjudication of crimes based on system errors.¹
Text: Patricia Reed