Plausible Deniability

Earlier this morning, something incredible happened:

I was rejected by a machine that insisted nobody had taught it how to discriminate.

I asked who was responsible.

The representative said the algorithm.

I asked who had built it.

The engineer said management had specified the requirements.

Management said legal had approved the process.

Legal said the decision was consistent with policy.

I asked who had written the policy.

They sent me a link.

I read it.

The policy stated

that all decisions were made in accordance with applicable criteria.

I asked who had chosen the criteria.

They sent me another link.

This one explained how the system applied them.

I began to suspect

I was being fucked by a committee

that had outsourced the fucking

and retained the right to deny there had been any fucking at all.

I asked for a human being.

They said a human being was not required at this stage.

I asked when one would be required.

They said if I wished to appeal.

I appealed.

The appeal was reviewed

by the same system that had rejected me.

The appeal was rejected.

The system had considered my case from every possible angle.

Except the one from which I was a person.

I asked to speak to someone

who could overrule the decision.

They said no such person was available.

Not that the decision was irreversible.

Not that nobody had the authority.

Only that the person with the authority was unavailable.

I pictured them at lunch.

A sandwich in one hand.

My future in the other.

Both entirely disposable.

I asked when they would return.

The representative said they couldn't provide a timeline.

And then, they thanked me for my understanding.

I couldn't quite understand

what, precisely, I was supposed to understand.

That nobody had intended this?

That everybody had done their job?

That somewhere between

the person who wrote the rules

and the person who suffered them,

we had built a machine

that could make a human decision

without requiring a human being to stand behind it?

We used to need a person to look you in the eye while ruining your day.

Now we call that inefficiency.

I closed the browser.

The decision remained.

Somewhere, someone had made it.

Somewhere, someone could reverse it.

Somewhere, a person

was having a perfectly ordinary day, unaware

that doing nothing had become the most consequential thing

they'd done all year.

There was no villain to expose.

No monster to drag into the light.

Just a job well done,

a policy correctly applied,

a performance review to look forward to.

And me,

holding the consequences of a decision

nobody had made.