> Two decades ago, in his book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott explored what happens when governments, or those with authority, attempt and fail to “improve the human condition.” Scott found that to understand societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized, abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess more “legible” to them. With this legibility came the ability to assess and then impose new social, economic, and ecological arrangements from the top down: communities of people became taxable citizens, a tangled and primeval forest became a monoculture timber operation, and a convoluted premodern town became a regimented industrial city.
One thing that I remember from Seeing Like a State is that people used to be judged by village tribunals, and now we have fair trials at the state level. People used to live in the same place all their life, now we can go in many places. Making things more legible can mean destroying a forest by making it into a monoculture timber operation. It can also mean allowing all kind of people to live as long as they pay taxes, offering them freedom that they couldn't find in a smaller structure.
I think it's very important to remember that the map is not the territory, that unknown unknowns exist as well as known unknowns, that trying to impose to people a specific way of life will often not make them happier. But also that technology has meant better lives for most people on this planet.