An unexpected consequence of feeling comfortably mid-career is that I’ve started to feel unable to tolerate platformised forms of bureaucracy from any organisation other than my employer. There have been a few cases now where I completely overreact to an irritating but trivial request in which a platformised bureaucratic process meant that I was being asked to manually copy material from one format to another in order to meet the requirements of an organisation’s system. It frustrates me when my employer asks me to do it but I accept it as part of employment. Whereas when an external organisation I’ve volunteered to do something for asks me to do it provokes an increasingly slightly overblown reaction in me.
What’s irrational about this is that I feel comfortable using an LLM in this context. There’s an ethical issue here about how shadow work is generated through platformisation, creating tasks that serve no purpose other than to make a bureaucracy work in a more automated way. For the organisation it reduces administrative load but it does it in part by passing that load partially onto external actors. I just find this so frustrating that I keep lashing out needlessly when I’m confronted with it, partly I think because I have years of built up frustration about my own precarity where I couldn’t refuse.
But I’m also conscious in these situations that I’m being kind of a dick. The people I’m talking to neither designed nor chose these systems. My refusal will do nothing to change the operation of these systems. Perhaps most of all: it only takes me 2 minutes to do this when I use an LLM to do the administrative load for me. If a platformised bureaucracy is passing administrative load to us then the use of LLMs becomes a kind of bureaucratic self-defence against workload intensification.
Mark Carrigan 