Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions

[[Diversity]] ought, you’d think, to be ''hard to pin down'', its manifestations being naturally — well — ''diverse''. But to get a handle on diversity in their populations, organisations must make it ''[[legible]]''. They do this by defining “[[diversity]]” in a strikingly limited way, then seeking to gather ''data'' from their staff on that limited metric, so that they can propagate statistics about their changing diversity. Thus, diversity is formalised, homogenised, parameterised and regularised, and no attention is paid to the product and output of diversity at all. As long as we ''look'' diverse, and ''talk'' tike we’re diverse, but everyone fits neatly into one of the five boxes we have prescribed for them, in the right proportions, we have achieved our goal. Sounds a bit like an Aldous Huxley novel, doesn’t it? Feels a bit like one too.

Scott’s last two criteria are probably opposite sides of the same coin: an authoritarian state able and willing to coerce society to bring high modernist ideals into being, and a subjugated population lacking the capacity to resist the implementation of high-modernist plans. Scott was writing in 1998, a few years after the collapse of communism and in an era when [[This time it’s different|Francis Fukuyama]] and others were declaring the end of history, all battles won and so forth, so was a little shoe-shuffly about this. He needn’t have been! Not only have we seen the return of authoritarian governments and prostrate populations — for posterity I note I am writing from lockdown that has now lasted some nine months — but it has ''always'' been true of the corporate sector which is resolutely organised to be authoritarian, hierarchical and where you, dear employee, are administrated and ordered like no other participant on Earth. Every “meaningful”<ref>Meaningful to them, not to you.</ref> aspect of your performance and your role is, at some level, reduced to a parameterised data point: ID, location, salary, rank, position, performance, reporting line, holiday entitlement, sick-leave, [[service catalog]], objectives — let me know when you want me to stop. As for the high modernist ideal, well, this entire site is a paean to that, but strategy as we receive it seems entirely predicated on a deterministic, [[reductionist]] ideology that we can solve our landscape and then proceed sedately and without the need to be troubled by turbulent [[subject matter expert]]s thereafter.