Seeing Like a State. Every system here had to make you legible.
Front
Seeing Like a State
Every system here had to make you legible
Simplifying a messy reality until it can be counted and governed.
Back
To run anything at scale, a state first has to simplify it: surnames, street addresses, standard units, land registries, timetables. The map is always thinner than the ground it describes. James C. Scott's argument is that the damage starts when planners forget that, and rebuild the ground to match the map.
- Every card in this volume is a version of the same move. A system made the world legible enough to run, and the world quietly routed around it.
- The counterweight is local knowledge: the unwritten skill of the people actually doing the work. Plans that ignore it tend to fail slowly and then expensively.
Keep exploring
Because you read Seeing Like a State.
Antibiotic Resistance
A cure being used up in slow motion
Bacteria learning to survive the medicines that used to kill them.
The Investigation
Ask what failed, not who failed
The method of learning from an accident instead of punishing it.
Normal Accidents
Some failures are built into the design
Failures built into a system rather than caused by somebody's error.