On the origins and objectives of legibility...
...and high-modernism, statecraft, and social engineering
How thoroughly have societies and the environment they inhabit been refashioned by statecraft’s attempt at making everything more legible? When did it all start? And more importantly, are these processes ongoing and, if so, why? And through what means?
Though we can be certain that the process started many millennia ago, it is also quite clear that “nomads, pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn” (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State) in the large-scale implementation of said process. Just like it wasn’t all societies that simultaneously converted from mobile hunter-gathering lifestyles to sedentary agriculturists, the process was far from uniform when it came to making societies more legible. As is often the case, we can find some of the earliest clues by consulting well-known records of attempts at increasing legibility in various ancient texts, the Bible being one of those better known resources.
Hence it was that all were called upon to be “enrolled” and this is one of the earliest examples of the beginnings of a concerted effort towards “legibility.” As such efforts mounted to permanently hinder historically and traditionally mobile peoples through sedentarization, states’ attempt at making their populations more legible increased, all with the objective of facilitating taxation and conscription, as well as preventing rebellion (this latter point is rather pertinent to our current “emergency measures” context; more on this later). It is through this very legibility, in fact, that societies could then increase their capacity for large-scale social engineering and high-modernist ideologies, all of which provided a social terrain that was ripe for ever-increasing authoritarian control. Self-determination was (and is) thus continually trumped via subjugation to a higher (at times self-appointed, although often enough, “democratically”-appointed) power.
Once we recognize illegibility as not merely an administrative headache for the ruling classes, but an actual obstacle, we can begin to understand why there has historically been an (especially in modern times) ever-accelerated race towards removing this obstacle. Illegibility, in fact, has often constituted the most reliable “resource” for ensuring political autonomy and sovereignty (“hill peoples” of various countries being classic examples). After all, what a state or monarchy can’t measure, it can’t collect, nor tax. From the implementation of grids that became customary of all cities (cadastre), to the practice of permanent surnames, to the imposition of an official language or even units of measure, the various techniques devised by the ruling class to further enhance a society’s legibility have become vastly more sophisticated but, surprisingly, the political motives driving them have changed very little. That is not to say, of course, that they only or inherently lead to nefarious outcomes, far from it (standardized units of measure being one obvious example), but recognizing the motives for certain top-down organizational structures favouring an increase in said legibility does serve to elucidate many of their more seemingly covert enterprises.
What’s more, increasing legibility inevitably results in the amplification of the capacity of the state to impose discriminating (and often more tyrannical) interventions. And that is what I wish to address here: the type of knowledge derived and provided to authorities who possess this unique and privileged vantage point over society offers a perspective that is never afforded to those who are not (and never will be) endowed with such authority. Legibility, therefore, becomes a condition of manipulation. In fact, “the greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required to effect it.” (Ibid)
Legibility effectively becomes a prerequisite of appropriation and of all manners and permutations of authoritarian governance. And in its most extreme form, can even lead to what can best be described as a tyflocracy.
Imagine a new form of totalitarian governance, composed of non-elected officials who have been indoctrinated into believing that they hold a superior intellect and humanity to those whom they were appointed to serve.
Imagine a new form of government so convinced of its own virtue mandate and the contrasting original sin of its constituents, that it has adopted the view that its own citizens are now a less-than-human enemy – no longer worthy of the full slate of human rights.
In this modern day and age, the relentless onslaught of techniques being used and domains being impacted continues to grow, almost by the hour.
As one Dave Rubin tweeted last week, the high-modernist reshaping of society is happening right before our eyes, with seemingly no stone being left unturned.
But let me be clear: the plan is to have this Metaverse extend far beyond Facebook (sorry, Meta :/ ). Thousands of virtual spaces where one's identity can be split into infinite ‘manufactured alters’, each one a potential customer for the sale of digital items on blockchain, are literally sprouting up in all spheres of human activity.
Alas, too few are still failing to realize (or are wishfully ignoring) that that is the endgame. Gamification of life, individual values, in the process, becoming the final frontier for legibility.
How does all this translate to the current technocratic state we find ourselves in, you ask? Well, one doesn’t have to look much further than right here in La Belle Province, where through a recently enacted Ministry of Cybersecurity, the newly appointed minister, Éric Caire, is vowing to make Québec the first nation in North America to deploy biometric digital identity on its entire citizenry!
In all, eleven billion dollars will be allocated to what can be best described as some dystopian techno-fascist enterprise to render all human and human activities, legible. You see, health/vaccine passports, under the guise of “safeguarding” us against a virus, is really just the main entry point into normalizing these new means of interacting and, this, for all domains of human activity.
Including activities that, under any normal circumstances, would very likely remain illegible. I’m talking here, of course, about tangible “in real life” human connection and interaction. Family celebrations, gatherings of friends, casual conversations at the local pub or with coworkers at lunch. All these now with the potential to be rendered legible, surveillable, traceable, recordable, recoverable and replayable, via the latest offerings of 5G-abled surveillance, apps, and online communication platforms.
What’s more, in 1977, French sociologist Jacques Ellul could only imagine what was to come, and warned that as “…the computer gathers a cluster of previously scattered information about each individual, making the control of society unbearable, …. control will be exercised not just by ‘authorities,’ but also by the public, the ‘others,’ by public opinion.” Ellul, 1977
Self-policing, through this modern panopticon, has never in fact been so simple, each one of us enabled in playing the role of cheaply dispensed agents of control and subversion.
With the advent of new technologies that are better equipped than ever to handle Big Data, we can easily see how Ellul's warnings have truly come to life in a never-imagined all-encompassing manner.
But how do we render ourselves illegible, or at least more so?
Quite often, I find it useful to talk about what a thing isn’t (via negativa), or to consider its exact opposite, to conceive of it in a different manner than we’re accustomed to. In that way, it’s possible to start roughly defining its edges and contours, allowing the concept, in spite of its absence, to take form. In our case, the opposite of illegibility, of course, would be legibility. And so now we can ask: how does a modern society (or more specifically, its technocratic elite) make us more legible? Simple: increase, by all means possible, a given population’s dependence on the “safety”, “security”, “convenience” and “conviviality” offered by the very technology they happen to be promoting and providing to “solve” the very problem they have created (sometimes—many times(?)—out of whole cloth).
Problem. Reaction. Solution. Hegelian dialectics are almost always at play.
Therefore, and given the above, I would suggest the solutions or countermeasures to increased legibility should be rather clear…
One might ask then: is their goal for us to live in a 24/7 matrix type simulation? I’d wager that for the majority, it may well be received as a welcomed “improvement”. Even at the cost of their privacy. Although I suspect for some (hopefully many), it will not have the same appeal. But what number will end up feeling (or being) forced into what can best be described as an augmented hybrid dystopian reality? Will the choice to revoke one’s consent always remain a viable one?
Within a paragraph excerpted from the linked Forbes article above, we may get a glimpse of what that might look like. Either voluntarily, or less so (a form of mass media/entertainment predictive programming, if you will?)…
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Either way, it is appearing more likely as if opting out might require fully reinventing oneself or the society as we imagine it. But this reinventing, in turn, would have to comport a much more organic process towards pluralistic and municipalist forms of social organization, a welcomed alternative to the usually muscle-bound version of modern societal dogmatic beliefs in scientific and technical progress generally associated with high-modernist conceptions of our world.
As James C. Scott again makes clear, “the troubling features of high modernism derive, for the most part, from its claim to speak about the improvement of the human condition with the authority of scientific knowledge and its tendency to disallow other competing sources of judgment.”
Therefore, at its core, high modernism necessarily implies a radical break with both history and tradition. And we couldn’t have better proof of this than being witness to what has transpired over the last 18+ months. All manners of “science says so” have been thrown at us, but usually with only one side of that “science” getting its say. Yet Feyerabend (Against Method) wrote in 1975, “the time is [surely] overdue for adding the separation of state and science to the by now quite customary separation of state and church. Science is only one of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible, and it has become too powerful, too pushy, and too dangerous to be left on its own.”
I would concur.
Similarly and contextually (Covid-ly, in case you’re wondering) speaking, isn’t it grand time we put “science”, “scientists” and their shady modelling, theories and predictions, in their place. Isn’t it time we review our perspective of its methods and limitations, its body of knowledge by no means constituting an exclusive form of knowledge, but merely one, like various other methods, offering many advantages yet fraught (cursed?) with at least as many drawbacks.