As much as my priors made me love the ideas in Seeing Like a State, I felt the same way about the "well what shall we do then?" take. Most implementations of high modernism we have today are (IMO) net *good*, not bad, even though there've been downsides. I've always been a both-siders on many things — every system comes with pros and cons. You make trades. Somewhere between living-like-peasants with rich tribal knowledge and the authoritarian nanny state is some medium we can make work (we already do).
To me the key is avoiding the guardrail extremes, but algorithm culture seems to constantly pull people to the edges: one group wanting to go back to the middle ages, the other to drag the world into a global New Economic Order. One group crows Malthusian overpopulation and climate disaster, the other unmitigated technological acceleration. Maybe we could meet in the middle...
Henry, thank you for this, particularly your, "OK, then what shall we do?" criticism.
I spent my career modelling enormous data sets on health systems to try get better care to more people. Now that I am in end-of-life care, I have a close and personal view of the truths Scott pointed to.
Unfortunately, harrowing suffering and bottomless unmet needs for care persist; I do not see how Scott's approach could address them. Therefore, I remain committed to my life's work. Doctors should read Seeing Like a State, but they also need to follow the evidence, such as it is.
For a different perspective on Silicon Valley that explicitly eschews the "techne" perspective of interests, here is Timothy Snyder "The New Paganism: How the Postmodern became Premodern" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nr2Q2zGNC8.
He is not talking about metis though. Perhaps the "passions"?
Thank you for the nice post. There’s lots to say, and I hope this sad event at least brings more discussion of Scott’s thinking in the coming months.
A few kernels of reactions:
1. I think Scott *does* have one normative notion in SLAS, and that is that high modernism may itself be net worthwhile for lots of problems, and that the danger itself is when it comes bundled with the authoritarian use of violence. Broadly I read Scott here as saying something like, “use high modernism, not too much, and be open to iterating on your model of the world when the voices of Métis grow loud.”
2. There’s a thread as it relates to software and Métis that I think has not been pulled, and should. It’s best described in the methods people roll up as “lean startup” or “do things that don’t scale” etc. These reflect a certain notion that software can be *extraordinarily* powerful when it models the world at the most efficient level of granularity/loss, AND that much of achieving that is through constant, practical tinkering in real circumstances out in the world which reveal to you what the behavior of users and systems actually is. I’ve often thought this is in effect an elegant solution to the Métis dilemma — engage in goal oriented but non opinionated practice at a small scale, and take what we find true in the mess and scale it up. I think it’s a blind spot in discussions of tech and Scott that there is a very real folk art of discovering and exploiting Métis in these practices of early rapid iteration and testing.
On 1 - that is my reading of Scott too, and this piece is a riff on it - https://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/25/seeing-like-a-finite-state-machine/ (roughly, the argument being that high tech modernism will have much more significant problems in non-democratic states because of the sparsity of other forms of feedback - both Martin Dimitrov and Jeremy Wallace have interesting discussions of how information problems plague these systems).
On 2. really worth reading Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine, which provides a theoretical account, based on Stafford Beer, that pairs very nicely with Jen Pahlka's more practical focus on software/institutional development, if you haven't already. I summarized some of the relevant bits here - https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/cybernetics-is-the-science-of-the - but the book itself is much more fun.
Ohh I'll be interested to read the Dimitrov and Wallace perspectives. I've been spending perhaps too much time thinking about information problems.
Your #2 reply is a bit trolling me, though very much unintentionally (I've been a big Dan Davies stan for some time and as for Jen's book, well, I/my work on SNAP is in it...)
I knew that you knew Jen (hence the mention) but didn't know that you'd read Dan. Although now that I think of it, she mentioned at some point or another that a friend independently liked Dan's work - so I am guessing that was possibly you?
Do you mean: the beholder? I found the traditional dress quaint & the local practices enormously reassuring & stable. I saw the same thing in Japan in the 90s - everyone dressing up for summer matsuris etc; But for my young Japanese friend, the culture was a prison. She wanted to choose her own values & her own style of life. In the 60s, the Anglo-American counter-culture threw off norms that stifled them. This is not a value judgement - it is a statement of fact that homogenous, stable norms will present a stifling environment for many people. While the opposite - heterogeneity & lack of norms or stability creates an atomised, isolated society. We exist within waves of state change from stabilisation / conservation into fragmentation / variation. That’s just the evolutionary process.
I thought a lot about Scott this last week while staying in the Austrian Alps. There is a fascinating co-ordination of high modernism - Teutonic order - with localism & community there. I kept pondering how small Alpine farms can still make home made produce & run inefficient herds in the mountains without succumbing to the optimisation & distillation that infects Anglo Saxon nations. Is Austria just living off the kindness of others - a wealthy nation able to subsidise ‘inefficient’ forms of production thanks to its proximity to Germany & strong currency? Or is there something to learn from societies that have allowed rules, order & engineering efficiency to co-exist alongside bottom up economic forms? Is the mittelstand key to the diversity & variation that is so evident in their economy? Or is the true driver of local, bottom up variation, something more obvious? Lower levels of inequality allowing efficiency savings to be re-invested, perhaps haphazardly, inefficiently, but from the bottom up & with large helpings of system slack. Of course, I also pondered the corollary of this local, connected, agrarian community - which is a distinct lack of human variation. Very few people of colour. Clear signals of status & region reflected in traditional dress styles that people willingly wore during the ‘dorfest’ (beer or music festivals held in local villages). Excellent food but lacking in the ethnic variety so familiar to me in Britain. Is the price of local, bottom up self organisation, a stifling set of norms & social rules that maintains the cohesion of these communities? Either way, it made me wonder about Scott & what he would have observed in these flows of village life & economic enterprise that seemed so appealing compared to the over-optimised, post efficient, spiritually downbeat, non-diversified economy of my own country.
If you'll forgive an uneducated position, your description of Scott's description of the problem vs. plan to deal with it sounds like what I hope is conventional wisdom about Marx and Marxism. Diagnosing the problem and treating it go well together in medicine, but doctors go through a lot to master each discipline. The example of Marxism shows how important it is to become an early adopter at addressing the problem, seizing the ground is a big advantage, especially when you're willing to kill your critics.
THANK YOU so much for introducing me to a whole world that I didn't know existed! ;-)
I look forward to reading this article more deeply and following up by reading some of the references you provided.
As a 40+ year veteren of "high tech" it is refershing and somewhat reassuring to see this type of discussion and analysis of the industry, its roots and subliminal drivers. Its reassuring in the sense that at least _SOMEONE_ is thinking about these things and talking about them. Perhaps from this type of analysis and discussion, "things can improve".
Thank you again for sharing your reading and writing
As much as my priors made me love the ideas in Seeing Like a State, I felt the same way about the "well what shall we do then?" take. Most implementations of high modernism we have today are (IMO) net *good*, not bad, even though there've been downsides. I've always been a both-siders on many things — every system comes with pros and cons. You make trades. Somewhere between living-like-peasants with rich tribal knowledge and the authoritarian nanny state is some medium we can make work (we already do).
To me the key is avoiding the guardrail extremes, but algorithm culture seems to constantly pull people to the edges: one group wanting to go back to the middle ages, the other to drag the world into a global New Economic Order. One group crows Malthusian overpopulation and climate disaster, the other unmitigated technological acceleration. Maybe we could meet in the middle...
Henry, thank you for this, particularly your, "OK, then what shall we do?" criticism.
I spent my career modelling enormous data sets on health systems to try get better care to more people. Now that I am in end-of-life care, I have a close and personal view of the truths Scott pointed to.
Unfortunately, harrowing suffering and bottomless unmet needs for care persist; I do not see how Scott's approach could address them. Therefore, I remain committed to my life's work. Doctors should read Seeing Like a State, but they also need to follow the evidence, such as it is.
For a different perspective on Silicon Valley that explicitly eschews the "techne" perspective of interests, here is Timothy Snyder "The New Paganism: How the Postmodern became Premodern" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nr2Q2zGNC8.
He is not talking about metis though. Perhaps the "passions"?
Thank you for the nice post. There’s lots to say, and I hope this sad event at least brings more discussion of Scott’s thinking in the coming months.
A few kernels of reactions:
1. I think Scott *does* have one normative notion in SLAS, and that is that high modernism may itself be net worthwhile for lots of problems, and that the danger itself is when it comes bundled with the authoritarian use of violence. Broadly I read Scott here as saying something like, “use high modernism, not too much, and be open to iterating on your model of the world when the voices of Métis grow loud.”
2. There’s a thread as it relates to software and Métis that I think has not been pulled, and should. It’s best described in the methods people roll up as “lean startup” or “do things that don’t scale” etc. These reflect a certain notion that software can be *extraordinarily* powerful when it models the world at the most efficient level of granularity/loss, AND that much of achieving that is through constant, practical tinkering in real circumstances out in the world which reveal to you what the behavior of users and systems actually is. I’ve often thought this is in effect an elegant solution to the Métis dilemma — engage in goal oriented but non opinionated practice at a small scale, and take what we find true in the mess and scale it up. I think it’s a blind spot in discussions of tech and Scott that there is a very real folk art of discovering and exploiting Métis in these practices of early rapid iteration and testing.
On 1 - that is my reading of Scott too, and this piece is a riff on it - https://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/25/seeing-like-a-finite-state-machine/ (roughly, the argument being that high tech modernism will have much more significant problems in non-democratic states because of the sparsity of other forms of feedback - both Martin Dimitrov and Jeremy Wallace have interesting discussions of how information problems plague these systems).
On 2. really worth reading Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine, which provides a theoretical account, based on Stafford Beer, that pairs very nicely with Jen Pahlka's more practical focus on software/institutional development, if you haven't already. I summarized some of the relevant bits here - https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/cybernetics-is-the-science-of-the - but the book itself is much more fun.
Ohh I'll be interested to read the Dimitrov and Wallace perspectives. I've been spending perhaps too much time thinking about information problems.
Your #2 reply is a bit trolling me, though very much unintentionally (I've been a big Dan Davies stan for some time and as for Jen's book, well, I/my work on SNAP is in it...)
I knew that you knew Jen (hence the mention) but didn't know that you'd read Dan. Although now that I think of it, she mentioned at some point or another that a friend independently liked Dan's work - so I am guessing that was possibly you?
Your guess is correct!
Do you mean: the beholder? I found the traditional dress quaint & the local practices enormously reassuring & stable. I saw the same thing in Japan in the 90s - everyone dressing up for summer matsuris etc; But for my young Japanese friend, the culture was a prison. She wanted to choose her own values & her own style of life. In the 60s, the Anglo-American counter-culture threw off norms that stifled them. This is not a value judgement - it is a statement of fact that homogenous, stable norms will present a stifling environment for many people. While the opposite - heterogeneity & lack of norms or stability creates an atomised, isolated society. We exist within waves of state change from stabilisation / conservation into fragmentation / variation. That’s just the evolutionary process.
I thought a lot about Scott this last week while staying in the Austrian Alps. There is a fascinating co-ordination of high modernism - Teutonic order - with localism & community there. I kept pondering how small Alpine farms can still make home made produce & run inefficient herds in the mountains without succumbing to the optimisation & distillation that infects Anglo Saxon nations. Is Austria just living off the kindness of others - a wealthy nation able to subsidise ‘inefficient’ forms of production thanks to its proximity to Germany & strong currency? Or is there something to learn from societies that have allowed rules, order & engineering efficiency to co-exist alongside bottom up economic forms? Is the mittelstand key to the diversity & variation that is so evident in their economy? Or is the true driver of local, bottom up variation, something more obvious? Lower levels of inequality allowing efficiency savings to be re-invested, perhaps haphazardly, inefficiently, but from the bottom up & with large helpings of system slack. Of course, I also pondered the corollary of this local, connected, agrarian community - which is a distinct lack of human variation. Very few people of colour. Clear signals of status & region reflected in traditional dress styles that people willingly wore during the ‘dorfest’ (beer or music festivals held in local villages). Excellent food but lacking in the ethnic variety so familiar to me in Britain. Is the price of local, bottom up self organisation, a stifling set of norms & social rules that maintains the cohesion of these communities? Either way, it made me wonder about Scott & what he would have observed in these flows of village life & economic enterprise that seemed so appealing compared to the over-optimised, post efficient, spiritually downbeat, non-diversified economy of my own country.
Are you sure they are stifling, just because they are local and relatively homogeneous?
"Stifling" is in the mind of the bearer, isn't it? Is there oxygen in city life or is it all laughing gas?
If you'll forgive an uneducated position, your description of Scott's description of the problem vs. plan to deal with it sounds like what I hope is conventional wisdom about Marx and Marxism. Diagnosing the problem and treating it go well together in medicine, but doctors go through a lot to master each discipline. The example of Marxism shows how important it is to become an early adopter at addressing the problem, seizing the ground is a big advantage, especially when you're willing to kill your critics.
THANK YOU so much for introducing me to a whole world that I didn't know existed! ;-)
I look forward to reading this article more deeply and following up by reading some of the references you provided.
As a 40+ year veteren of "high tech" it is refershing and somewhat reassuring to see this type of discussion and analysis of the industry, its roots and subliminal drivers. Its reassuring in the sense that at least _SOMEONE_ is thinking about these things and talking about them. Perhaps from this type of analysis and discussion, "things can improve".
Thank you again for sharing your reading and writing