probably the best book i've read all year!
made me seriously reconsider some of my stances on problem-solving and progress. Scott leverages a well-evidenced critique of authoritarian technocracy, ultimately arguing for the elevation of local, adaptive knowledge in institutional reform. furthermore, he describes how ruling elites use simplification and legibility (often restructuring and mass data collection) to make complex systems more controllable.
he makes his case by illustrating the lofty goals and failures of various historical projects from scientific socialism in Tanzania to industrial agriculture in Germany to Le Corbusier's utopian city plans. I appreciated that his examples are not limited by field, sector, ideology, or geography.
he also avoids dismissing scientific approaches wholesale, instead arguing that they must be
combined with pragmatic knowledge (metis)
subject to input from the populace/workers/practitioners - a strong civil society
work best in closed systems rather than open and complex ones
implemented slowly and iteratively
I found this book a really good accompaniment to Antifragile and The Life and Death of Great American Cities (Jacobs is cited extensively), but broader and more rigorous than either (though the rigor bar is not that high).
finally, I'm most curious about how Scott's analysis applies to the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism - both major means of making complex systems more legible/manipulable, and consequently centralizing power in techno-elites as algorithmic decisionmaking becomes prevalent. tangentially, i think tech disruptions are especially prone to optimize one variable in a complex system at the cost of others.
sep 13, 2019
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