[gentoo]

The human faces of the machine are our only hope. The alternative is, in the short term, a machine face of the machine, whom you can't argue with and who will summarily deny your benefits with no chance of appeal. In the long term, the alternative is no machine at all.

The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.

Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.

See, e.g., the case studies in https://virginia-eubanks.com/automating-inequality/.

[salawat]

See, here's the thing. All the planning and whatnot for the human facing part of the org was done years in advance, and nobody factors/designs in bottom-up change from the consumers of the process. If you aren't willing to comply, you are written off as not the target demographic. Physical production/bureaucracy/software development, it's all the same shit. Just different labels, and by the time the process bumps into you, it's already ossified. Literally the only way to change things is targeting actual executives. They are the only ones with the authority to change things, and they do everything possible to hide themselves/insulate themselves from having to do it. Even then though, it may be for naught. Governmental bureaucrats are often limited by statute/politics/resources. The lack of care we experience on a day to day basis is the system working as designed. Should it be designed that way? Probably not. But until we can figure out a better way to do things, or we stop all being asshats to one another, this is what we have to work with.