The persistence of paper

Fenna Hoefsloot

The popular Dutch children's book Otje tells the story of a young girl living with her chaotic but loving father, Tos. Tos has a big problem; he has no papers. Ever since he lost them in the ‘kompjuter’ building, he has not been able to retrieve them. In the book, his lack of papers leads to a whirlwind tour across the world in search of official documents so they can finally settle down.

Now, many years after having read that story, I am reminded of it because, for the first time in my life, I am confronted with the same problem. I have no papers. And perhaps even stranger in today's digitalized world, I need papers.

For Dutch citizens migrating to the UK as skilled workers, the visa application process has become fully digitized. With the near field community technology in my phone, I was able to scan the chip in my passport to share my biometrics with the UK customs office while sitting in a café in Amsterdam. One week later I received a digital notice that I had the right to live and work in the UK. Similarly, my employment and housing contract were signed digitally in specifically designed information infrastructures, validating the pixels on my screen as a legal document.

Of course, this is not the reality for everyone. Specifically in a context for increased hostility towards refugees and migrants trying to settle in the UK, my experience is one of privilege. But with a sponsorship statement, an English language degree, and a European passport, the UK boarders are easily opened. All without a single paper document passing through my hands.

Nevertheless, the first post I received in the UK was a letter from the bank explaining that to open a checking account, I need to provide proof of residence by sending the original files to the bank by post. The bank offers plenty of options for proof of residence, from an official copy of a driver's license stating my address, to utility bills or letters regarding council tax. But I have none. Living in shared housing the utility bills are not in my name and my Dutch driver's license is of no use. Having just moved a couple of weeks ago, I have yet to receive a bill from the council tax office.

I have PDFs by the dozen and can easily share my right to work and rent via a share code. But there is no paper trail tying me to this country, employer, or home. Not even a stamp in my passport indicating I have crossed the border.

The ‘digital’ enmeshes in the organization of society to the extent that there are few aspects of governance that have not been, at least to part extent, influenced by digital technologies. Annalisa Pellizza has done extensive research on the digital infrastructures that enact the border of the EU. Misalignment in the data collection and classification, or a lack of interoperability between databases create cracks in the system and can cause major drawbacks in the processing of citizenship. She argues that these technologies not only enact the migrant as a distinct personal category, but also enact the state, and make the country. With each person processed through the system, the notion of state and nation is (re)defined. The ongoing processes and consequences of digitalization determine movement, status, and identity, as well as statehood.

Yet, sitting here with the letter from the bank in my hand made me reflect on the relationship between digitalized information infrastructure and the paper infrastructure, and how, in the process of datafication, not all systems are aligned. Because while digital technologies have transformed the way the state can register people and places and govern the city, for citizens to be included into these data based and registered by the digital infrastructure, paper often still functions as gatekeeper.

Of course, I am hardly the first to be confronted by the importance of paper. As Matthew Hull describes in his book ‘Government of Paper’, governments continue to dependent on paper documents with written directives, rules, maps, and personal information which are circulated, lost and stored, and in doing so, create a material infrastructure which has agency. Like Pellizza’s thesis that digital infrastructures enact the state, Hull explains how in Islamadad the material – paper-based - infrastructure makes the state and is the complex and oftentimes opaque system through with is governs it citizens, land, and resources. With the effect that people living in various degrees and conditions of informality, such as Otje’ s dad, Tos, continuously fall between the cracks of the paper bureaucracies in which we live.

Also, during my PhD research on the datafication of water governance in Lima, Peru, it became clear how the importance of paper persists in the digitalized state. While Lima’s water company uses drones to create semi-automated maps of the unplanned newly urbanized peripheries of the city, citizens rely on paper maps, with stamps and signatures from the right people from the right departments, to be registered and counted in the GIS based municipal cadaster. Thus, while this information is later digitalized, without an original paper map, there is no way a resident can apply for a water connection.

Much can and needs to be said about what digital technologies do to the ability, or lack thereof, of states in governing citizenship and urbanization processes; at the same time, the very non-digital roots of the digital state need thorough illumination. We must pay attention to how the digital infrastructure is built on top of already existing structures paper bureaucracies that pre-dated the digital and oftentimes still forms their fundament. Because while digitalization of state processes might at first glance seem awe-inspiring – my reaction during the efficient visa application process - it is the interaction between paper and digital that reveals sites of displacement, erasure, and extraction.

Thus, while I eagerly wait for the paper post proving that I live in the house at which it arrives, I am looking forward to further conceptually and empirically analyzing how digitalization is structuring urbanization in the metropolitan regions of Nairobi, Guadalajara, and Mumbai, and how the materiality and structures of earlier, paper-based, information infrastructures persist.