The Accidental Bureaucracy: Fragility and Robustness in Non-hierarchical Infrastructure Management
The modern hackerspace movement, in those parts which trace their heritage to places such as c-base and Metalab, often take as a core principle an idea known as Do-ocracy — a non-hierarchical, anarchistic organizational methodology that is often summed up with the simple exclamation, “if you want something done, do it!”.
This simple idea gets deployed for everything from how people should approach using resources for personal projects, to how legally incorporated non-profit business gets done. A canonical example of this is the hackerspace I participate in regularly: Noisebridge in San Francisco. Almost everything here is do-ocratic, and we bristle at the aspects which aren’t.
Do-ocracy as a methodology is incredibly empowering. That’s part of it’s appeal. Want to hack together an open air laser and shoot it across the space? Rad, do it! Want to build a metal shop? Cool! Let me know if you need any help. Want to take out the trash? Whoa! Thank you for helping to keep Noisebridge clean!
There are constraints, of course. We have to be accountable to one another when do-ocratically shooting lasers , and so forth, which often gets summed up in the rule “Be Excellent to Each Other”. But the non-hierarchical do-ocratic structure is great for enabling cool things, and engendering a sense of personal stake in the community and the space. We are all collectively responsible for this place, and nothing gets done unless we choose to do it, and when things need to happen, we’re encouraged and empowered to make them happen. This space is truly ours.
But. And there’s always a but. In this case many buts. But. There are failure modes of do-ocracy. The hackerspace wiki documents a number of them, but this post is about one particular one, which I’m calling Accidental Bureacracy. This is one that is on the minds of many Noisebridge regulars at the time of writing. The Accidental Bureaucracy is the phenomenon where some piece of infrastructure, some cool tool, whatever, has a layer of bureaucratic control or access restriction in place, which stands in the way of its use or maintenance, and which exists not because people thought bureaucracy was a great idea, but because no one realized they were creating it.
A Tale of Two Locks
A good example of bureaucracy is locks. Long-time Noisebridger Danny O’Brien gifted us with a wonderful little poem-song at one Tuesday meeting in 2010:
For we’re excellent to each other here
We rarely ever block
We value tools over pre-emptive rules
And spurn the key and the lock.
And boy is it true! Noisebridge hates keys and locks. So much so that for the first few years of its existence, the only barrier to entry of Noisebridge was being able to get a key made from a pattern which was posted on our public wiki and referenced in the Getting In page. Anyone could walk in off the street and start hacking, after a quick visit to their local hardware store to get a key made. Many people, most notably co-founder Mitch Altman, gave out Noisebridge keys to the space to people they met around the world, and people still show up to Noisebridge for the first time, years after getting these keys, and find that they do in fact work on the front gate. Noisebridge belongs to everyone, and everyone belongs at Noisebridge, and so the idea of guarding access with a lock is antithetical. It’s bureacracy, and for no good reason.
The locks at Noisebridge were, in a very real sense, an intentional bureacracy. What landlord wants their property to be lockless? We are forced by private property to be keyed and locked, much to our dismay. But unintentional bureacracy of locks is also a thing that happens. The conscious effort to spurn the key and the lock at Noisebridge’s front door, sadly, doesn’t follow over to everything else. Many people have been hampered by the accidental bureacracy of locks that were just part of a piece of equipment.
A good example of this kind of lock bureaucracy is a collection of wireless microphones we have for our main A/V set up. Being wireless, it’s not too hard for them to wander out and find themselves sold on the side walk by less scrupulous, or less economically fortunate, visitors to Noisebridge. So, a lock was placed on a box, and the microphones were placed in the box. And it was fine, at least for a while, because it was for a very specific set of microphones that were attached to a certain piece of equipment.
Unfortunately, one day, a microphone that was part of a mobile PA system found its way into the lock box too. It’s understandable — its a wireless mic just laying around, someone thought it was one of the A/V system’s mics, and they wanted to secure them. They wanted to do the Excellent thing. But as soon as that microphone went into that box, no one could use the mobile PA system, and had no way to get the microphone out.
Well not really. We’re hackerspace, after all! We have angle-grinder-shaped keys that fit all locks. There is no longer a lock box with wireless mics, just a box. No mics have been lost. The lock box created an Accidental Bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy was literally cut away do-ocratically, because it got in the way, and fuck that.
Critical Failure
This post isn’t really about locks, tho. I mean, the story about the locks is a minor example of Accidental Bureaucracy, but it’s not a major problem. The real problem of Accidental Bureaucracy, the real terrifying situation, is critical infrastructure. For example: Noisebridge’s domain name, noisebridge.net, is currently owned by someone who is banned from Noisebridge by unanimous agreement of the members of Noisebridge. Some day in the near future, our domain name registration will expire, our website will fail to work, and we can do nothing to prevent this except hope and pray that this person turns it over to us in a moment of remorse. We’re playing a waiting game, now, trying to be ready to leap into action and purchase the domain the moment it falls out of his control.
You’d think this would be a one of thing, but it’s not. Amongst our other ridiculous critical failures:
- Another domain name is owned by a Noisebridger in good standing with the community, but who is, for one reason or another, non-responsive.
- Our donations page, which is a single largest source of regular income, recently went off line because the maintainer of the server, and one of the few people with credentials on it, has work and life obligations that have prevented him from being available.
- For a few months, no one was able to acquire 24 hour access to Noisebridge because the one person who was editing the access control system went off the grid for work and personal reasons.
The list goes on.
None of these failures are intentional, but they exist entirely because there is an Accidental Bureaucracy: one or two people have control of a resource, and everything must go through them. They are the gate keeper, the maintainer, the go-to person. And there is no angle grinder that will fix this situation.
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You might be asking yourself, “How the fuck did Noisebridge get themselves into this situation?”, and the answer is, the same way you probably would have! Every single one of these Accidental Bureaucracies comes from a well-intentioned, do-ocratic solution to a problem that we faced.
Way back in the early days of Noisebridge, we needed a domain name. So, someone went out and got one. I mean, it’s easy! You just go to your favorite registrar, find the one you want, click buy, put your name and email address in, and you’re done. It’s quick and easy, guys, we’ve got a domain name!
Well, you’ve got a domain name, we’ve got nothing. Do-ocracy requires that we solve problems by just, well.. solving them. We go and do the thing that needs to be done, or at least the thing we think needs to be done, and that typically means that we take the easiest course of action. We use our personal accounts to buy domain names, set up servers, etc. And in the short term, it works. It’s fine. But people come and go from a community, whether that’s by being banned, by getting hit by a bus, by getting bored, by getting a job. It is an inevitability that people will drift away, and when they do, anything they were in control of becomes inaccessible to whoever remains.
This is how every single Accidental Bureaucracy described above came into existence. A temporary solution was put in place which was, ultimately, a single person as the point of access and control, or it might as well have been, and they drifted away. The only reason some of these problems were overcome for Noisebridge was extreme good luck on our part.
Bug Fix
Unfortunately, I can’t say now, “here is how we solved this problem”, because we’re still in the middle of these problems, trying to figure out what solutions are available that are compatible with the Noisebridge ethos. But even if we had a solution, it probably wouldn’t apply to your situation. Sorry. :(
