Bureaucracy – Rule by Office – or, even more literally, Rule by Desk. A very useful word which in its mildest and most forgiving sense means a system of administration in which the administrators – officials – those of the office – follow rules very carefully, but which in its far more accurate, delicious sense means the tyranny of the official, and all of the inflexibilities, inefficiencies, incompetence, and general twattishness that inevitably follows.
And yet I find that this word is not enough to describe the kind of insanity that we are surrounded with in the present day. With every passing year, I notice that I have to give more and more scans of different documents to be able to do things – and the constraints on them have become narrower and narrower. ‘Send us a scan of a recent credit card statement or utility bill with your current address. It must be from the last 6 minutes, show your full name and star sign, and have been certified by a dental hygienist with a Ph.D. in Sanskrit.’ Completely ignoring the fact that everything’s gone paperless – I don’t know how I’m supposed to prove that I’ve ever lived anywhere now.
I have to give the same information out again and again to companies – and those most loathesome of all institutions, banks – even though they definitely have my name, telephone number, and address from the last time I gave it to them – which is invariably a few days ago. Somehow, their computer systems, perfectly capable of remembering my email address when they want to send me spam, suffer from attacks of amnesia at any other time.
I am actually shocked by how often I am asked to email someone a scan of my passport as proof of identity. How is this even allowed? Surely it’s a massive security failure to have everyone emailing scans of their passport all over the place all of the time? Why has what is supposed to be the most secure document you can own become equivalent to a meme?
We are ruled by little pieces of paper – as well as their electronic counterparts – and it’s mad’ning. I thought that perhaps rather than the word ‘bureaucracy’, we ought to have a word that literally means ‘Rule by Paper’. The word ‘paper’ is from Greek papyros – ideal – we can combine this in the usual way with the Greek-origin suffix -cracy, meaning ‘rule by’, for papyrocracy – Rule by Paper, Rule by Paperwork.
It turns out I’m not the first person to think of this word. The word already exists with this meaning – it’s just not a very common word at all. Some dictionaries list it as a synonym for ‘bureaucracy’, but I don’t think it should be thought of as a perfect synonym. I think ‘papyrocracy’ should refer to the absolute worst excesses of bureaucracy (itself already something that is the worst excesses) – when paperwork itself becomes the aim – when filling out forms again and again and again becomes the aim. In papyrocracy, you are a slave to little pieces of paper – nothing happens without them, yet having them in no way ensures that the right thing happens – just that what happens conforms to what the little pieces of paper say. The purpose of everything becomes filling out forms – to no real end other than to fill out more forms. In the style of Douglas Adams, one might call it ‘Vogocracy’. In the style of Matt Lucas and David Walliams, it’s the final, all-consuming tyranny of ‘Computer says no.’.
