Big Tech is Soviet

Scott’s Seeing Like a State describes what large organizations need to manage a system. Everything must be made visible, countable, and comparable; in other words everything must be standardized. The problem is that standardization serves the center, not the periphery. It simplifies administration, but at the cost of destroying local adaptations that made things actually work. For example, precolonial land tenure systems that assigned use rights in complex ways according to season, kinship, and historical agreement were illegible to colonial administrators. They were replaced with systems of private title that were legible and administrable, but which dispossessed most of the existing users. The same logic recurs in forestry, urban renewal, and agricultural collectivization: the abstraction that makes central management possible also strips out the complexity that made the original system work. These kinds of failures follow a pattern: A central authority identifies a problem. Its…