The Dehumanizing Force of Administrative Sludge

How small inconveniences and indignities build suggest we are insignificant

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

When I wrote You Are Not Your Own, I discussed a series of mundane bureaucratic actions that contribute to a feeling of exhaustion and indignity. One example was buying homeowners insurance over the phone from someone who had never seen my home and who would sell a policy to a company who had also never seen my home. My conclusion was:

When so many of our commercial interactions have this kind of disembodied character, it is psychically draining. It’s exhausting to have to trick an automated phone answering system into connecting you to another human. It feels like a test to see if you are worthy enough to warrant actual attention. And the reason companies use automated systems is that it’s more efficient, and some customers will give up long before they get to talk to a human representative. You feel inhuman because the state and the market view you as a Case or Account Number, and you fear that no matter how hard you work to stay on top of things, there will always be some obligation you are forgetting. And one day you’ll receive a call or an email or a letter announcing your delinquency. It’s a terrible weight to walk around with. (110-111)

At the time I wrote this, I didn’t know of the concept of “sludge,” which (as I understand it) was coined by the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler. It refers to “tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.” In a wonderfully written article for The Atlantic, Chris Colin gives his personal experience with sludge and explores the modern phenomena. I highly recommend it. What’s most significant to me in the article, and what I tried to highlight in You Are Not Your Own, is that sludge does not just make our lives harder. Lots of things do that. Sludge is a use of technique to maximize efficiency defined as profits or some other standard (number of people processed, in the case of the State), but it denies human dignity. On its own, any individual instance of sludge is (usually) unremarkable. But collectively, sludge communicates that you are not important, worthy of dignity or respect, made in the Image of God, a bearer of rights, a citizen, a neighbor, or a human. And I think this takes a psychic toll on us.

In a few places in his article, Colin highlights the cognitive toll that sludge takes on people. For example, he writes:

Individually, the calls and emails were blandly substance-free. But together they spoke clearly: You are powerless. I began to wonder: Was the accretion of these exhaustions complicit in the broader hopelessness we seem to be feeling these days? Were these hassles and frictions not just costing us but warping us with a kind of administrative-spiritual defeatism?

So part of the message they send, and part of why they seem to strike at our dignity as humans, is that they suggest we lack agency. One of the themes in my effort to call us back to living as fully human has been to emphasize our agency, our ability to choose, to act, to move in the world despite feeling trapped. Sludge weighs on us. Consider, for example, the forms you are given when you sign in at a doctor’s appointment. You feel compelled to sign them. Or End-User-Licensing-Agreements, as I’ve written about before. We feel compelled to adopt A.I. Compelled to vote for candidates we don’t actually support. Compelled to shop at stores with terrible customer service (I recently visited a Walmart where virtually every employee was wearing earbuds). And so on. These are the bureaucratic hoops we jump through to live in the contemporary world and there’s nothing we can do about it, seems to be the message we received.

But sometimes we can. As Colin points out, he was able to get his issue with Ford resolved through perseverance. I’ve had a similar experiences. I’ve been able to resolve billing conflicts through perseverance and communication skills. But as Colin points out, and I would agree with him, this is a privilege. Not everyone has the time to spend on the phone or emailing documents to get their issue dealt with. Also, I have the advantage of a PhD and good communication skills. What happens to the poorly educated person who is busy working long hours who has a billing conflict or is trying to secure some essential government benefit? It’s not just that sludge costs one group more than another, but it does. In any case, my larger point here is that it dehumanizes by making us feel helpless before a machine. We feel tiny, insignificant, and voiceless.

In a later section, Colin interviews Sunstein who makes some notable comments on the dehumanizing effects of sludge:

In his 2021 follow-up to Nudge, Sludge, Sunstein notes that this constellation of frictions “makes people feel that their time does not matter. In extreme cases, it makes people feel that their lives do not matter.” I asked Sunstein about this depletion. “Suppose that people spend hours on the phone, waiting for help from the Social Security Administration, or seeking to get a license or a permit to do something,” he replied. “They might start to despair, not only because of all that wasted time but because they are being treated as if they just don’t count.”

Indignity by a thousand paper cuts. I do think that for some contemporary people, the forces of sludge cause them to feel a kind of depression about themselves, a despair about their place in the world. A feeling that they are insignificant and helpless. When you combine these mundane experiences with any other difficult life experiences that tempt you to despair, it’s easy to see how contemporary people struggle with mental health challenges.

For Christians, this isn’t just a matter of creating systems that are nice toward people. It’s a matter of justice and dignity. Systems that prioritize maximizing profits over all other goods (rather than seeing profits as ideally working with other goods) will end up crushing the dignity of others. Too many bureaucracies and companies see their goal as preventing customers from receiving justice, from receiving what is their due.

So what can we do? Those of us with privileges ought to do what we can do to fight sludge and advocate for ourselves, to lean into our agency. Authorities who implement sludge rely on us giving up. The more we resist, the better. But it’s important that we don’t just advocate for ourselves. We should use our time and abilities to advocate for others around us. Make phone calls for elderly family members, for example. Give advice to younger people. Where we can, we ought to patronize companies that respect customers. For those of us in positions of influence in bureaucracies and companies, we ought to advocate for (admittedly costly) human-focused interactions.

With the expansion of A.I., we’re only going to see more efforts to offload customer service and interactions onto machines and away from human care. It’s already difficult to get to talk to a human. In a recent call to my health insurance company, I had to fight past the automated system, past several recommendations to “use the website” (which wasn’t helpful), and wait to get to talk to a human. I felt lucky to talk to a human at all, which is pretty sad when you think about it.