Auteur: aliza

One of my all-time favorite stories is Franz Kafka’s Before the Law. It sounds better in the original German: Vor dem Gesetz. It is one of those stories that reveal a new treasure every time you reread it. Today, I can’t read it without thinking of Machine Law.

The anti-hero of this short story wants to enter the Law, but is held back by a guard, who also warns him that he is only the first, and least intimidating, gatekeeper of many. This surprises our hero:

“The man from the country had not expected such difficulties; the law is after all meant to be accessible to everybody at all times, he thinks, but now as he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, his large pointed nose and his long thin black Tatar beard, he decides that he would actually prefer to wait until he receives permission to enter.”

The law should be accessible to everybody at all times. How can you follow rules, plan your life, if you don’t know them? Or if you can’t foresee the consequences. However, that is exactly what is going on with our society. We made our rules and systems so complex that players in the system cannot oversee the whole system. That would not be such a big problem if the government took on itself the duty to make the rules accessible, and the consequences of these rules for specific cases foreseeable, for everyone.

In Dutch administrative law, there is a principle that government officials are held to honor, called the principle of legal certainty. This principle, however, does not apply to legislators. So, to tackle this problem at the core, we need to reverse the burden of complexity to the state. This would put many bookkeepers and lawyers out of work—or make them work for the government. And that’s a good thing. Because now, if you can’t afford one, you are always behind the state in the rules game.

I asked Claude to illustrate this with an analogy, starting with the situation of a child and household rules. It came up with this:

Imagine you are a child, and your bedtime is 7 pm (you are still very young). Now over time, your parents’ simple bedtime rules expanded like this:

Your bedtime is 7 PM on weekdays, unless it’s during Daylight Saving Time, in which case it shifts to 7:23 PM. On weekends, bedtime is “somewhere before 9 PM,” but this window adjusts based on your behavior coefficient calculated from a proprietary formula involving chore completion percentages and tone-of-voice metrics from the past 37 hours.

You must eat your vegetables before dessert, but “vegetables” are redefined monthly according to a rotating schedule in Appendix C of the Household Nutrition Guidelines. Green beans count as vegetables on Mondays, Wednesdays, and alternate Fridays, but are classified as “questionable legumes” requiring special permission forms on other days.

“Bad behavior” warrants penalties, with the definition of “bad” encompassing an ever-expanding universe of infractions including “excessive sighing,” “improper sock alignment,” and “unauthorized eyebrow raising.” The complete list exists in a 217-page manual that is simultaneously “always available upon request” yet perpetually “being updated.”

Penalties are determined by cross-referencing the Transgression Severity Index with the Monthly Privilege Matrix, but special exceptions apply during lunar eclipses or when visitors are present.

The consequence? You, the child, stop trying to understand the system entirely. Instead, you either:
– Live in constant anxiety, never knowing when you’re breaking an unknowable rule
– Ignore all rules completely, accepting random punishments as inevitable
– Develop elaborate workarounds that comply technically but defeat the purpose

This is precisely what happens when legal systems become excessively complex. Citizens cannot reasonably navigate their obligations, creating either paralysis, rebellion, or cynical compliance. The law transforms from a framework for fair social operation into an incomprehensible labyrinth that punishes the unwary and rewards those who can afford to exploit its complexity.

True rule of law requires that those subject to it can understand what is expected of them without needing a team of specialists to translate their obligations.

In a household situation, the above scenario is obviously absurd. In real life, we think it’s perfectly fine to complicate the rules indefinitely, to such an extent that we need bookkeepers, lawyers and years of education ourselves to navigate the system. But is it? I don’t think so. A new principle is needed. The burden of complexity should land with the rule-setter. So the choice is there: you can still make things more complex, but the services offered should be on par. Better yet, don’t overcomplicate in the first place.

There should be guides, welcoming you at the gates, handing you a plan, snacks for the way—and explanations at every landmark. “On our left, we see a relic of the old Law, we also like to call it ‘The Maze’. Nobody uses it anymore, but we revisit it regularly as a reminder of what happens when there is no penalty on making things excessively complicated. And whenever a legislator, policymaker, or lawyer proposes a rule that overcomplicates things, we drop them in the maze without food or drinks. None of them are ever seen again.”

And yes. This guide is there for you, and you only, tailored to your needs.

“If I had known what I know now, I would never have accepted this job.”
The government manager of a high-stakes, high-value program sighed – and at the same time, there was a shimmer in his eyes that said something different. Something like: “If I had known what awaited me, I would have refused – and missed out on this huge, risky, challenging opportunity.” That it was also kind of…cool? Rewarding?

The day before, Roos and I had a meeting with several people on the question “to fieldlab or not to fieldlab” with the ‘loonaangifteketen’. The ‘loonaangifteketen’ is a critical Dutch government digital infrastructure for tax and social security contributions, where employers electronically submit wage and employment data to government agencies. Although the general idea of holding a Fieldlab appealed to them, the work and investment required from all involved parties seemed to set them off. There is the organizational aspect of it, which requires a lot of work and thinking through, setting the right conditions for the programmers and makers of other things like policy, law, processes, at the event. Choosing and defining the case, designing the right materials to communicate what you will do, and have done, communicating continuously with stakeholders – all of this takes time and effort. But the rewards are real, and the rippling effect after the event is amazing. We have not yet organized a Fieldlab that we regret.

No one captures these kinds of dilemmas better than the Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska in “One Version of Events”. She lists all types of objections and fears that we would have had, had we been given the choice to enter life as we know it:

If we’d been allowed to choose,
we’d probably have gone on forever.

The bodies that were offered didn’t fit,
and wore out horribly.

The ways of sating hunger
made us sick.
We were repelled
by blind legacy
and the tyranny of the glands.

The list goes on and on, life is not appealing at all – or maybe, but only some lives, under some circumstances. Luckily, or not, we don’t have a choice, and we sure don’t know what awaits us in real life. In work, we think it’s different. We make budgets, business cases, and step-by-step plans like we presented to the colleagues from the ‘loonaangifteketen’. Even if you think something will take long, and a lot of effort – it will probably take longer, and more effort. Science says so. And even if we are aware of this fact, we will still overestimate our abilities and underestimate the effort. Could it be that we are programmed to be optimistic, to avoid analysis paralysis? Would we ever begin anything at all, if we knew what it would cost us?

To make things more complicated, there are choices that will alter the person we are altogether. This means that the person making the decision is not the same as the person who will experience the effects of that decision, because the choice itself will change you. Having children is a good example. There is no explanation in the world that will make you understand what it means to become a parent, and only when you are one, will you know what this means. But also choices for a certain profession, made as a child or young adult, are choices that we cannot fully foresee the consequences of. Every time we try something completely new, to some extent, we face this dilemma. And yet, this is how we live, evolve, and develop.

The choice to organize a Fieldlab or not is not equal to that of having a baby or choosing a profession. It is a challenge for us, however, to show why it is worth the considerable investment to people who haven’t done it before. And in a wider perspective, this applies to all the new things we do, the new techniques and standards, the new concepts that we introduce. It’s a world that we don’t know, that is therefore hard to imagine. But hey, that’s exactly where a Fieldlab comes in: it makes the future imaginable. And a little less scary.

In Szymborska’s poem, the lingerers find themselves in fewer and fewer numbers left behind:

We struck ourselves as prudent,
petty, and ridiculous.

In any case, our ranks began to dwindle.
The most impatient of us disappeared.
They’d left for the first trial by fire,
This much was clear,
especially by the glare of the real fire
they’d just begun to light
on the steep bank of an actual river.

A few of them
actually turned back.
But not in our direction.
And with something they seemed to have won in their hands.

As a child, when I was bored, and complained about it, my mother would always suggest a tedious task. “You can iron tea towels.” Or something similarly understimulating. Sometimes she would not bother coming up with a task and simply say “That’s good, it’s good to be bored.” My father would transfer the wisdom of ages in his family to me, and answer in English: “Go bang your head against the wall.”

I hated these predictable exchanges. One time I actually started ironing tea towels. But mostly I would just sit and be bored and, after having received those familiar replies, annoyed as well.

Now, I work in an environment, where there is no time to get bored. We plan meetings head-to-tail, without room for basic human needs like hydrating, physical movement, toilet visits. We work as abstractions of ourselves, bodyless figures that need only an internet connection to transfer knowledge and achieve Success at Work. To the point that it almost seems that Success at Work is defined by the number of meetings you’ve had, and the number of meetings you’ve planned that lead to new meetings and e-mails, that generate new e-mails, that call for new meetings, and so on and so forth (they never end, the world will end before e-mail and meetings end).

To actually get things done, we need time. Time to make things – which follows a different logic from communication time. Anne wrote about that this week. But we also need time to think. Whereas maker’s time and manager’s time is a respectable way to spend your working hours, there is never in anyone’s office schedule a time to think. And by thinking I don’t mean a structured brainstorm, but time to ponder, to drift, to wander and discover what happens when you do nothing. Pondering time.

It sounds better in Dutch:

Mijmertijd.

Today, I iron my tea towels. It’s free mijmertijd.