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(This is the first of many promised articles which explain an idea in isolation. It is hoped that ideas may be adapted, linked together and implemented.)

Someone from my makerspace said "We're living in a post-Xerox world." and he didn't mean Xerox's business of photocopiers.

The original objectives of Xerox PARC are in widespread use. That includes object programming languages, arbitrary bitmap displays, vector graphic storage formats, laser printing, ubiquitous desktop computer networking and - most notably - ruggedized, kid-safe computers which are no larger or heavier than a pad of paper.

He believes that we're in a malaise because we've reached a widely known goal and there is no agreed continuation. Actually, he believes the problem is more fundamental. Collectively, we don't know that there was a set of ideas popularized by one organization nor do we know that we attained it.

I believe that we have a different problem. We've implemented digital paper rather than digital computing. This would be a problem if it stayed in a computer but it often spills onto paper too. A word-processor and rapid printing is contrary to a paperless workflow. Most significantly, it has continued the trend of increasing bureaucracy and forms. Even in the 18th century, people complained that there were too many forms. Now we have forms on paper, in HTML, PDF, apps and elsewhere.

This is tedious. It costs time and money. There is the obvious cost of time spent completing a form and time spent by administrators to process a form. Many types of fraud can be achieved merely by completing forms. As an example, a dental fraud cost UK taxpayers £1.4 million (US$2 million). It was achieved by completing about 30 forms per day describing fictious dental treatment.

Bureaucracy is organized around institional memory. This may be quipu storage, filing cabinets, file servers or databases. Bureaucrats perform ingress and egress filtering. Both may be infuriating. Ingress filtering should ensure that institional memory is accurate but this rarely occurs when the cost of errors is externalized. For example, when hundreds of large companies have read/write access to credit checks, the majority of credit reports are wrong. Egress filtering should restrict disclosure of sensitive information but, again, costs are externalized. Obtaining any meaningful change of state may be difficult. Ensuring an accurate round-trip of data may be impossible. Likewise for any inter-organizational change of state.

Block-chain enthusiasts claim that smart-contracts will significantly reduce these problems. It could make inter-organizatioal state atomic. However, unwinding bad states may require an individual with the skills of a lawyer and a programmer. Furthermore, the reduced friction of transactions could make state changes more frequent. Essentially, by Jevons paradox, this encourages more bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the interface between person and bureaucracy may become increasingly quixotic.

Forms continue to proliferate without satisfactory user testing and each form remains an oblique signal for a bureaucracy to change state. That's increasingly irrelevant when nation-states are falling apart and corporations are increasingly untrustworthy. Indeed, while peons are completing each other's forms and contact each other in telephone call centers, our overlords collect data in bulk and transform it into structured data. The most benign example is marketing analytics for the purpose finding the local maxima of a business model. Another example is an opt-out, keyword aggregating marketplace which skims value from millions of parties. This is commonly called a search engine. Then there is the fascist, totalitarian panopticon of signals intelligence which treats every citizen as an enemy.

However, there is another way. It requires a more suitable building block of data. I intend to describe this next.