Granular Certainty, the Vertical Filing Cabinet, and the Transformation of Files

The novelty of the vertical filing cabinet and tabbed manila folder derived from a faith in granular certainty. The belief that breaking things down into small components would increase the possibility that a desired outcome would happen shaped the discourse of efficiency and a historically specific conception of information. The filing cabinet dev

Paper in vertical files gave a material existence to information as a thing that could be detached and repositioned, reordered, and recombined.

Managers made the machine, with its supporting ideas of harmony and order, central to the conception of organizational problems that they then argued required trained managers to solve. Therefore, as sociologist Yehouda Shenhav argues, their writings explicitly carried the assumption that everything was a technical problem; they designated all part