Documents instead of decisions¶

The reader produces as well as reads. The infrastructure committee meets quarterly and has, since the pilot, produced minutes, a status report, a summary of the status report for the Director, and a summary of the summary for the board, none of which any person wrote and few of which any person has read. The collegial disagreement about the SIEM is in all four, in slightly different words each time, unresolved in each. The estate grows faster than it did, in prose no person wrote and few will read, and the reader becomes necessary to digest what the reader produced. An arrangement in which the tool manufactures the problem the tool solves has the commercial structure of a subscription, whatever the pricing page says.

Cheap generation also changes what a document is for. When producing a report costs an afternoon of someone’s attention, a report is usually an attempt to say something. When producing one costs a sentence of instruction, the report becomes available for other work: deferring a decision, dressing a disagreement, being seen to respond. The Home knew this move long before the reader; committees have produced papers instead of choices for as long as there have been committees, and the Home has a committee for the curtains. What changes is the price. The friction of producing a document was rationing the avoidance all along; removing it relocates the cost downstream, into reading, navigating and the decisions deferred beneath the prose. Uncertainty can now be answered with volume, disagreement with a summary of positions, and the estate grows because more is being avoided, in prose. The reader then completes the circle as the instrument required to navigate the avoidance it made affordable.