Legibility is a precondition for control over a system

• This is the key reason why we desire legibility. We want to be in control. Wrestling with or accepting things we can’t control is a superpower.
• A Big Little Idea Called Legibility site:: ribbonfarm author:: Venkatesh Rao date-saved:: Jun 19th, 2024 date-published:: Jul 26th, 2010 id:: 671841b3-4771-4c6c-a6f3-b543cc1fcd6b collapsed:: true

  • Highlights

    • The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure

      Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).
      Here is the recipe:
      • Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
      • Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
      • Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
      • Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
      • Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
      • Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
      • Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
      The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility. ⤴️

    • High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible. Or at least more legible to the all-seeing statist eye in the sky (many of the pictures in the book are literally aerial views) than to the local, embedded, eye on the ground. ⤴️