About Form Submission

"What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center?...The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since - as is very quickly clear to the caller - there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself." - Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism

The above quote is one which I reread just as the current Covid related shutdowns were truly taking effect; in the time after various state supports were announced but before any sort of clear plan for implementing them had been put in place. Many people, including many in my own circles, were suddenly dependent upon access to various ‘benefits’ without a clear way to access them, or even to determine if they qualified. Many of them lost hours or even days to government call lines; stuck on hold, forced to call back, forced to hang up when other things could no longer be ignored or pushed back, or just stuck in cyclical conversations with workers who had no information.

Fisher’s description of the call center (in a chapter titled there’s no central exchange) draws on an analysis of Kafka’s The Castle, in which a character named simply ‘K’ is forced to try and navigate a powerful, oppressive and profoundly obtuse state bureaucracy. Fisher draws connections between the fictional Authority of The Castle and Neoliberalism, the Capitalist ideology which we currently live under, saying this:

“The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there - it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility.”

In the more than ten years since Capitalist Realism was written, much of the authority of the call centre has been shifted online; to automated forms, customer service live-chats, (where much of the chatting is done by bots or copy/pasted scraps of text) anonymous email addresses which may or may not respond at some indeterminate future time, and various other autonomous or semi-autonomous digital mechanisms. As a direct consequence, (and not by coincidence) this has exacerbated the fundamental non-responsibility of state and corporate agencies. Rather than (eventually) reaching an actual human being who simply won’t tell us what we need to know or pass us further up the chain, we instead must deal exclusively with digital entities that legitimately can’t do those things, and which can’t be bargained with, (even futilely) appealed to, (even nominally) or circumvented (even at great personal cost). There’s no central exchange.

All of this was the initial inspiration for Form Submission. Combining Fisher’s discussion of Kafka’s The Castle with ideas from another of Kafka’s works, The Metamorphosis, Form Submission uses a network of interactive forms to explore the unique ways that digital bureaucracy not only serves as a Neoliberal control mechanism, but also renders its users abject through the continual quantification and (re)adjustment of their identity.

State entities are especially guilty of this form of abjectification and secondhand violence, since they are most often the gatekeepers of essential services and supports, the most obsessive about ‘security’ and the threat of ‘fraud’ against the system, and are almost universally underfunded and understaffed. The language of the online submission form for CERB and CESB ‘benefits’ (Covid related relief funds issued by the Canadian government) became increasingly hostile over the few months that it existed, requiring exponentially more affirmations, disavowals and accepted threats of state violence to navigate.

And that’s only dealing with the control mechanisms that have been made explicit. Much of the violence of digital bureaucracy is merely implicit, or the consequence of unconsidered and unproblematized violence elsewhere in the system. Through the use of language, accessibility, (it’s becoming increasingly necessary to possess both digital technology and the skill to use it just to access the most marginal of social assistance) the need for legal documentation, and countless other barriers, trying to access even information (let alone money or services) from one of the state’s online mechanisms can be a harrowing experience, and one which more often than not yields no results.

Users must submit to having their identity quantified, qualified, recorded, rerecorded, stored and then sent back to them in an ‘acceptable’ format even to make an attempt at navigating the system, with all responsibility (and liability) for any errors or breakages within that system placed on their own shoulders. And each new layer, once accessed, often calls for the entire process to be repeated.

The violence and abjectification of this especially targets those in marginalized groups, whose ‘official’ identities (the ones recognized by the various online forms and portals which they must make use of) are made to conform to white, cis/heteronormative, english-speaking, colonial standards. Mistakes are common in all cases (my old Alberta health card inexplicably had my brother’s middle name instead of my own, despite him having lived in another province for over a decade) and are only compounded when the creation of an ‘acceptable’ identity involves translating languages, or making use of documents that are overseas, out of date, inaccessible, lost or non-existent in the first place (each of these conditions being reflective of yet further state failings and/or control mechanisms).

Form Submission is an online game (though a decidedly unfun one) which uses the same methods, language and technology of state and corporate maintained digital bureaucracies. As the user navigates it, through both forms and automated emails, they will be required to continually reaffirm their identity and their submission to the system, while at the same time that identity (as recognized by the system) is steadily shifted and malformed until it becomes unrecognizable; with no choice but to acquiesce in order to proceed, and no way to appeal or redress the subtle but significant violence done against them. It is an attempt to capture, and make at least partially more visible, the artificial, banal, centerless stupidity of Capital in itself.