I realised I was facing what the writer Dan Davies has named an “accountability sink”, in which it was somehow nobody’s fault. In his recent book The Unaccountability Machine, Davies explains the basic logic of an accountability sink: decision-making power is removed from individuals you might want to shout at, and made instead by an algorithm or some distant committee both ignorant of and immune to your objections.
Everyone I spoke to insisted that they were powerless to act. And if you cannot change a decision, you cannot be held accountable for it. That’s the accountability sink at work.
“Computer says no” first became a comedy catchphrase 20 years ago, so although the accountability sink is a useful new term it describes an older problem. Just ask 440 luckless squirrels who in 1999 arrived at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, en route from Beijing to Athens. Unfortunately, particularly for the squirrels, they had been shipped without the right paperwork.
What to do? It wasn’t legal to send them on to Athens. It wasn’t possible, apparently, to send them back to Beijing or to fix the paperwork. So the airport ground staff started up an industrial shredder normally used in poultry farms for killing male chicks and threw all 440 of the squirrels into it.