Bruno Latour’s work on “inscription devices” helps explain why documents are so potent: an inscription can move through a network while keeping its shape, allowing decisions made in one place to be enforced in another. A form is an “immutable mobile” that drags a whole institution behind it. - bruno-latour.fr 
This is a neutral capability: it can scale care (benefits, protections, rights) or scale harm (exclusion, surveillance, bureaucratic violence), depending on design.