Erhardt Graeff

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is an incredible critique of the accidental and not so accidental authoritarianism of the past 200+ years in which high modernist planning used scientific knowledge and oversimplification to attempt to improve the world. Through social and environmental engineering, James C. Scott documents the ways revolutionaries have attempted to simplify the world so that it is more legible and controllable, assuming scientific expertise would make society more efficient and productive. Most of these efforts were well intentioned and meant to advance a society rapidly like in the case of the budding Soviet Union under Lenin and villagization in East Africa after independence. Scott argues that these schemes fail because they disrespect “metis,” the local practical knowledge that people have accrued over hundreds of years that allow their agriculture to be productive and resilient in the harshest of settings and their communities to have an organically developed internal logic that keeps them stable. The importance of these “traditional” features is proven not just in the failure of authoritarian imposed systems but in the survival of people in spite of these failures. From the kolkhoz farmers in the Soviet Union to the peripheral residents of Brasilia, the author notes how they adapted and improvised to create the diverse practices and informal relationships typical of metis that kept the larger society functioning. This often meant parallel or dark economies conducted beyond the ledgers of centralized authorities.

The book’s critique is an important perspective for any industry or sector that has a tendency toward over-simplifying the world in order to fit certain scientific visions of rational systems (most of the them). Solutionism, whether derived from high modernist appeals to perfect geometry of all things or the belief that Big Data will provide universal insights as long as we have enough rows and columns, should be balanced by a respect for local, practical knowledge. This is the key insight and offering of the book, that despite the fact metis doesn’t scale by definition it will inevitably determine how society works and whether it survives. Scott argues that we need to think about design which is open to the influence of practical knowledge, which is connected to its organic roots and made more productive by the interaction between the local and the global. The book is not a rejection of scientific knowledge but of acknowledgement its limitations, where breadth of application dominated by averages cannot simply replace depth and detail.

Must read.

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Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The near future depicted in this book takes some getting used to, like the sexism of Mad Men or the violence of a Tarantino film. And you never feel great about accepting this world for what it is but at least you can enjoy the ride while it lasts after a couple of chapters of desensitization (a theme of the novel itself). Gary Shteyngart appears to have once again written a part of himself into his book as Lenny Abramov, the insecure middle-aged Russian Jew clinging to his vintage clothes and printed books in a Post-Literate world where young people major in “Images” and “Assertiveness” and hope for careers in Retail or Credit—the remaining vocations of prestige in a perfectly service-oriented and paralyzingly indebted to the Chinese America.

This book proposes one extreme vision of where our world might go post-financial crisis, where we live mostly within our Facebook accounts or in scanning through whatever we can buy online on our mobile devices. We are getting dumber and the rich are getting richer. Corporations have merged with sovereign nations to rebrand whole geographies. It’s Shteyngart’s version of Idiocracy. He’s painted a fairly cohesive portrait of this world and commented on a range of issues: cowboy military deployments, superficial media personalities, hyper-sexualization, anti-intellectualism, and the Millennial need to feel like a special flower.

At it’s heart, as the title suggests, is a love story, meditating on family values and responsibility and the complexity of emotions that make us either beautifully authentic or that much more stupid. The novel’s epistolary form augments these intimate aspects. I must admit, I found it pretty absorbing and charming, as well as gross and horrifying, as Shteyngart intended it to be.

Check it out if you enjoy dystopic love stories. Fans of Snow Crash will find some familiar territory here, only with the more cyberpunk action sequences replaced by good ol’ Jewish worry.

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