[HN Gopher] Big Tech Sees Like a State (2020)
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Big Tech Sees Like a State (2020)
Author : mooreds
Score : 42 points
Date : 2024-09-02 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thediff.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thediff.co)
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I haven't read _Seeing Like a State_ , but I find the list of
| legibility criteria to be very interesting, purely because of how
| many don't apply here in the United Kingdom.
|
| > Lives at a particular location, and has an exact address.
|
| A person in the UK may live at any natural number of places,
| including zero. The NHS has specific provisions for providing
| healthcare to the homeless. At the other end of the spectrum,
| landowners with property in different parliamentary
| constituencies were entitled to vote in all of those
| constituencies until the passage of the Representation of the
| People Act 1948.
|
| > Has a specific name.
|
| In the UK, a person has no specific legal name. A person may use
| any name they wish, including multiple names, without the need
| for a deed poll or any other legal instrument.
|
| > Earns money in a currency which the government understands, and
| pays taxes in it.
|
| The UK has a thriving (although regulated) cryptocurrency sector.
| Tax policy is a little lax, and it's very easy for someone to
| live in the UK unbanked and untaxed, which is probably a
| contributing factor to so many irregular immigrants moving
| specifically to the UK, rather than remaining in the first 'safe
| country'.
|
| > Was born on a particular date, and can thus be called up for
| jury duty or conscription.
|
| The UK is good at tracking when and where people were born, and
| to whom, but someone can slip through the cracks of the system if
| they put a little effort in to avoid service to the state.
|
| > Doesn't steal other people's goods, trespass on their land,
| injure them, or kill them. (Except as a result of the
| aforementioned conscription situation.)
|
| Due to reductions in policing budgets, shoplifting is currently
| rife and, when the value is low, not addressed, but this is a
| temporary state of affairs. Trespass is generally a civil matter,
| and is only criminal in specific situations, such as when the
| trespass is into a home.
|
| > Speaks a language intelligible to the government employees who
| are responsible for checking all of the above.
|
| The UK's only official language is Welsh, and Welsh only has that
| status in Wales. Some legislation is written in Norman French.
|
| On the other hand, I grew up in Australia, where that list very
| much applies, because Australia is a nation that learnt
| civilisation from prison guards. It's not a bad list - the UK is
| just a very peculiar place.
| narski wrote:
| >shoplifting is currently rife and, when the value is low, not
| addressed, but this is a temporary state of affairs.
|
| Remember though, how often in the history of states, the
| temporary cannily usurps permanence. It's hard to tell what's a
| brief deviation from the mean, rather than an early glimpse
| into the new normal.
|
| I have no idea what I'm talking about, either in terms of
| understanding society nor the UK specifically, but your
| phrasing tickled my paranoia about that phrase a sort of famous
| last words for civilizations, lol.
| Onavo wrote:
| Then why is the UK still so authoritarian about free speech and
| insisting on policing online activity?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Because the UK is very peculiar?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Funny the concept of "legibility" is on my mind because I've been
| working on content understanding systems and I quickly came to
| the conclusion that some content was more legible than other
| content to the system as opposed to better or worse. (E.g. I hate
| political image memes because my filters can't look inside the
| image easily)
| bawolff wrote:
| This feels like its framed in the wrong way.
|
| The much simpler explanation is that both governments and big
| companies are large groups of people. You need to make
| simplifying assumptions to make large groups of people work
| together at scale.
|
| That's true of any system at scale. Just consider how people give
| their servers unique names at small scale and numbers at big
| scale. Its just how scaling works.
|
| Whether that is a good or bad thing is an entirely different
| question.
| rosecross wrote:
| That's the whole point, though. The need to make things
| interpretable from the center is what it means to "see like a
| state." A society doesn't need to be interpretable to exist.
| Large groups of people can relate to one another peerwise.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Isn't that basically what the article is saying?
|
| The article is using the vocabulary of sociology, where
| "legibility" in reference to the state is a well-known concept.
| The article specifically references _Seeing like a state_ and
| James Scott 's other writings, but he's not the only one to
| think in terms of such concepts. Foucault's idea of the
| Panopticon is very similar - it's about the state maintaining
| control through the citizenry always knowing that they're
| watched - while Habermas's idea of a "lifeworld" ("metis" in
| this article) which is "colonized by expert systems" is the
| same phenomena.
| somat wrote:
| For some reason we think of corporations and governments as
| different things. but an incorporation is a government, and a
| government is an incorporation. that is the whole point, that
| is why a cooperation is formed.
|
| A group of people want to run their enterprise under rule of
| law and this requires a government. this legal entity we call a
| corporation. it may be a for profit endeavor. it might be a
| public good physical area monopoly(a town, county, state,
| country). It might be a for profit physical area monopoly(these
| were some of the first licensed corporations, but you don't see
| it much now days). anyway there are many types of corporations.
|
| Usually to achieve the desired legal protection a license is
| acquired from a parent corporation that lets you form the
| government needed to run the corporation. it's corporations all
| the way down. At the top level they are peers(nominally) and
| must guarantee their protection the hard way(armed force).
| Organized crime is an example of an unlicensed cooperation,
| there is still a government, but the endeavor is run
| unlicensed, in rebellion to whatever larger entity claims
| jurisdiction over the area.
| nostrademons wrote:
| One interesting question is if you can get the benefits of
| legibility without the very human downsides of corruption,
| authoritarianism, poor decision-making, and self-dealing that
| come from having humans at the top of this pyramid of legibility.
|
| I work for one of those Big Tech companies, and internally, it is
| anything but legible. Very consequential decisions are made by a
| small team that happens to have responsibility for the codebase
| in question, oftentimes very far down in the org. Culturally at
| least there is a respect for data and a sincere effort to do the
| right thing, but when your decisions impact 3 billion people
| there is no way a human can fully evaluate them. And ironically,
| _a recurring problem for the last 20 years is that the CEO has no
| idea what 's going on within the company_. Most records about
| what's being worked on, why, how far along they are, who's
| involved, etc. are firmly in the realm of _metis_ , tribal
| knowledge that's passed down in 1:1s and watercooler
| conversations.
|
| The more I encounter other powerful government bureaucracies
| (like building codes, local government, zoning, legislation), the
| more I suspect they work the same way. Somebody at the time it
| was formalized decided "this is how it should work" on the basis
| of the best information available at the time, and then once it's
| formalized, it's virtually impossible to change.
|
| I'm interested in crypto not for the "get rich quick" or even the
| "currency" aspect, but for the prospect of replacing corporations
| and executives. Crypto's big innovation is in creating a shared
| reality everybody accepts without a centralized authority to
| enforce that reality. This is exactly the same efficiency
| advantage that having a single executive gives. Could you use
| blockchains to essentially create an "artificial executive", a
| plan of record that everybody gets behind that doesn't fall prey
| to human fallibilities?
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Even the most dysfunctional and abusive states can generally
| manage a deeper vision for the future than the next quarter's
| management bonuses.
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