[sho]

The "scientific management" was just one example out of many, and I disagree its lessons form the thesis of the book. The thesis as I understood it was that states seek legibility of domains under their jurisdiction, and the example of the forests was demonstrating the bad outcomes arising from seeking that legibility through misguided means. While unfortunate, that was an implementation error that could - and indeed was - corrected.

I'd say a much better illustrative example from the book was the introduction of last names. In that case, faced with the illegible identity of the people under its rule, a whole new construct was invented, imposed and pertains to this day. This one really opened my eyes. The whole reason we have last names at all is because our society just sort of invented them, hundreds of years ago, for its own convenience, and it was so successful we all just accept it as the way things are. Now that is seeing - and acting - like a state!

[polynox]

I agree and you are correct that concept of legibility was central, however going from the text now I believe that James takes specific issue with joint combination of both the exercise of state authority as well as the blindness that is implied by high modernism. Starting on page 88:

> I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, ... The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving those designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist those plans.

I believe my comment still stands, in responding to not the book but the author of the comment, in that framework I'm describing, assuming the thesis of the book is true, then the second element is not met by the mere publication of software. Rather it is the foisting of such software upon users that is the act of power or other covert means by which choice is restricted such as controlling the bounds of publication or else the centralizing nature of capital investment in software that by sheer bad luck it turns out that perhaps we just end up with a few pseudo monopolies because software as a capital expense is ... well, expensive to develop.

[MichaelZuo]

The real truth is that all 8 billion+ people plus all the world's organizations, governments, and so on, are constantly interpenetrating and co-modifying each other, every second of the day.

But no one can comprehend this, so at best, if you are literally the smartest person in the world, you might be able to get away with only a few hundred simplifying abstractions.

The average HN user probably needs tens of thousands.

So its not just states, it's everyone and everything that will ever exist.

The real question is what is the best bundle of such aids to use, at any given time?