That’s largely because bureaucracy in its simplest examination is there to let humans emulate computers. It was designed and conceived in the British empire to manage lands that the sun never set on from a tiny island off the coast of mainland Europe.

Bureaucracy allowed them to streamline the process so that buying land in Australia, India, or the Americas was exactly the same as buying land in London, and it was a fantastic system during a point in time that it took months to get a form from Southeast Asia to London.

We live in a time that the same functions of bureaucracy can be accomplished in fractions of a second from anywhere in the world, and even a few spots outside of the world. You could be isolated on the International Space Station and still perform bureaucratic functions as complex as being executor of an estate with minimal difference in living in the apartment directly across the street from the courthouse.

The issue with bureaucracy in this day and age is that it moves at the speed of paperwork and procedure in a day and age that the rest of the world functions at the speed of light, and those that wield those bureaucratic powers are loathe to relinquish any of them in the name of some nebulous concept like, “efficiency.”

What does it matter to the person at the school board if you have to physically go to their office and file a piece of paper, or physically track down a notary to witness to your change of address, when this same accomplishment could be a selection from a drop box on a website? Why should they give up the funding for some flunky to file that paperwork and walk you through the process? Efficiency doesn’t keep their friend employed. Efficiency doesn’t keep their budget filled. Efficiency probably costs them money to implement it, and costs them those cushy job totals a lot of such systems use to justify their very existence.

I don’t think it’s government though. It’s all of the technology we have implemented perhaps hiding its hand in how much it influences our behavior. Just a thought I’ve been pondering in the shower lol