Notes on Vexatious Systems

an update, delayed by a vexatious system

I’m late for this week’s subscriber update thanks to the government of America. You see, I was going to send a cute little letter about my trip to Berkeley, the kind of low-stakes, lyrical travelogue that I can comfortably emit when I’m on the road and I have little time to contemplate more substantive thoughts. But then a customs officer refused to grant my TN visa. It’s cool, I’m working it out. But it made me think about vexatious systems.

In a naive stage of my life, I thought of bureaucratic tasks as ‘simple’ or ‘complicated,’ which is to say, I looked at the number of steps involved, and assigned an anticipated difficulty to the task based on that. But this is not a complete picture. It doesn’t take into account what turns out to be the most important quality of a system: the overall agenda, the guiding principle. One key element of that agenda is whether a system is inherently vexatious, as opposed to collaborative.