Do the Illegible
36 points by ashwinsundar
36 points by ashwinsundar
Maybe this is hyperbolic and unhelpful but...once you've fully digested Scott's thesis I think it becomes difficult to see computing as anything but a sprawling legibility project.
To me it helps to expand it from "computing" to "automation" in general. Taking the things people do based off of vibes and experience and codifying them into rules, whether they're algorithms or steps in a manufacturing process.
Bureaucracy is all about automating and formalizing human decision-making.
It’s interesting because computing is closely tied to fields all about illegibility, e.g. cryptography.
With the Discord age verification event we saw how people are becoming less willing to make themselves legible to unpleasant entities in exchange for digital services.
So there’s hope yet for illegibility in computing, imo.
I’d have said cryptography is about control. For example, the entire idea of a PKI is a legibility project.
Right, I think productionized cryptography falls on the side of increasing legibility, but cryptography in the hands of regular people can serve to reduce legibility.
As much as I disagree with the popular thought-terminating cliché of "technology X is just a tool" (in favor of McLuhan's "the medium is the message"), I think, if anything, cryptography serves as a good example of X being just a tool. Math can serve both you and the totalitarian state. Its power is of course magnified tremendously in the hands of the state...
Anticipating a gathering of philosophers, I want to take this chance to ask whether (and if so, how) this matter of illegibility has something to do with the Real. Please also point me towards some accessible primers into these topics, for as interesting as it looks like in the wiki article, I didn't spend years studying philosophy to be able to actually understand this stuff. After scouring through the entire article, I could only find this somewhat more comprehensible explanation towards the end..
Glyn Daly also provided a further elaboration of Žižek's three modalities through his pre-established examples from pop culture: [...]
The symbolic Real refers to the anonymous symbols and codes (scientific formulae, digitalisation, empty signifiers...) that function in an indifferent manner as the abstract "texture" onto which, or out of which, reality is constituted. In The Matrix, for example, the symbolic Real is given expression at the point where Neo perceives "reality" in terms of the abstract streams of digital output. In the contemporary world, Žižek argues that it is capital itself that provides this essential backdrop to our reality and as such represents the symbolic Real of our age.
Zizek is approaching philosophy from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. In that field, the Real is not so much “reality” as the matrix of symbols that make reality legible to individuals, but the Real is also always incomplete and unstable. For Marxists, individual psychology is created by social forces (capitalist ideology, class consciousness) and for Lacan, individual psychology has a lot of unconscious mechanisms to classify and simplify reality into understandable units. Zizek basically combines the two systems to mostly talk about how we’re blinded to capitalism all around us working through symbolic patterns.
I find it thought provoking, but I’m not sure it’s a full account of what's going on. In particular, the Lacan stuff doesn’t seem that well grounded. It’s definitely interesting though.
I don't think it's hyperbolic but I think it's too broad and assertion. What is "computing" in this context?
If it's "the tech sector" - the structure of predominantly (but not exclusively) private interests which dominate mainstream tech, then yes, absolutely.
If it's "the discipline of computing", well, that's less clear. It's obviously deeply entangled with the tech sector.
In both cases these subcategories are still super broad, and "computing" existing across a huge range of industries and practices.
So while I agree that the state of mainstream/commercial computing is very tied up with rendering human activity legible to governments and capital, I don't think this is an inherent limitation of the form, if that makes sense.
Agreed, this is part of what I was trying to say. There's plenty you can do with computing besides automation. Art, games, community, etc.
Good read, I'd say I'm mostly in agreement with the author.
One quibble:
In my view, Brooks’ Mythical Man-Month takes the opposite stance of Naur’s, that programming is TOO illegible. Brooks ultimately advocates for more companies to turn the act of programming into an engineering discipline.
Having read The Mythical Man Month twice, I think this is not quite right. Yes, it advocates for different structures around programming. But if you look at the actual team structure advocated by Brooks, the people in the team are not all fungible engineers but they each have quite different roles!
Moreover, there's a difference in the level of abstraction that engineering processes serve vs the theory of the program operates at.
MMM is really about project management at its core. Sure, that involves some durable artifacts. But someone can simultaneously hold the viewpoints that introducing processes & durable artifacts is good (e.g. "all teams should use the same issue tracker", "all major systems should have architecture doc"), as well as value tacit knowledge ("new engineers should pair with experienced ones during on-boarding"). I don't think these two are in opposition.
E.g. the bit quoted from MMM would cover things like "we useTypeScript and Go because we have many supporting libraries for them." That doesn't also carry the implication that "programmers are intrchangeable" or that "we use Go because we can quckly hire new Go programmers". Yes, some people might think that! But I don't think the former implies the latter.
This reminds me of this essay: https://www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-a-software-company/
This argues that a software company wants to make everything legible, but that illegibility is essential in making stuff actually happens.
We’ve all heard the story of the person who learned how to automate their job down to a simple script they run at the start of the week and then they spend the rest of the week just pretending to work but actually slacking off. From the corporate point of view, this is bad. The person is idling! But from the individual point of view, being able to control your time is important and makes the job tolerable. Legibility is about trying to make sure the corporation can “see” all the work being done and ensure it is done to their favor rather than the favor of the worker.
Legibility has always been partial and incomplete because making things legible is a process itself and inefficient and it forces sub-optimal shapes onto work.
For example, fruit has to be packed onto a truck and kept fresh long enough to be delivered to consumers, so it is tougher and less flavorful than fresh fruit off a farm. “Legible fruit” is superior in transportability and shelf life, but inferior in flavor.
In software development, a small team of motivated developers working without any management controls is often more productive than a larger team with extensive management controls, but corporations still prefer the controls because it is manageable, predictable, replaceable, etc.
Thanks for sharing!
Clearly Seeing Like a State needs to go on my reading list; [another essay on it]https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/) is in my backlog. (Via Titus Winters' valediction when departing Google, "resist the push for legibility". He was the C++ library/language TLM-- context seems relevant.)
One goal of a well-oiled software-producing machine is to for the software-producing cogs in their machine to be interchangeable, hot-swappable, bus-factorable.
This is the goal of the agile ticket factory but in reality as much as Jira pretends to control the software development life cycle, the real work happens despite all the Atlassian stuff, not thanks to it.