Illegiblity as an antidote to technocracy

Countering technocracy-driven legibility

Now just over a week after my first official post, I am beginning to suspect I should have first laid down the foundation for my newsletter title. My first post dug right into the meat of a current issue, an issue pertinent to a topic that has occupied much of my thinking (and working, and writing) hours since early February of 2020.

While wishing to be careful not to put any limitations or restrictions on the nature of the musings you might expect by following this newsletter, I felt it would be appropriate to make any potential reader aware of the inspiration for what is being implied by “Cultivating Illegibility.”

It took some time before I actually came up and felt comfortable with a title (and, ergo, the actual newsletter), for fear, as expressed above, that it might either mislead the reader, or else limit the scope of the mosaic of topics I might, on any given day, choose to ponder over. I will spare you the details (for now), and refrain from elaborating too much (for now), on the nature of the topics I might explore in the future.

For now, let us simply delve into what “illegibility” might comport. And why, as my title suggests, we may wish to cultivate it, particularly in these challenging times.

Broadly speaking, “legibility” is a term that, to the best of my knowledge, was first coined and popularized by James C. Scott, in Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. It refers to (bold is mine)

a state’s attempt to make society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind [or illegible]; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to “translate” what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view.

Legibility—or increasing the latter—thus effectively became a means for elaborating a standard grid whereby heretofore complex and illegible societal behaviours and practices could be centrally recorded, surveilled and monitored.

This is, in effect, the essence of what modern statecraft entails. And statecraft (largely a project of internal colonization), itself, is facilitated by a form of authoritarian high modernist ideology which aspires to top-down forms of comprehensive planning. In Seeing Like a State, Scott alludes to this when writing:

High modernist ideologies embody a doctrinal preference for certain social arrangements… Most of the preferences can be deduced from the criteria of legibility, appropriation, and centralization of control. To the degree that the institutional arrangements can be readily monitored and directed from the center and can be easily taxed (in the broadest sense of taxation), then they are likely to be promoted.

In turn, one can easily see how this leads us into what has been transpiring over the last 18 months or so: an ever-accelerated race towards implementing centralized top-down unified global agendas (21, 2030, Build Back Better, The Great Reset, whatever tickles your fancy) that claim to offer more “safety,” more “security,” more “sustainability” and more “convenience,” all at the cost of a serious loss of freedoms, rights and privacy. And as such Big Brother, or its modern rendition of the Panopticon, is, I would propose, rarely seen for what it truly might entail: Maximizing legibility at all cost. Whether through cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI, health/vaccination passports, tele-education, telemedicine, Big Data, algorithms, all consist of paths leading to “...everything [being] made more legible via real-time tracking; all profiles and patterns … revealed via data-driven analysis.” (The Captured City, J. Sadowski)

Without making this longer than it needs to be, especially as I want this to be a simple introductory comment to what this newsletter will be about and, consequently, what alternatives I may propose, my hope is that at this point, you are already starting to perceive the contours of what “cultivating illegibility” might insinuate.

If we are to gain back control over our lives, our rights (to freedom of movement, to earn a living, to freely associate and congregate, to privacy, etc.) and our very beings (mRNA and nanotechnology necessarily acting as direct insults to that very concept), we may well wish to conceive of what is being so “benevolently” offered to us under a different light.

As one Allison McDowell fittingly offered just today:

Social impact eco-fascists plan to use nano-electronics to digitally counterfeit the earth and all its beings. We’re carbon and water. We have gifts of creativity and chaos. We are keepers of natural life. We will not stand silently by and let that happen. #DandelionManifest

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The bureaucratic state and its cronies (social impact investors, “academics” and “scientists,” public “health” entities, Big Tech, etc.) abhor and have always loathed the rich functional structure and complex behaviour of the very organic entities that it governs, merely viewing them (us!) as resources that must be organized (for the “benefit” of the citizenry, or the “greater good”), all in in an attempt to maximize returns according to a centralized, reductionist and strictly utilitarian logic.

Finding ways to disconnect and reconnect, to disorganize and reorganize, to re-imagine what it truly means to be sovereign and sustainable, therein lie the keys to the proposed Metaverse.