CONCEPT
Bureaucracy of Everywhere
Kafka’s insight, derived from the totalizing institutions of The Trial and The Castle, that the gravest implication of a system is not any particular unjust decision but the elimination of the outside—the disappearance of any region of life not in principle subject to assessment, scoring, and judgment.
In
Kafka’s novels, the institutions are totalizing: the court in
The Trial has no jurisdictional boundary Josef K. can step outside of; the Castle governs the entire village and everything in it; the penal colony is a closed world where the apparatus and its logic are simply the order of things. The nightmare these fictions produce is not the nightmare of a powerful institution among others, which one might escape by leaving its territory. It is the nightmare of an institution coextensive with the world—one that has no edge, that one is always already inside. Kafka read for a century as expressionist exaggeration turns out to have been forecast:
algorithmic systems are now embedded in the infrastructure of ordinary life—in the phone, the search, the feed, the payment, the application, the screening that precedes the interview. There is increasingly no outside. Non-participation in the data-generating activities of