The author's musings about this are good fun but they struggle to make a coherent point that delivers deep insight. In this post, he considers the points that c

The author's musings about this are good fun but they struggle to make a coherent point that delivers deep insight. In this post, he considers the points that commenters raised and tiptoes around the possibility that maybe some bureaucratic rituals are a filter to screen the petitioners by desperation, but he doesn't talk about the possibility that such structures may have evolved incrementally to optimize for maximum ass-covering and the implications thereof. To him, efficiency (of filtering customers) is a sufficient explanation, which is odd considering his complaints about bureaucracy's inefficiencies before and after. So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV. For being the primary identity providers of the US populace, the DMVs of US states are actually rather remarkable. I guess the seemingly arbitrary progression of ticket numbers in cavernous waiting rooms is valid annoyance, but watermarked cards being mailed out to thousands of people just a few business days after collecting their info is pretty good, and then there's more vehicles than that. Bureaucracy gets a bad rap, but it's worth applying the "I could've built that" test for them the same way it's trendy to critique valuable companies that are "just a chat app". If you had to credential 35 million people and 39 million vehicles a year, how would you do it? Would you codify a few things, and hire rockstars who can think on their feet? How soon would you start making rules about the blatantness of invalid forms, or unpaid fees, or how many people would you have to catch selling favors before you re-examine the process? Deep bureaucracies are often the emergent result when your process has been burned by costly customers (in time, money, effort) or rogue employees (corruption, graft, espionage) too many times. They are systems where each and every decision maker can always defer to the Process as an explanation for why someone can't have something and the Process is sacred because "it's always been that way", even if it changes, and where each and every fulfiller is powerless to truly make a meaningful exception, except when that feature was already built in.