Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions

[[Diversity]] ought, you’d think, to be ''hard to pin down'', its manifestations being naturally — well — ''diverse''. So, to get a handle it, organisations must make [[diversity]] ''[[legible]]''. They do this by defining it in a strikingly limited and homogenous way. They gather ''data'' from their staff on that limited metric — to make it more [[legible]], so that the organisation can propagate statistics about its “improving” [[diversity]]. Thus, “[[diversity]]” as the administration knows it is a formalised, homogenised, parameterised and regularised [[second-order derivative]], and no attention is paid to the outcome of this diversity (compared with the illegible diversity it replaced) at all. As long as the firm ''looks'' diverse, and ''talks'' like it’s diverse, and everyone fits neatly, in the mandated proportions, into one of the five boxes it has prescribed for them, it has achieved its 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 the society it manages to bring its [[high modernist]] ideals into being, and a subjugated population lacking the capacity to resist the implementation of these 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 since seen the return of authoritarian governments and prostrate populations — for posterity, I write from the ninth month of a government-mandated nationwide lockdown — but it has ''always'' been true of the corporate sector, which is resolutely organised to be maximally authoritarian and 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 mutely receive it, seems entirely predicated on a [[reductionist]] ideology that we can solve all conundrums in our landscape and then proceed sedately and without the need to be troubled by turbulent [[subject matter expert]]s thereafter.