This reminded me of my favorite David Greaber book: The utopia of rules (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules).

Greaber, if I remember right, argues that modern bureaucracy started with efficient means of communication. He squares the Deutsche Post as the milestone, as they made the whole population available to be controlled. Now the state could send them letters, count them, enlist them in the military etc.. It's a brilliant observation: communication technology is the main tool of the bureaucracy. The tangent he takes fron there is even more brilliant: we have been heavily focusing and improving the communication tech (telephone, fax, tv, radio, internet, social media) but not necessarily the tech to reduce thr burden of work for the masses (robots!). If you would ask someone 100 years ago how the future would look like, people would almost invariably say they would need to work less in the future, abd at some point they invariably expected to have robots do all the work. Yet, all we got is smartphones that watch every movement of us, makes us available to the employer anywhere and anytime, hence more means to control us by state or, exceedingly, private bureaucracies. There's a reason why AI boom is happening, as this is the next tech on the bureaucracy tree.

This being said, none of these tech are bad by themselves. It is the shape they took and the way they are used in contemporary society. To tie with the OP: we have communication tools available to us that is billions of times more efficient and effective yet the customer service, or any interaction with any big corporation (as a customer or employee) or state got so much worse and impersonal. Impersonal as in, individual cases do not exist anymore, only policies. One could have expected to escalate a claim back in late 19th century by just writing letters and eventually get to someone, or even just show up at the offices of a company and get their problem resolved (this is still the case in developing countries). Can we expect this now?