Legibility, Illegibility, Anti-Legibility

version

version

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
I haven't seen him discussed on here I think, maybe because I spend my time reading 21 page threads about zhao's dick which were written while i was in secondary school, but there is all the james scott stuff about the legibility of populations to states, and the ways that people make themselves deliberately illegible to states in order to avoid being controlled by them.
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This is one of the fears about things like AI and the kind of surveillance tech we're developing. That they will be able to read us more comprehensively than we're able to read ourselves and we won't even know it. That it will be entirely out of our hands.
 
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shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
version said:
What's so difficult about it?
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it's been a while since i opened it, because i gave my copy to my friend usman and he never gave it back. the tough part i remember is the relentless minutiae about upland communities in myanmar, which seem to go on and on forever in a quite unstructured way.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
it's been a while since i opened it, because i gave my copy to my friend usman and he never gave it back. the tough part i remember is the relentless minutiae about upland communities in myanmar, which seem to go on and on forever in a quite unstructured way.
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i mean you can actually make sense of it. it's not like D&G or neitzsche. it just gets into the weeds a bit.
 
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luka

luka

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Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I went to a tech conference a few years back where one of the keynotes was basically half an hour of ideas about legibility from another James Scott book, Seeing Like A State, with a ten minute coda about how tech is fucking everything up:



How is a software project like the USSR?

Unfortunately, this is not a joke and the answer isn't funny. Software follows in a grand tradition of totalitarian regimes by creating a simplifying vision of how the world works, then forcing the world to fit that vision.

The vision is different, as is the power we use to enforce it, but the failure modes share a lot in common.

This is a talk about power. We all have it, and we cannot abdicate it, so instead we must use it carefully and responsibly.

I will try to set you on the path to doing so, by giving you the introduction to cultural anthropology and anarchist theory that I wish someone had given me before I ever started developing software.
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luka

luka

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some things are easy to read.
some things are hard to read.
some things can't be read?

but what's he getting at?
 
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luka

luka

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i have to go to cambridge now. you lot will have to sort it out. it's beyond me.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
It's a thread about how we strategically make ourselves easy or hard to read

Yeah SLAS is an interesting book I haven't read Scott's others, but it does get into the way making a system legible is often a move for control, taxation, regulation which impoverishes the local community because they have to reorganize their activity in a way that makes sense to outsiders/higher-ups. It also gets in a bit to the fetish of legibility, where officials prefer straight orderly lines and matrices from a surveillance standpoint, but these things aren't necessarily amenable to quality on the ground.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
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shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
version said:
This is one of the fears about things like AI and the kind of surveillance tech we're developing. That they will be able to read us more comprehensively than we're able to read ourselves and we won't even know it. That it will be entirely out of our hands.
Click to expand...
Yeah, right, exactly. It's a bit of a game changer when it comes to controlling people in general I think. Obviously there's no way to know, but I quite often end up wondering if this is going to be a big part of whatever it is that comes after democracy.
 
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