I’ve just finished (re)reading Latour’s famous essay, “Drawing Things Together.” I’d read it for the first time so long ago that I’d forgotten most of what was in it, but was struck once again by how much he accomplishes in a relatively short piece.
One of the more interesting moves Latour makes in the course of the article is to reframe Weber’s arguments about rationalization and the spread of bureaucracy in terms of processes of inscription. Inscription, for Latour, is a theoretical construct—the means by which the real world is made manipulable through its representation on paper. In short, we make sense of the world by assembling our knowledge into books, articles, graphs, diagrams, and so on. Coastlines become maps. Living bodies are represented as anatomical diagrams. And so on and so forth.
For Latour, bureaucracy is just one case among many where this sort of thing happens. In order to make decisions about the future of others, a bureaucrat reduces them to numbers. A student entering college, for instance, is reduced to a transcript and sets of test scores which can be compared at will with other similarly cases.
Latour’s essay is from 1990 and most of his examples of inscription are what he calls “paperwork”—literally the shuffling of physical pieces of paper. One task for my dissertation will be to think about Latour’s observations in terms of the digital age. My thought for the moment is about the computer as bureaucrat.
When you enter a Website, you’re quite literally treated as a number (right now, my cookie information shows that Tumblr knows me as session number 189990958.1856672240.1265725773.1265725773.1265725773.1). Whatever demographics you divulge, the text you submit to the server, the path you take through the site, and whatever other digital traces you leave are used—at least by today’s more interactive sites—to adjust the behavior of the site. Amazon shows you the books you might like, Google shows you products relevant to your search, Yahoo! shows you the news items you’ve customized, Facebook decides whether to show you male- or female-targeted ads. And of course the list goes on.
Even in the somewhat more physical world, we’ve automated things in a similar way. A stoplight may decide whether or not to green up and let your car through depending on whether it senses that it’s an emergency vehicle. And automation in this sense predates digital technology—it’s part of the “politics of artefacts,” so to speak. For instance, a door will “decide” to open for you or not, depending on whether your key matches.
The server example is perhaps more striking though, in that it happens in a way reminiscent of the manner in which Latour’s Weberian bureaucrat might look at many records at once, make comparisons, and hand down a decision about what services to offer. So that’s my question. In the context of Weber’s ideas about the unstoppable spread of bureaucracy, what does it mean to think to think of computers as automated bureaucrats? Does it make a difference whether they’re automated for our convenience (e.g., personalization) or someone else’s (e.g., DRM)?
