[memorythought]

My reading of Seeing Like A State was not "central planning bad". The author explicitly acknowledges that there are many benefits to what they refer to as "high modernist" projects which we all enjoy on a daily basis. My reading was more that large scale projects designed to entirely change the way something is done in order to make it legible to a central authority necessarily throws away an enormous amount of local information and this leads to a tradeoff. You end up being able to build much bigger systems, but those systems are not as flexible.

In the context of microservices that seems like a pertinent point because the purpose of a microservice architecture in the first place is often to allow an organisation to be more flexible and accommodate local knowledge.