(Roughly) Daily

The estimable Henry Farrell on James Scott and technology…

The political scientist James Scott died last week. I only knew him through email – an occasional and irregular correspondence, mostly involving unsuccessful attempts to organize discussion at political science conferences around his work. As he suggested in a biographical essay, “Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast,” which just came out a few months ago, he was semi-detached from his academic discipline.

I’ve wandered away from political science, though I could argue that political science has wandered away from me. I am honored even to be seen as a specialist, and probably as much to be embraced by anthropology and history.

The world was better for his iconoclasm. Scott wrote far more beautifully than political scientists are supposed to write and his ideas and work were too big to fit into any discipline. Although arguments were largely rooted in the past, his book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, has shaped how we think about technology.

Seeing Like a State is important because of how it sets up the problem of modernity. Scott was a critic of the vast impersonal systems – bureaucracies and markets – that modern society depends on. He believed that they prioritized the kind of thinking that comes easily to engineers over the kind that comes readily to peasants and craftsmen, and that we had lost something very important as a result.

In Scott’s account, both governments and long distance markets “see” the world through abstractions – technical standards, systems of categories and the like. A government cannot see its people directly, or what they are doing. What it can see are things like statistics measuring population, the number of people who are employed or unemployed, the percentages of citizens who work in this sector or that, and the like. These measures – in numbers, charts and categories – allow it to set policy.

Such knowledge grants its users enormous power to shape society – but often without the detailed, intimate understanding that would allow them to shape it well. There is a lot of social reality that is described poorly, or not at all, by categories or statistics. Even so, as governments and markets established their power, they not only saw the world in highly limited ways but shaped it so that it conformed better to their purblind understanding, ironing out the idiosyncrasies and apparent inefficiencies that got in the way of their vast projects. The state did not just ‘see’ its society through bureaucratic categories, but tried to remake this society so that it fit better with the government’s preconceptions.

So too for the abstractions and general categories that long distance markets depend on, as the historian William Cronon observed in his great book on nineteenth century Chicago, Nature’s Metropolis (Scott was a fan). As another scholar observed of Chicago’s late twentieth century markets, abstract seeming financial conceptions may be engines, not cameras, making the economy rather than merely reflecting them.

This abstraction of the world’s tangled complexities into simplified categories and standards underpinned vast state projects, and supported enormous gains in market efficiency. We could not live what we now consider to be acceptable lives without it, as Scott somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. It also often precipitated disaster, including Soviet collectivization and China’s Great Famine.

So what does this have to do with modern information technology? Quite straightforwardly: if you read Scott, you will see marked similarities between e.g. the ambitions of 1960s bureaucrats, convinced that they can plan out countries and cities for “abstract citizens” and the visions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that algorithms and objective functions would create a more efficient and more harmonious world.

Scott focuses on officials in developing countries, who were starry-eyed about “planning.” Many of their notions came second-hand from the most striking example of high modernism, the effort of Soviet bureaucrats to use production statistics and linear programming to make the planned economy work. This provides the most obvious connection between what Scott talks about and the algorithmic ambitions of Silicon Valley today. A distinct whiff of “Comrades, Let’s Optimize!” lingers on, for example, in the airy optimism of Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth’s infamous “We connect people. Period” memo.

Both the old ambitions and the new are bets on the universal power of a particular kind of engineering knowledge – what Scott calls techne, the kind of knowledge that can “be expressed precisely and comprehensively in the form of hard-and-fast rules (not rules of thumb), principles, and propositions.” Scott describes the limits of techne in ways that resonate today. The grand failed projects of the mid-to-late twentieth century – vast rationalized cities like Brasilia laid out according to plans that seemed almost to be the squares of a chessboard; efforts to displace peasants and plan agriculture at scale – are close cousins to Facebook’s failed ambitions to build a world of shared connections on algorithmic foundations, and the resulting social media Brezhnevism of today.

Hence, 20th century state planning and 21st century social media evangelism are different flavors of what Scott called “high modernism … a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” High modernism was both a faith and a practice. It turned rich and diffuse social relations into something much thinner, which could be measured and observed.

Against this kind of knowledge, Scott suggested the value of metis – “the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.” This is the kind of tacit knowledge that peasants come to build about their land and the weather, or that people in less regimented societies accumulate about how to live with others in tolerable peace. Scott – an anarchist – greatly preferred this latter kind of knowledge, and the societies that valued it more, to the kind of world we live in today.

Scott provides intellectual ammunition for those who want to understand what Silicon Valley has in common with past grand efforts to improve the human condition. It’s a fountain of useful comparisons…

[Farrell reviews elaborations on and critiques of Scott’s thought…]

… All this suggests that you could reframe my criticisms of Scott in more positive ways. His contribution is not to provide a systematic framework for getting ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into, but to plant some of the seeds for a different intellectual ecology, in which others will take up his thoughts, use them to argue, also arguing with them and arguing with each other, and hence discover aspects of the world that they would never have seen otherwise. That would be as fine a legacy as any thinker could want…

Eminently worth reading in full: “High Modernism made our world,” from @mastodon.social@henryfarrell in his wonderful newsletter Programmable Mutter.

See also: “The Art of Pretending to Govern,” from @vgr.

* Freeman Tilden

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As we see like a state, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was actually signed (by all of the signatories except Matthew Thornton from New Hampshire, who inked it on November 4, 1776).  After the Continental Congress voted to declare independence on July 2, the final language of the document was approved on July 4– to wit our celebration of the date– and it was printed and distributed on July 4–5.

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