Stories were the first crucial information technology developed by humans. They laid the foundation for all large-scale human cooperation and made humans the most powerful animals on earth. But as an information technology, stories have their limitations.
To appreciate this, consider the role storytelling plays in the formation of nations. Many nations have first been conceived in the imagination of poets. Sarah Aaronsohn and the NILI underground are remembered by present-day Israelis as some of the first Zionists who risked their lives in the 1910s to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, but from where did NILI members get this idea in the first place? They were inspired by an earlier generation of poets, thinkers, and visionaries such as Theodor Herzl and Hayim Nahman Bialik.
In the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century, Bialik, a Ukrainian Jew, published numerous poems and stories bewailing the persecution and weakness of European Jews and calling on them to take their fate in their hands—to defend themselves by force of arms, immigrate to Palestine, and there establish their own state. One of his most stirring poems was written following the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, in which forty-nine Jews were murdered and dozens more were injured.[1] “In the City of Slaughter” condemned the murderous antisemitic mob who perpetrated the atrocities, but it also criticized the Jews themselves for their pacifism and helplessness.
In one heart-wrenching scene, Bialik describes how Jewish women were gang-raped, while their husbands and brothers hid nearby, afraid to intervene. The poem compares the Jewish men to terrified mice and imagines how they quietly prayed to God to perform some miracle, which failed to materialize. The poem then tells how even after the pogrom was over, the survivors had no thought of arming themselves and instead entered Talmudic disputations about whether the raped women were now ritualistically “defiled” or whether they were still “pure.” This poem is mandatory reading in many Israeli schools today. It is also mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand how after two millennia of being one of the most pacifist groups in history, Jews built one of the most formidable armies in the world. Not for nothing was Bialik named Israel’s national poet.[2]
The fact that Bialik lived in Ukraine, and was intimately familiar with the persecution of Ashkenazi Jews in eastern Europe but had little understanding of conditions in Palestine, contributed to the subsequent conflict there between Jews and Arabs. Bialik’s poems inspired Jews to see themselves as victims in dire need of developing their military might and building their own country, but hardly considered the catastrophic consequences for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, or indeed for the Mizrahi Jewish communities native to the Middle East. When the Arab-Israeli conflict exploded in the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi Jews were driven out of their ancestral homes in the Middle East, partly as a result of poems composed half a century earlier in Ukraine.[3]
While Bialik was writing in Ukraine, the Hungarian Jew Theodor Herzl was busy organizing the Zionist movement in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century. As a central part of his political activism, Herzl published two books. The Jewish State (1896) was a manifesto outlining Herzl’s idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and The Old New Land (1902) was a utopian novel set in the year 1923 describing the prosperous Jewish state that Herzl envisioned. The two books—which fatefully also tended to ignore realities on the ground in Palestine—were immensely influential in shaping the Zionist movement. The Old New Land appeared in Hebrew under the title Tel Aviv (a loose Hebrew translation of “Old New Land”). The city of Tel Aviv, established seven years after the book’s publication, took its name from the book. While Bialik is Israel’s national poet, Herzl is known as the visionary of the state.
The yarns Bialik and Herzl wove ignored many crucial facts about contemporary reality, most notably that around 1900 the Jews of Palestine comprised only 6–9 percent of the region’s total population of about 600,000 people.[4] While disregarding such demographic facts, Bialik and Herzl accorded great importance to mythology, most notably the stories of the Bible, without which modern Zionism is unimaginable. Bialik and Herzl were also influenced by the nationalist myths that were created in the nineteenth century by almost every other ethnic group in Europe. The Ukrainian Jew Bialik and the Hungarian Jew Herzl did for Zionism what was earlier done by the poets Taras Shevchenko for Ukrainian nationalism,[5] Sándor Petőfi for Hungarian nationalism,[6] and Adam Mickiewicz for Polish nationalism.[7] Observing the growth of other national movements all around, Herzl wrote that nations arise “out of dreams, songs, fantasies.”[8]
But dreams, songs, and fantasies, however inspiring, are not enough to create a functioning nation-state. Bialik inspired generations of Jewish fighters, but to equip and maintain an army, it is also necessary to raise taxes and buy guns. Herzl’s utopian book laid the foundations for the city of Tel Aviv, but to keep the city going, it was also necessary to dig a sewage system. When all is said and done, the essence of patriotism isn’t reciting stirring poems about the beauty of the motherland, and it certainly isn’t making hate-filled speeches against foreigners and minorities. Rather, patriotism means paying your taxes so that people on the other side of the country also enjoy the benefit of a sewage system, as well as security, education, and health care.
To manage all these services and raise the necessary taxes, enormous amounts of information need to be collected, stored, and processed: information about properties, payments, exemptions, discounts, debts, inventories, shipments, budgets, bills, and salaries. This, however, is not the kind of information that can be turned into a memorable poem or a captivating myth. Instead, tax records come in the shape of various types of lists, ranging from a simple item-by-item record to more elaborate tables and spreadsheets. No matter how intricate these data sets may become, they eschew narrative in favor of dryly listing amounts owed and amounts paid. Poets can afford to ignore such mundane facts, but tax collectors cannot.
Lists are crucial not only for national taxation systems but also for almost all other complex financial institutions. Corporations, banks, and stock markets cannot exist without them. A church, a university, or a library that wants to balance its budget soon realizes that in addition to priests and poets who can mesmerize people with stories, it needs accountants who know their way around the various types of lists.
Lists and stories are complementary. National myths legitimize the tax records, while the tax records help transform aspirational stories into concrete schools and hospitals. Something analogous happens in the field of finance. The dollar, the pound sterling, and the bitcoin are all brought into being by persuading people to believe a story, and tales told by bankers, finance ministers, and investment gurus raise or lower their value. When the chairperson of the Federal Reserve wants to curb inflation, when a finance minister wants to pass a new budget, and when a tech entrepreneur wants to draw investors, they all turn to storytelling. But to actually manage a bank, a budget, or a start-up, lists are essential.
The big problem with lists, and the crucial difference between lists and stories, is that lists tend to be far more boring than stories, which means that while we easily remember stories, we find it difficult to remember lists. This is an important fact about how the human brain processes information. Evolution has adapted our brains to be good at absorbing, retaining, and processing even very large quantities of information when they are shaped into a story. The Ramayana, one of the foundational tales of Hindu mythology, is twenty-four thousand verses long and runs to about seventeen hundred pages in modern editions, yet despite its enormous length generations of Hindus succeeded in remembering and reciting it by heart.[9]
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Ramayana was repeatedly adapted for film and television. In 1987–88, a seventy-eight-episode version (running to about 2,730 minutes) was the most watched television series in the world, with more than 650 million viewers. According to a BBC report, when episodes were aired, “streets would be deserted, shops would be closed, and people would bathe and garland their TV sets.” During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown the series was re-aired and again became the most watched show in the world.[10] While modern TV audiences need not memorize any texts by heart, it is noteworthy how easy they find it to follow the intricate plots of epic dramas, detective thrillers, and soap operas, recalling who each character is and how they are related to numerous others. We are so accustomed to performing such feats of memory that we seldom consider how extraordinary they are.
What makes us so good at remembering epic poems and long-running TV series is that long-term human memory is particularly adapted to retaining stories. As Kendall Haven writes in his 2007 book, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, “Human minds…rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understanding, making sense of, remembering, and planning our lives…. Lives are like stories because we think in story terms.” Haven references more than 120 academic studies, concluding that “research overwhelmingly, convincingly, and without opposition provides the evidence” that stories are a highly efficient “vehicle for communicating factual, conceptual, emotional, and tacit information.”[11]
In contrast, most people find it hard to remember lists by heart, and few people would be interested in watching a TV recitation of India’s tax records or annual budget. Mnemonic methods used to memorize lists of items often work by weaving the items into a plot, thereby turning the list into a story.[12] But even with the help of such mnemonic devices, who could remember their country’s tax records or budget? The information may be vital—determining what quality of health care, education, and welfare services citizens enjoy—but our brains are not adapted to remembering such things. Unlike national poems and myths, which can be stored in our brains, complex national taxation and administration systems have required a unique nonorganic information technology in order to function. This technology is the written document.
The written document was invented many times in many places. Some of the earliest examples come from ancient Mesopotamia. A cuneiform clay tablet dated to the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month of the forty-first year of the reign of King Shulgi of Ur (ca. 2053/4 BCE) recorded the monthly deliveries of sheep and goats. Fifteen sheep were delivered on the second day of the month, 7 sheep on the third day, 11 sheep on the fourth, 219 on the fifth, 47 on the sixth, and so on until 3 sheep were delivered on the twenty-eighth. In total, says the clay tablet, 896 animals were received that month. Remembering all these deliveries was important for the royal administration, to monitor people’s obedience and to keep track of available resources. While doing so in one’s head was a formidable challenge, it was easy for a learned scribe to write them down on a clay tablet.[13]
Like stories and like all other information technologies in history, written documents didn’t necessarily represent reality accurately. The Ur tablet, for example, contained a mistake. The document says that 896 animals were received during that month, but when modern scholars added up all the individual entries they reached a total of 898. The scribe who wrote the document apparently made a mistake when he calculated the overall tally, and the tablet preserved this mistake for posterity.
But whether true or false, written documents created new realities. By recording lists of properties, taxes, and payments, they made it far easier to create administrative systems, kingdoms, religious organizations, and trade networks. More specifically, documents changed the method used for creating intersubjective realities. In oral cultures, intersubjective realities were created by telling a story that many people repeated with their mouths and remembered in their brains. Brain capacity consequently placed a limit on the kinds of intersubjective realities that humans created. Humans couldn’t forge an intersubjective reality that their brains couldn’t remember.
This limit could be transcended, however, by writing documents. The documents didn’t represent an objective empirical reality; the reality was the documents themselves. As we shall see in later chapters, written documents thereby provided precedents and models that would eventually be used by computers. The ability of computers to create intersubjective realities is an extension of the power of clay tablets and pieces of paper.
As a key example, consider ownership. In oral communities that lacked written documents, ownership was an intersubjective reality created through the words and behaviors of the community members. To own a field meant that your neighbors agreed that this field was yours, and they behaved accordingly. They didn’t build a hut on that field, graze their livestock there, or pick fruits there without first asking your permission. Ownership was created and maintained by people continuously saying or signaling things to one another. This made ownership the affair of a local community and placed a limit on the ability of a distant central authority to control all landownership. No king, minister, or priest could remember who owned each field in hundreds of distant villages. This also placed a limit on the ability of individuals to claim and exercise absolute property rights, and instead favored various forms of communal property rights. For example, your neighbors might acknowledge your right to cultivate a field but not your right to sell it to foreigners.[14]
In a literate state, to own a field increasingly came to mean that it is written on some clay tablet, bamboo strip, piece of paper, or silicon chip that you own that field. If your neighbors have been grazing their sheep for years on a piece of land, and none of them ever said that you own it, but you can somehow produce an official document that says it is yours, you have a good chance of enforcing your claim. Conversely, if all the neighbors agree that it is your field but you don’t have any official document that proves it, tough luck. Ownership is still an intersubjective reality created by exchanging information, but the information now takes the form of a written document (or a computer file) rather than of people talking and gesturing to each other. This means that ownership can now be determined by a central authority that produces and holds the relevant documents. It also means that you can sell your field without asking your neighbors’ permission, simply by transferring the crucial document to someone else.
The power of documents to create intersubjective realities was beautifully manifested in the Old Assyrian dialect, which treated documents as living things that could also be killed. Loan contracts were “killed” (duākum) when the debt was repaid. This was done by destroying the tablet, adding some mark to it, or breaking its seal. The loan contract didn’t represent reality; it was the reality. If somebody repaid the loan but failed to “kill the document,” the debt was still owed. Conversely, if somebody didn’t repay the loan but the document “died” in some other way—perhaps the dog ate it—the debt was no more.[15] The same happens with money. If your dog eats a hundred-dollar bill, those hundred dollars cease to exist.
In Shulgi’s Ur, in ancient Assyria, and in numerous subsequent polities, social, economic, and political relations relied on documents that create reality instead of merely representing it. When writing constitutions, peace treaties, and commercial contracts, lawyers, politicians, and businesspeople wrangle for weeks and even months over each word—because they know that these pieces of paper can wield enormous power.
Every new information technology has its unexpected bottlenecks. It solves some old problems but creates new ones. In the early 1730s BCE, Narâmtani, a priestess in the Mesopotamian city of Sippar, wrote a letter (on a clay tablet) to a relative, asking him to send her a few clay tablets he kept in his house. She explained that her claim to an inheritance was being contested and she couldn’t prove her case in court without those documents. She ended her message with a plea: “Now, do not neglect me!”[16]
We don’t know what happened next, but just imagine the situation if the relative searched his house but could not find the missing tablets. As people produced more and more documents, finding them turned out to be far from easy. This was a particular challenge for kings, priests, merchants, and anyone else who accumulated thousands of documents in their archives. How do you find the right tax record, payment receipt, or business contract when you need it? Written documents were much better than human brains in recording certain types of information. But they created a new and very thorny problem: retrieval.[17]
The brain is remarkably efficient in retrieving whatever information is stored in its network of tens of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. Though our brain archives countless complex stories about our personal life, our national history, and our religious mythology, healthy people can retrieve information about any of them in less than a second. What did you eat for breakfast? Who was your first crush? When did your country gain its independence? What’s the first verse in the Bible?
How did you retrieve all these pieces of information? What mechanism activates the right neurons and synapses to rapidly call up the necessary information? Though neuroscientists have made some progress in the study of memory, nobody yet understands what memories are, or how exactly they are stored and retrieved.[18] What we do know is that millions of years of evolution streamlined the brain’s retrieval processes. However, once humans have outsourced memories from organic brains to inorganic documents, retrieval could no longer rely on that streamlined biological system. Nor could it rely on the foraging abilities that humans evolved over millions of years. Evolution has adapted humans for finding fruits and mushrooms in a forest, but not for finding documents in an archive.
Foragers locate fruits and mushrooms in a forest because evolution has organized forests according to a discernible organic order. Fruit trees photosynthesize, so they require sunlight. Mushrooms feed on dead organic matter, which can usually be found in the ground. So mushrooms are usually down at soil level, whereas fruits grow farther up. Another common rule is that apples grow on apple trees, whereas figs grow on figs trees. So if you are looking for an apple, you first need to locate an apple tree, and then look up. When living in a forest, humans learn this organic order.
It is very different with archives. Since documents aren’t organisms, they don’t obey any biological laws, and evolution didn’t organize them for us. Tax reports don’t grow on a tax-report shelf. They need to be placed there. For that, somebody first needs to come up with the idea of categorizing information by shelves, and to decide which documents should go on which shelf. Unlike foragers, who need merely to discover the preexisting order of the forest, archivists need to devise a new order for the world. That order is called bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is the way people in large organizations solved the retrieval problem and thereby created bigger and more powerful information networks. But like mythology, bureaucracy too tends to sacrifice truth for order. By inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people’s understanding of the world in unique ways. Many of the problems of our twenty-first-century information networks—like biased algorithms that mislabel people, or rigid protocols that ignore human needs and feelings—are not new problems of the computer age. They are quintessential bureaucratic problems that have existed long before anyone even dreamed of computers.
Bureaucracy literally means “rule by writing desk.” The term was invented in eighteenth-century France, when the typical official sat next to a writing desk with drawers—a bureau.[19] At the heart of the bureaucratic order, then, is the drawer. Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer.
The principle remains the same regardless of whether the document is placed into a drawer, a shelf, a basket, a jar, a computer folder, or any other receptacle: divide and rule. Divide the world into containers, and keep the containers separate so the documents don’t get mixed up. This principle, however, comes with a price. Instead of focusing on understanding the world as it is, bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world. Bureaucrats begin by inventing various drawers, which are intersubjective realities that don’t necessarily correspond to any objective divisions in the world. The bureaucrats then try to force the world to fit into these drawers, and if the fit isn’t very good, the bureaucrats push harder. Anyone who ever filled out an official form knows this only too well. When you fill out the form, and none of the listed options fits your circumstances, you must adapt yourself to the form, rather than the form adapting to you. Reducing the messiness of reality to a limited number of fixed drawers helps bureaucrats keep order, but it comes at the expense of truth. Because they are fixated on their drawers—even when reality is far more complex—bureaucrats often develop a distorted understanding of the world.
The urge to divide reality into rigid drawers also leads bureaucrats to pursue narrow goals irrespective of the wider impact of their actions. A bureaucrat tasked with increasing industrial production is likely to ignore environmental considerations that fall outside her purview, and perhaps dump toxic waste into a nearby river, leading to an ecological disaster downstream. If the government then establishes a new department to combat pollution, its bureaucrats are likely to push for ever more stringent regulations, even if this results in economic ruin for communities upstream. Ideally, someone should be able to take into account all the different considerations and aspects, but such a holistic approach requires transcending or abolishing the bureaucratic division.
The distortions created by bureaucracy affect not only government agencies and private corporations but also scientific disciplines. Consider, for example, how universities are divided into different faculties and departments. History is separate from biology and from mathematics. Why? Certainly this division doesn’t reflect objective reality. It is the intersubjective invention of academic bureaucrats. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, was at one and the same time a historical, biological, and mathematical event. But the academic study of pandemics is divided between the separate departments of history, biology, and mathematics (among others). Students pursuing an academic degree must usually decide to which of these departments they belong. Their decision limits their choice of courses, which in turn shapes their understanding of the world. Mathematics students learn how to predict future morbidity levels from present rates of infection; biology students learn how viruses mutate over time; and history students learn how religious and political beliefs affect people’s willingness to follow government instructions. To fully understand COVID-19 requires taking into account mathematical, biological, and historical phenomena, but academic bureaucracy doesn’t encourage such a holistic approach.
As you climb the academic ladder, the pressure to specialize only increases. The academic world is ruled by the law of publish or perish. If you want a job, you must publish in peer-reviewed journals. But journals are divided by discipline, and publishing an article on virus mutations in a biology journal demands following different conventions from publishing an article on the politics of pandemics in a history journal. There are different jargons, different citation rules, and different expectations. Historians should have a deep understanding of culture and know how to read and interpret historical documents. Biologists should have a deep understanding of evolution and know how to read and interpret DNA molecules. Things that fall in between categories—like the interplay between human political ideologies and virus evolution—are often left unaddressed.[20]
To appreciate how academics force a messy and fluid world into rigid bureaucratic categories, let’s dig a little deeper in the specific discipline of biology. Before Darwin could explain the origin of species, earlier scholars like Carl Linnaeus first had to define what a species is and classify all living organisms into species. To argue that lions and tigers evolved from a common feline ancestor, you first have to define “lions” and “tigers.”[21] This turned out to be a difficult and never-ending job, because animals, plants, and other organisms often trespass the boundaries of their allotted drawers.
Evolution cannot be easily contained in any bureaucratic schema. The whole point of evolution is that species continually change, which means that putting each species in one unchanging drawer distorts biological reality. For example, it is an open question when Homo erectus ended and Homo sapiens began. Were there once two Erectus parents whose child was the first Sapiens?[22] Species also keep intermingling, with animals belonging to seemingly separate species not only having sex but even siring fertile offspring. Most Sapiens living today have about 1–3 percent Neanderthal DNA,[23] indicating that there once was a child whose father was a Neanderthal and whose mother was a Sapiens (or vice versa). So are Sapiens and Neanderthals the same species or different species? And is “species” an objective reality that biologists discover, or is it an intersubjective reality that biologists impose?[24]
There are numerous other examples of animals breaking out of their drawers, so the neat bureaucratic division fails to accurately categorize ring species, fusion species, and hybrids.[25] Grizzly bears and polar bears sometimes produce pizzly bears and grolar bears.[26] Lions and tigers produce ligers and tigons.[27]
When we shift our attention from mammals and other multicellular organisms to the world of single-cell bacteria and archaea, we discover that anarchy reigns. In a process known as horizontal gene transfer, single-cell organisms routinely exchange genetic material not only with organisms from related species but also with organisms from entirely different genera, kingdoms, orders, and even domains. Bacteriologists have a very difficult job keeping tabs on these chimeras.[28]
And when we reach the very edge of life and consider viruses like SARS-CoV-2 (responsible for COVID-19), things become even more complicated. Viruses straddle the supposed rigid boundary between living beings and lifeless matter—between biology and chemistry. Unlike bacteria, viruses aren’t single-cell organisms. They aren’t cells at all, and don’t possess any cellular machinery of their own. Viruses don’t eat or metabolize, and cannot reproduce by themselves. They are tiny packets of genetic code, which are able to penetrate cells, hijack their cellular machinery, and instruct them to produce more copies of that alien genetic code. The new copies burst out of the cell to infect and hijack more cells, which is how the alien code turns viral. Scientists argue endlessly about whether viruses should count as life-forms or whether they fall outside the boundary of life.[29] But this boundary isn’t an objective reality; it is an intersubjective convention. Even if biologists reach a consensus that viruses are life-forms, it wouldn’t change anything about how viruses behave; it will only change how humans think about them.
Of course, intersubjective conventions are themselves part of reality. As we humans become more powerful, so our intersubjective beliefs become more consequential for the world outside our information networks. For example, scientists and legislators have categorized species according to the threat of extinction they face, on a scale ranging from “least concern” through “vulnerable” and “endangered” to “extinct.” Defining a particular population of animals as an “endangered species” is an intersubjective human convention, but it can have far-reaching consequences, for instance by imposing legal restrictions on hunting those animals or destroying their habitat. A bureaucratic decision about whether a certain animal belongs in the “endangered species” drawer or in the “vulnerable species” drawer could make the difference between life and death. As we shall see time and again in subsequent chapters, when a bureaucracy puts a label on you, even though the label might be pure convention, it can still determine your fate. That’s true whether the bureaucrat is a flesh-and-blood expert on animals, a flesh-and-blood expert on humans, or an inorganic AI.
In defense of bureaucracy it should be noted that while it sometimes sacrifices truth and distorts our understanding of the world, it often does so for the sake of order, without which it would be hard to maintain any large-scale human network. While bureaucracies are never perfect, is there a better way to manage big networks? For example, if we decided to abolish all conventional divisions in the academic world, all departments and faculties and specialized journals, would every prospective doctor be expected to devote several years to the study of history, and would people who studied the impact of the Black Death on Christian theology be considered expert virologists? Would it lead to better health-care systems?
Anyone who fantasizes about abolishing all bureaucracies in favor of a more holistic approach to the world should reflect on the fact that hospitals too are bureaucratic institutions. They are divided into different departments, with hierarchies, protocols, and lots of forms to fill out. They suffer from many bureaucratic illnesses, but they still manage to cure us of many of our biological illnesses. The same goes for almost all the other services that make our life better, from our schools to our sewage system.
When you flush the toilet, where does the waste go? It goes into the deep state. There is an intricate subterranean web of pipes, pumps, and tunnels that runs under our houses and collects our waste, separates it from the supply of drinking water, and either treats or safely disposes of it. Somebody needs to design, construct, and maintain that deep web, plug holes in it, monitor pollution levels, and pay the workers. That too is bureaucratic work, and we would face a lot of discomfort and even death if we abolished that particular department. Sewage water and drinking water are always in danger of mixing, but luckily for us there are bureaucrats who keep them separate.
Prior to the establishment of modern sewage systems, waterborne infectious diseases like dysentery and cholera killed millions of people around the world.[30] In 1854 hundreds of London residents began dying of cholera. It was a relatively small outbreak, but it proved to be a turning point in the history of cholera, of epidemics more generally, and of sewage. The leading medical theory of the day argued that cholera epidemics were caused by “bad air.” But the physician John Snow suspected that the cause was the water supply. He painstakingly tracked and listed all known cholera patients, their place of residence, and their source of water. The resulting data led him to identify the water pump on Broad Street in Soho as the epicenter of the outbreak.
This was tedious bureaucratic work—collecting data, categorizing it, and mapping it—but it saved lives. Snow explained his findings to local officials, persuading them to disable the Broad Street pump, which effectively ended the outbreak. Subsequent research discovered that the well providing water to the Broad Street pump was dug less than a meter from a cholera-infected cesspit.[31]
Snow’s discovery, and the work of many subsequent scientists, engineers, lawyers, and officials, resulted in a sprawling bureaucracy regulating cesspits, water pumps, and sewage lines. In today’s England, digging wells and constructing cesspits require filling out forms and getting licenses, which ensure that drinking water doesn’t come from a well someone dug next to a cesspit.[32]
It is easy to forget about this system when it works well, but since 1854 it has saved millions of lives, and it is one of the most important services provided by modern states. In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India identified the lack of toilets as one of India’s biggest problems. Open defecation is a major cause for spreading diseases like cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea, as well as exposing women and girls to sexual assaults. As part of his flagship Clean India Mission, Modi promised to provide all Indian citizens with access to toilets, and between 2014 and 2020 the Indian state invested around ten billion dollars in the project, building more than 100 million new latrines.[33] Sewage isn’t the stuff of epic poems, but it is a test of a well-functioning state.
Mythology and bureaucracy are the twin pillars of every large-scale society. Yet while mythology tends to inspire fascination, bureaucracy tends to inspire suspicion. Despite the services they provide, even beneficial bureaucracies often fail to win the public’s trust. For many people, the very word “bureaucracy” carries negative connotations. This is because it is inherently difficult to know whether a bureaucratic system is beneficial or malicious. For all bureaucracies—good or bad—share one key characteristic: it is hard for humans to understand them.
Any kid can tell the difference between a friend and a bully. You know if someone shares their lunch with you or instead takes yours. But when the tax collector comes to take a cut from your earnings, how can you tell whether it goes to build a new public sewage system or a new private dacha for the president? It is hard to get all the relevant information, and even harder to interpret it. It is similarly difficult for citizens to understand the bureaucratic procedures determining how pupils are admitted to schools, how patients are treated in hospitals, or how garbage is collected and recycled. It takes a minute to tweet allegations of bias, fraud, or corruption, and many weeks of arduous work to prove or disprove them.
Documents, archives, forms, licenses, regulations, and other bureaucratic procedures have changed the way information flows in society, and with it the way power works. This made it far more difficult to understand power. What is happening behind the closed doors of offices and archives, where anonymous officials analyze and organize piles of documents and determine our fate with a stroke of a pen or a click of a mouse?
In tribal societies that lack written documents and bureaucracies, the human network is composed of only human-to-human and human-to-story chains. Authority belongs to the people who control the junctions that link the various chains. These junctions are the tribe’s foundational myths. Charismatic leaders, orators, and mythmakers know how to use these stories in order to shape identities, build alliances, and sway emotions.[34]
In human networks connected by written documents and bureaucratic procedures—from ancient Ur to modern India—society relies in part on the interaction between humans and documents. In addition to human-to-human and human-to-story chains, such societies are held together by human-to-document chains. When we observe a bureaucratic society at work, we still see humans telling stories to other humans, as when millions of Indians watch the Ramayana series, but we also see humans passing documents to other humans, as when TV networks are required to apply for broadcasting licenses and fill out tax reports. Looked at from a different perspective, what we see is documents compelling humans to engage with other documents.
This led to shifts in authority. As documents became a crucial nexus linking many social chains, considerable power came to be invested in these documents, and experts in the arcane logic of documents emerged as new authority figures. Administrators, accountants, and lawyers mastered not just reading and writing but also the skills of composing forms, separating drawers, and managing archives. In bureaucratic systems, power often comes from understanding how to manipulate obscure budgetary loopholes and from knowing your way around the labyrinths of offices, committees, and subcommittees.
This shift in authority changed the balance of power in the world. For better or worse, literate bureaucracies tended to strengthen the central authority at the expense of ordinary citizens. It’s not just that documents and archives made it easier for the center to tax, judge, and conscript everybody. The difficulty of understanding bureaucratic power simultaneously made it harder for the masses to influence, resist, or evade the central authority. Even when bureaucracy was a benign force, providing people with sewage systems, education, and security, it still tended to increase the gap between rulers and ruled. The system enabled the center to collect and record a lot more information about the people it governed, while the latter found it much more difficult to understand how the system itself worked.
Art, which helps us understand many other aspects of life, offered only limited assistance in this case. Poets, playwrights, and moviemakers have occasionally focused on the dynamics of bureaucratic power. However, this has proven to be a very difficult story to communicate. Artists usually work with a limited set of story lines that are rooted in our biology, but none of these biological dramas sheds much light on the workings of bureaucracy, because they have all been scripted by evolution millions of years before the emergence of documents and archives. To understand what “biological dramas” are, and why they are a poor guide for understanding bureaucracy, let’s consider in detail the plot of one of humanity’s greatest artistic masterpieces—the Ramayana.
One important plotline of the Ramayana concerns the relations between the eponymous prince, Rama, his father, King Dasharatha, and his stepmother, Queen Kaikeyi. Though Rama, being the eldest son, is the rightful heir to the kingdom, Kaikeyi persuades the king to banish Rama to the wilderness and bestow the succession instead on her son Bharata. Underlying this plotline are several biological dramas that go back hundreds of millions of years in mammalian and avian evolution.
All mammal and bird offspring depend on their parents in the first stage of life, seek parental care, and fear parental neglect or hostility. Life and death hang in the balance. A cub or chick pushed out of the nest too soon is in danger of death from starvation or predation. Among humans, the fear of being neglected or abandoned by one’s parents is a template not just for children’s stories like Snow White, Cinderella, and Harry Potter but also for some of our most influential national and religious myths. The Ramayana is far from being the sole example. In Christian theology damnation is conceived as losing all contact with the mother church and the heavenly father. Hell is a lost child crying for his or her missing parents.
A related biological drama, which is also familiar to human children, mammalian cubs, and avian chicks, is “Father loves me more than he loves you.” Biologists and geneticists have identified sibling rivalry as one of the key processes of evolution.[35] Siblings routinely compete for food and parental attention, and in some species the killing of one sibling by another is commonplace. About a quarter of spotted hyena cubs are killed by their siblings, who typically enjoy greater parental care as a result.[36] Among sand tiger sharks, females hold numerous embryos in their uterus. The first embryo that reaches about ten centimeters in length then eats all the others.[37] The dynamics of sibling rivalry are manifested in numerous myths in addition to the Ramayana, for instance in the stories of Cain and Abel, King Lear, and the TV series Succession. Entire nations—like the Jewish people—may base their identity on the claim that “we are Father’s favorite children.”
The second major plotline of the Ramayana focuses on the romantic triangle formed by Prince Rama, his lover, Sita, and the demon-king Ravana, who kidnaps Sita. “Boy meets girl” and “boy fights boy over girl” are also biological dramas that have been enacted by countless mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish for hundreds of millions of years. We are mesmerized by these stories because understanding them has been essential for our ancestors’ survival. Human storytellers like Homer, Shakespeare, and Valmiki—the purported author of the Ramayana—have displayed an amazing capacity to elaborate on the biological dramas, but even the greatest poetical narratives usually copy their basic plotline from the handbook of evolution.
A third theme recurring in the Ramayana is the tension between purity and impurity, with Sita being the paragon of purity in Hindu culture. The cultural obsession with purity originates in the evolutionary struggle to avoid pollution. All animals are torn between the need to try new food and the fear of being poisoned. Evolution therefore equipped animals with both curiosity and the capacity to feel disgust on coming into contact with something toxic or otherwise dangerous.[38] Politicians and prophets have learned how to manipulate these disgust mechanisms. In nationalist and religious myths, countries or churches are depicted as a biological body in danger of being polluted by impure intruders. For centuries bigots have often said that ethnic and religious minorities spread diseases,[39] that LGBTQ people are a source of pollution,[40] or that women are impure.[41] During the Rwanda genocide of 1994, Hutu propaganda referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches. The Nazis compared Jews to rats. Experiments have shown that chimpanzees, too, react with disgust to images of unfamiliar chimpanzees from another band.[42]
Perhaps in no other culture was the biological drama of “purity versus impurity” carried to greater extremes than in traditional Hinduism. It constructed an intersubjective system of castes ranked by their supposed level of purity, with the pure Brahmins at the top and the allegedly impure Dalit (formerly known as untouchables) at the bottom. Professions, tools, and everyday activities have also been classified by their level of purity, and strict rules have forbidden “impure” persons to marry “pure” people, touch them, prepare food for them, or even come near them.
The modern state of India still struggles with this legacy, which influences almost all aspects of life. For example, fears of impurity created various complications for the aforementioned Clean India Mission, because allegedly “pure” people were reluctant to get involved in “impure” activities such as building, maintaining, and cleaning toilets, or to share public latrines with allegedly “impure” persons.[43] On September 25, 2019, two Dalit children—twelve-year-old Roshni Valmiki and her ten-year-old nephew Avinash—were lynched in the Indian village of Bhakhedi for defecating near the house of a family from the higher Yadav caste. They were forced to defecate in public because their houses lacked functioning toilets. A local official later explained that their household—while being among the poorest in the village—was nevertheless excluded from the list of families eligible for government aid to build toilets. The children routinely suffered from other caste-based discrimination, for example being forced to bring separate mats and utensils to school and to sit apart from the other pupils, so as not to “pollute” them.[44]
The list of biological dramas that press our emotional buttons includes several additional classics, such as “Who will be alpha?” “Us versus them,” and “Good versus evil.” These dramas, too, feature prominently in the Ramayana, and all of them are well known to wolf packs and chimpanzee bands as well as to human societies. Together, these biological dramas form the backbone of almost all human art and mythology. But art’s dependence on the biological dramas has made it difficult for artists to explain the mechanisms of bureaucracy. The Ramayana is set within the context of large agrarian kingdoms, but it shows little interest in how such kingdoms register property, collect taxes, catalog archives, or finance wars. Sibling rivalry and romantic triangles aren’t a good guide for the dynamics of documents, which have no siblings and no romantic life.
Storytellers like Franz Kafka, who focused on the often surreal ways that bureaucracy shapes human lives, pioneered new nonbiological plotlines. In Kafka’s The Trial, the bank clerk K. is arrested by unidentified officials of an unfathomable agency for an unnamed crime. Despite his best efforts, he never understands what is happening to him or uncovers the aims of the agency that is crushing him. While sometimes taken as an existential or theological reference to the human condition in the universe and to the unfathomability of God, on a more mundane level the story highlights the potentially nightmarish character of bureaucracies, which as an insurance lawyer Kafka knew all too well.
In bureaucratic societies, the lives of ordinary people are often upended by unidentified officials of an unfathomable agency for incomprehensible reasons. Whereas stories about heroes who confront monsters—from the Ramayana to Spider-Man—repackage the biological dramas of confronting predators and romantic rivals, the unique horror of Kafkaesque stories comes from the unfathomability of the threat. Evolution has primed our minds to understand death by a tiger. Our mind finds it much more difficult to understand death by a document.
Some portrayals of bureaucracy are satirical. Joseph Heller’s iconic 1961 novel, Catch-22, used satire to illustrate the central role bureaucracy plays in war. One of the most powerful figures in the novel is ex–private first class Wintergreen, who from his power base in the mail room decides which letters to forward and which to disappear.[45] The 1980s British sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister showed the ways that civil servants use arcane regulations, obscure subcommittees, and piles of documents to manipulate their political bosses. The 2015 comedy-drama The Big Short explored the bureaucratic roots of the 2007–8 financial crisis. The movie’s arch-villains are not humans but collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which are financial devices invented by investment bankers and understood by nobody else in the world. These bureaucratic Godzillas slumbered unnoticed in the depths of bank portfolios, until they suddenly emerged in 2007 to wreak havoc on the lives of billions of people by instigating a major financial crisis.
Artworks like these have had some success in shaping perceptions of how bureaucratic power works, but this is an uphill battle, because since the Stone Age our minds have been primed to focus on biological dramas rather than bureaucratic ones. Most Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters are not about CDOs. Rather, even in the twenty-first century, most blockbusters are essentially Stone Age stories about the hero who fights the monster to win the girl. Similarly, when depicting the dynamics of political power, TV series like Game of Thrones, The Crown, and Succession focus on the family intrigues of the dynastic court rather than on the bureaucratic labyrinth that sustains—and sometimes curbs—the dynasty’s power.
The difficulty of depicting and understanding bureaucratic realities has had unfortunate results. On the one hand, it leaves people feeling helpless in the face of harmful powers they do not understand, like the hero of The Trial. On the other hand, it also leaves people with the impression that bureaucracy is a malign conspiracy, even in cases when it is in fact a benign force providing us with health care, security, and justice.
In the sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto described the allegorical figure of Discord as a woman who walks around in a cloud of “sheaves of summonses and writs, cross-examinations and powers of attorney, and great piles of glosses, counsel’s opinions and precedents—all of which tended to the greater insecurity of impoverished folk. In front and behind her and on either side she was hemmed in by notaries, attorneys and barristers.”[46]
In his description of Jack Cade’s Rebellion (1450) in Henry VI, Part 2, Shakespeare has a commoner rebel called Dick the Butcher take the antipathy to bureaucracy to its logical conclusion. Dick has a plan to establish a better social order. “The first thing we do,” advises Dick, “let’s kill all the lawyers.” The rebel leader, Jack Cade, runs with Dick’s proposal in a forceful attack on bureaucracy and in particular on written documents: “Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.” Just then the rebels capture a clerk and accuse him of being able to write and read. After a short interrogation that establishes his “crime,” Cade orders his men, “Hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.”[47]
Seventy years prior to Jack Cade’s Rebellion, during the even bigger 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, the rebels focused their ire not only on flesh-and-blood bureaucrats but also on their documents, destroying numerous archives and burning court rolls, charters, and administrative and legal records. In one incident, they made a bonfire of the archives of the University of Cambridge. An old woman named Margery Starr scattered the ashes to the winds while crying, “Away with the learning of the clerks, away with it!” Thomas Walsingham, a monk in St. Albans Abbey who witnessed the destruction of the abbey’s archive firsthand, described how the rebels “set fire to all court rolls and muniments, so that after they had got rid of these records of their ancient service their lords would not be able to claim any right at all against them at some future time.”[48] Killing the documents erased the debts.
Similar attacks on archives characterized numerous other insurgencies throughout history. For example, during the Great Jewish Revolt in 66 CE, one of the first things the rebels did upon capturing Jerusalem was to set fire to the central archive in order to destroy records of debts, thereby wining the support of the populace.[49] During the French Revolution in 1789, numerous local and regional archives were destroyed for comparable reasons.[50] Many rebels might have been illiterate, but they knew that without the documents the bureaucratic machine couldn’t function.
I can sympathize with the suspicion of government bureaucracies and of the power of official documents, because they have played an important role in my own family. My maternal grandfather had his life upended by a government census and by the inability to find a crucial document. My grandfather Bruno Luttinger was born in 1913 in Chernivtsi. Today this town is in Ukraine, but in 1913 it was part of the Habsburg Empire. Bruno’s father disappeared in World War I, and he was raised by his mother, Chaya-Pearl. When the war was over, Chernivtsi was annexed to Romania. In the late 1930s, as Romania became a fascist dictatorship, an important plank of its new antisemitic policy was to conduct a Jewish census.
In 1936 official statistics said that 758,000 Jews lived in Romania, constituting 4.2 percent of the population. The same official statistics said that the total number of refugees from the U.S.S.R., Jews and non-Jews, was about 11,000. In 1937 a new fascist government came to power, headed by Prime Minister Octavian Goga. Goga was a renowned poet as well as a politician, but he quickly graduated from patriotic poetry to fake statistics and oppressive bureaucracy. He and his colleagues ignored the official statistics and claimed that hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were flooding into Romania. In several interviews Goga claimed that half a million Jews had entered Romania illegally and that the total number of Jews in the country was 1.5 million. Government organs, far-right statisticians, and popular newspapers regularly cited even higher figures. The Romanian embassy in Paris, for example, claimed there were a million Jewish refugees in Romania. Christian Romanians were gripped by mass hysteria that they would soon be replaced or become a minority in a Jewish-led country.
Goga’s government stepped in to offer a solution to the imaginary problem invented by its own propaganda. On January 22, 1938, the government issued a law ordering all Jews in Romania to provide documented proof that they were born in Romanian territory and were entitled to Romanian citizenship. Jews who failed to provide proof would lose their citizenship, along with all rights to residence and employment.
Suddenly Romania’s Jews found themselves in a bureaucratic hell. Many had to travel to their birthplace to look for the relevant documents, only to discover that the municipal archives were destroyed during World War I. Jews born in territories annexed to Romania only after 1918—like Chernivtsi—faced special difficulties, because they lacked Romanian birth certificates and because many other documents about their families were archived in the former Habsburg capitals of Vienna and Budapest instead of in Bucharest. Jews often didn’t even know which documents they were supposed to be looking for, because the census law didn’t specify which documents were considered sufficient “proof.”
Clerks and archivists gained a new and lucrative source of income as frantic Jews offered to pay large bribes to get their hands on the right document. Even if no bribes were involved, the process was extremely costly: any request for documentation, as well as filing the citizenship request with the authorities, involved paying fees. Finding and filing the right document did not guarantee success. A difference of a single letter between how a name was spelled on the birth certificate and on the citizenship papers was enough for the authorities to revoke the citizenship.
Many Jews could not clear these bureaucratic hurdles and didn’t even file a citizenship request. Of those who did, only 63 percent got their citizenship approved. Altogether, out of 758,000 Romanian Jews, 367,000 lost their citizenship.[51] My grandfather Bruno was among them. When the new census law was passed in Bucharest, Bruno did not think much about it. He was born in Chernivtsi and had lived there all his life. The thought that he needed to prove to some bureaucrat that he was not an alien struck him as ridiculous. Moreover, in early 1938 his mother fell ill and died, and Bruno felt he had much bigger things to worry about than chasing documents.
In December 1938 an official letter arrived from Bucharest canceling Bruno’s citizenship, and as an alien he was promptly fired from his job in a Chernivtsi radio shop. Bruno was now not only alone and jobless but also stateless and without much prospect for alternative employment. Nine months later World War II erupted, and the danger for paperless Jews was mounting. Of the Romanian Jews who lost their citizenship in 1938, the vast majority would be murdered over the next few years by the Romanian fascists and their Nazi allies. (Jews who retained their citizenship had a much higher survival rate.)[52]
My grandfather repeatedly tried to escape the tightening noose, but it was difficult without the right papers. Several times he smuggled himself onto trains and ships, only to be caught and arrested. In 1940 he finally managed to board one of the last ships bound for Palestine before the gates of hell slammed shut. When he arrived in Palestine, he was immediately imprisoned by the British as an illegal immigrant. After two months in prison, he was offered a deal: stay in jail and risk deportation, or enlist in the British army and get Palestinian citizenship. My grandfather grabbed the offer with both hands and from 1941 to 1945 served in the British army in the North African and Italian campaigns. In exchange, he got his papers.
In our family it became a sacred duty to preserve documents. Bank statements, electricity bills, expired student cards, letters from the municipality—if it had an official-looking stamp on it, it would be filed in one of the many folders in our cupboard. You never knew which of these documents might one day save your life.
Should we love the bureaucratic information network or hate it? Stories like that of my grandfather indicate the dangers inherent in bureaucratic power. Stories like that of the London cholera epidemic indicate its potential benevolence. All powerful information networks can do both good and ill, depending on how they are designed and used. Merely increasing the quantity of information in a network doesn’t guarantee its benevolence, or make it any easier to find the right balance between truth and order. That is a key historical lesson for the designers and users of the new information networks of the twenty-first century.
Future information networks, particularly those based on AI, will be different from previous networks in many ways. While in part 1 we are examining how mythology and bureaucracy have been essential for large-scale information networks, in part 2 we will see how AI is taking up the role of both bureaucrats and mythmakers. AI systems know how to find and process data better than flesh-and-blood bureaucrats, and AI is also acquiring the ability to compose stories better than most humans.
But before we explore the new AI-based information networks of the twenty-first century, and before we examine the threats and promises of AI mythmakers and AI bureaucrats, there is one more thing we need to understand about the long-term history of information networks. We have now seen that information networks don’t maximize truth, but rather seek to find a balance between truth and order. Bureaucracy and mythology are both essential for maintaining order, and both are happy to sacrifice truth for the sake of order. What mechanisms, then, ensure that bureaucracy and mythology don’t lose touch with truth altogether, and what mechanisms enable information networks to identify and correct their own mistakes, even at the price of some disorder?
The way human information networks have dealt with the problem of errors will be the main subject of the next two chapters. We’ll start by considering the invention of another information technology: the holy book. Holy books like the Bible and the Quran are an information technology that is meant to both include all the vital information society needs and be free from all possibility of error. What happens when an information network believes itself to be utterly incapable of any error? The history of allegedly infallible holy books highlights some of the limitations of all information networks and holds important lessons for the attempt to create infallible AIs in the twenty-first century.