Layers of files built to stop favoritism, such as rigged handouts of housing, multiply into a maze. That maze then makes room for the very deals it was meant to block. The habit of writing everything down began as a colonial fear that local officials could not be trusted.
When decisions pass through a file that many officials each write on, no single person clearly made the decision. Piling on documentation does not tighten control from the top. Instead it spreads agency so thinly that responsibility becomes hard to pin down.
A visitor may carry a note or visiting card belonging to a powerful patron rather than their own. The paper itself stands in for the patron and makes his backing visible to the official. The physical form of a request, how it is handed over, and its wording together set up who ranks above whom.
Each routine note an official adds to a file is a lasting trace that can be read later by people and in situations they cannot foresee. So writing is a personal risk as well as a way of acting. Officials hand themselves over to an uncertain present and an unknown future every time they sign.
Writing systems first designed to keep government sealed off from the public become the main way the public takes part in it. People seize the state's own tools, such as lists, maps and petitions, and turn them against it. Sending petitions straight to the very top acts out the common belief that real power sits only at the peak.