Understanding how bureaucracy develops

Here's an example from my corner of the Defense Department:

In order to publish a research paper, it has to be reviewed for suitability for public release. This process is more than a little silly, because it requires seven levels of review, of which exactly one - my immediate supervisor - will have any idea what the paper is about. But fine.

There used to be a paper form. You'd fill it out and either route it around for signatures, or if you had a time crunch, walk it around yourself. Eventually they replaced the paper form with a web form, so now there's an automated queuing system that emails people when they have a paper waiting to be reviewed.

The web form has all of the same info as the paper form, with one addition. They scanned the paper form and turned it into a pdf, and they make you fill out both the web form AND the pdf version of the original paper form. So to sign off on a paper, you now have to download the pdf, digitally sign it, upload it again, and hit the "Approve" button on the web form.

Because God help us if anybody does an audit and we don't have all of the forms correctly signed.

At a medical device manufacturer I worked at, it’s even worse: you print a copy of the thing to sign and sign it, then upload that to the digital system and digitally sign there too. You end up with several people printing huge documents, not just the signature page, and each signing a different copy which is uploaded then thrown away. That’s right, one paper copy per person is signed, scanned, then shredded.

Is a list or inventory maintained of research papers that aren’t published? What happens to those papers?

At least tell me the shredded paper is recycled so that the next document can be printed signed and shredded on it.

In my experience no research paper ever gets rejected, at least for reasons that have anything to do with their content. If your paper gets rejected, it is almost always because you failed to put the appropriate markings on the paper, or filled the form out wrong, and then you missed the conference deadline so the whole thing was OBE.

There is indeed a list of rejected papers. The system logs all of them. Generally they're recycled, updated, and published elsewhere.

Shredchain? Veracity by Proof of Shredding.

The list is probably not very interesting, the main benefit of these sort of censorship systems is that every knows of them and thus self-censor their output ahead of the explicit review step.

This is like the bureaucratic version of the Poop Machine art piece