Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
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Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs *on themselves*, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.
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When it comes to *virtual* paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.
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When it comes to *virtual* paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.
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AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.
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AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.
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What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to
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What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to
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It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):
https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
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It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):
https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
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This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600
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This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600
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This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog
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This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog
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This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge - the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood
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This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge - the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood
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This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why *not* do a mafia bust-out for every business?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
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This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why *not* do a mafia bust-out for every business?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
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The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.
So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have *any* consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping *is not politics*.
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The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.
So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have *any* consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping *is not politics*.
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What I have for you is *political* advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better *system*, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel - as I do - that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a *polity*. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff
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What I have for you is *political* advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better *system*, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel - as I do - that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a *polity*. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff
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Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:
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Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:
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Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders.
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Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders.
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Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works.
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Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works.
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The world has moved on, and *you* can't save it. But together, *we* can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so *great* but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement.
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The world has moved on, and *you* can't save it. But together, *we* can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so *great* but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement.
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We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.
eof/
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We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.
eof/
@pluralistic Umm…TLDR?
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/11/lapsarianism/#nostalgia-is-a-toxic-impulse
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@pluralistic This note with a link to the essay-formatted version is also _in_ the essay-formatted version. Unintentional?
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@pluralistic This note with a link to the essay-formatted version is also _in_ the essay-formatted version. Unintentional?
@heygarrett Will fix as soon as I get through airport security and get back on my laptop
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We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.
eof/
@pluralistic BTW you forgot to add "Burma Shave".
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I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robins's book, *The Reactionary Mind*. Robinson asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies - various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc - "conservative"? What binds all these views together?
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated
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@pluralistic To honor the true and original libertarians (those anarchists that hold a municipalist view) and free the term from any financial implication, we should find another word for those neoliberals.
Maybe “Kissingerites”.
