Big Tech Sees Like a State
diff.substack.com
diff.substack.com
"Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is a book by James C. Scott critical of a system of beliefs he calls high modernism, that centers around confidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with scientific laws. It was released in March 1998, with a paperback version in February 1999. The book catalogues schemes which states impose upon populaces that are convenient for the state since they make societies 'legible', but are not necessarily good for the people. For example, census data, standardized weights and measures, and uniform languages make it easier to tax and control the population.
The actual practice is more Feudalism-lite of alliegences and fiedoms. It is why bureaucracy was an improvement. Even with all of its pain in the ass inanities, rigidities the fiefdom seeking is lessened as they have less discretion to abuse it with defined rules.
The agenda of Scott echoes bad ideas been seen many times before. It seems to be an "anti-practical so they can call it intellectually pure" pseudo-intellectualism legacy of philosophers idolizing the Greeks who were largely essentially being "paid" (even if technically slaves their lifestyle was supported without toil) to kiss up to aristocracy and promote their prestiege and looking down upon anything practical.
That toxic anti-practical attitude just keeps on showing up in history. The "southern aristocrats" and old money distancing itself from the new in the industrial revolution. Because aristocracy defined themselves as not working but fighting and owning. The split of natural philosophy from philosophy and into science was a good but it implicitly left a "but not emperical thinking as it has become too lowly and practical!" to philosophy leaving it frankly tending towards the delusional. Yes there is "philosophy of science" but the need for the qualifier is a hint that it isn't an implicit norm with respect to empiricism.
The article also misses the mark in claiming a reversion from machine learning - even if it loses legibility the fact it is still based upon the data instead of direct personal whims is still a net perk even if the rules it operates end up Garbage In Garbage Out. The judgement of it may still be evaluated and adjusted - just like every other rule based system.
I can buy wonderful handmade artisanal croissants at my local bakery, but they will never feed the number of people that Conagra can. (E.g. They make Peter Pan peanut butter and everything else in your cabinet)
You could host your email with a small family owned and operated company, but it will never be as cheap as gmail.
Imposing legibility is also a requirement to making a market. That's what makes products similar across different manufacturers/providers. Remember the bad old days where this programming language meant you had to use that database? Imposing legibility means that you can swap out one vendor for another! Suddenly, you have the freedom to choose.
I agree with the idea but markets result in emergent legibility rather than imposed legibility.
Whether it's the stock market, or the European common market, or the Amazon ecommerce section, everywhere you can see very strict, imposed legibility. Order, schemata and standardization and smoothing expectations through very formal, top-down rules on how to conduct oneself become more and more common as a market increases in size and/or complexity.
I agree on the legibility aspect. How are these being imposed? From what I understand, the joint-stock company was created before S corps, C corps, and LLCs were codified into law. Amazon's marketplace is not regulated according to any special rules except for what rules apply to everyone and the rules that Amazon sets forth for use of their own marketplace. I'm not seeing your point.
The same is true for social media companies of course, to the point where the form of discussion itself specified (280 characters!). The modern tech corporation and its users are essentially a more advanced version of what James C. Scott imagined the modern and competent state to look like.
Of course we're not living in Shadowrun (yet) and they haven't claimed extraterritoriality or impose their own law in a literal sense, but we're not far off. (see the censorship debate)
That is my point. I'm saying that legibility is not imposed by the state, but arises from market actors in an emergent fashion.
"Suppose that [“a mythical visitor from Mars”] approaches the Earth from space, equipped with a telescope that revels social structures. The firms reveal themselves, say, as solid green areas with faint interior contours marking out divisions and departments. Market transactions show as red lines connecting firms, forming a network in the spaces between them. Within firms (and perhaps even between them) the approaching visitor also sees pale blue lines, the lines of authority connecting bosses with various levels of workers. As our visitors looked more carefully at the scene beneath, it might see one of the green masses divide, as a firm divested itself of one of its divisions. Or it might see one green object gobble up another. At this distance, the departing golden parachutes would probably not be visible.
No matter whether our visitor approached the United States or the Soviet Union, urban China or the European Community, the greater part of the space below it would be within green areas, for almost all of the inhabitants would be employees, hence inside the firm boundaries. Organizations would be the dominant feature of the landscape. A message sent back home, describing the scene, would speak of “large green areas interconnected by red lines.” It would not likely speak of “a network of red lines connecting green spots."
And this has only accelerated in the last few decades. Walmart in a sense is the largest communist experiment in the United States.
From a macro perspective the difference would be whether the owner of a firm or conglomerate is able to make decisions that would cause him to lose his conglomerate or if he can compel people to continue to support him. Of course in the US we have plenty of enterprise that are "too big to fail" but to my knowledge amazon is not yet one of them.
For the record, I'm strongly against these companies having free reign over markets and societies, but opportunistically sympathetic towards them sometimes counterbalancing arbitrary government actions. Of course I'd prefer having sane governments controlled by the public, but that is a pipe dream in most countries.
>And yet, very few people emigrate from highly legible countries in the United States and Western Europe in order to live in more informal ones. Meanwhile, many people around the world do choose to immigrate to those hyper-legible societies.
I don't think this is completely accurate. Really old republican democracies, mainly the US and Switzerland, seem to have less legibility than more modern, centralized and top-down states (model: France). There are more independent local institutions and old privileges of the populace that no autocratic government managed to remove. Things like guns, lack of compulsory IDs, local direct democracy, electing small local officials. Mind you, I'm not saying that the US is some civil rights paradise in practice (in fact, I'm happy to not be living there), just that it has more historical mess to counteract easy legibility and centralization.
I'd say that the Eastern Bloc tends towards even more legibility than Western Europe, because totalitarian regimes (and even earlier, reactionary monarchies) have destroyed organic, grassroots social institutions. People were taught to resist bureaucracy by petty cheating, not by conscious political action. (This is slowly changing, maybe.) Even moreso, of course, mainland China.
In short: people immigrate to societies with high standard of living and rule of law. Both are loosely correlated with legibility.
This is a good explanation of how the process of instrumental rationality turned into a runaway positive feedback cycle of social irrationality.