iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/08/2026

I would like to see a bizarro world version of that book, maybe call it Caring Like a State

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Yakov Feygin @buddyyakov.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Seeing Like a State (laudatory).

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Jessica Pickett @pickettjessica.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

fwiw Scott's intro regards the welfare benefits of legibility-as-statecraft to be firmly established facts that go almost without saying, and so explicitly limits his scope to authoritarian contexts where perverse incentives result in "development fiascoes"

I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.

Like any ideology, high modernism had a particular temporal and social context. The feats of national economic mobilization of the belligerents (especially Germany) in World War I seem to mark its high tide. Not surprisingly, its most fertile social soil was to be found among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new order. High-modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview. Nor was this utopian vision dangerous in and of itself. Where it animated plans in liberal parliamentary societies and where the planners therefore had to negotiate with organized citizens, it could spur reform.

Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people.

A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition.

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Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Seeing like a State by Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Being Seen by the State

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Colin Danby @cdanby.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Someone should write that. Actually Foucault, read attentively enough, does write that.

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