When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank:
pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/n...
42/
pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: Netflix wants to chop down your family tree (02 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow