Seeing like a state

how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed

Hardcover, 445 pages

English language

Published July 10, 1998 by Yale University Press.

ISBN:
978-0-300-07016-3
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OCLC Number:
191730771

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4 stars (26 reviews)

Examines how (sometimes quasi-) authoritarian high-modernist planning fails to deliver the goods, be they increased resources for the state or a better life for the people.

11 editions

Good Anti-Nerd Datapoints

4 stars

So what you're telling me is that the scourge of society is a bunch of nerds trying to design away all of life's problems and their solutions always seem to involve lower classes working to solve the politburo's problems? And their plans fuck up the environment and destroy community knowledge of how to, y'know, live self-sufficiently and otherwise? And that by now many of us discontents are kinda just doomed because the network we need to survive is actively recuperated and destroyed by the state?

Fucking nerds, I swear to God. The meek will destroy the Earth.

The collection of historical narratives was quite interesting, and the overarching message was essentially archetypical. It's a basic point extremely well-explained even if I simply could not retain anything in my head from the final part. Metis entered my mind. I got that. And then I seemed physically incapable of maintaining my attention.

Review of 'Seeing Like a State' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

If you want an unsubstantiated critique of any more or less left wing political project that does not at all come to the grips with why they happen, how and why they fail this is the book for you. Instead of analysis of how state power develops and how it relates to capital you get a theory of how the aesthetic of high modernism, think straight lines, cause all sorts of trouble. While many of the projects he discusses indeed were tragedies attributing them to aesthetics seem extraordinary reductive and idiotic. The rise of capitalism and capital adjacent regimes (really existing socialism, developmental states) is more or less completely forgotten. The high points are either when he touches on the realities of politico economic constraints and when he seemingly unwittingly acknowledges the deep conservatism of the unacknowledged political project he sketches between the lines.

legibility, high modernism, metis

4 stars

I enjoyed this greatly and I am dyingggg to know about criticisms of big tech and surveillance capitalism that utilize the concepts in this book—particularly around legibility and the mechanization of people/minds. If you see this and you know of any, plz share! Such a good read for those of us in the interstitial spaces between the provably known and the experientially felt, and for those thinking about the pain and problems of objectivity.

Review of 'Seeing Like a State' on 'GoodReads'

5 stars

I read this because it was heavily cited in a few different blog posts/essays that I found thought-provoking. This took me a really long time to get through, but has similarly been really thought-provoking, and has influenced how I think about a lot of different things.

In a very small nutshell (maybe a pistachio?): abstraction can be very useful but it's very easy to overlook the value of all the concrete details along the way; blind faith in it combined with a way to impose the abstraction on others can be pretty dangerous.

For what it's worth, I think you can basically read the introduction and then read Part IV: The Missing Link. At the beginning of that part he summarizes the salient points of Parts II and III. If you find any of those stories particularly interesting, there's nothing stopping you from going back and actually reading them. I …

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Subjects

  • Central planning -- Social aspects
  • Social engineering
  • Authoritarianism

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