Seeing Like a State

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.

I liked this as a rejoinder to most of what I read, which is primarily a celebration of technocracy and expertise. Most of these case studies warned against going too far without listening to feedback of those whose lives you are purporting to help. Worth remembering these days.

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.

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.

Excellent collection of case studies, but falls short in the last couple of chapters.

Full of good insights, but I could have used less explanation of why Soviet collectivization was wrong on every level and more than the passing reference that was made to the properties that make certain problems amenable to large-scale planning.