An apt piece. These tendencies in Big Tech lay bare the mechanism that pushes towards legibility because it's literally easier to code. It's worth some thought for programmers that we have to gravitate towards problems that can be solved by a tabulating machine (or a CRUD API).
For the record, I'm strongly against these companies having free reign over markets and societies, but opportunistically sympathetic towards them sometimes counterbalancing arbitrary government actions. Of course I'd prefer having sane governments controlled by the public, but that is a pipe dream in most countries.
>And yet, very few people emigrate from highly legible countries in the United States and Western Europe in order to live in more informal ones. Meanwhile, many people around the world do choose to immigrate to those hyper-legible societies.
I don't think this is completely accurate. Really old republican democracies, mainly the US and Switzerland, seem to have less legibility than more modern, centralized and top-down states (model: France). There are more independent local institutions and old privileges of the populace that no autocratic government managed to remove. Things like guns, lack of compulsory IDs, local direct democracy, electing small local officials. Mind you, I'm not saying that the US is some civil rights paradise in practice (in fact, I'm happy to not be living there), just that it has more historical mess to counteract easy legibility and centralization.
I'd say that the Eastern Bloc tends towards even more legibility than Western Europe, because totalitarian regimes (and even earlier, reactionary monarchies) have destroyed organic, grassroots social institutions. People were taught to resist bureaucracy by petty cheating, not by conscious political action. (This is slowly changing, maybe.) Even moreso, of course, mainland China.
In short: people immigrate to societies with high standard of living and rule of law. Both are loosely correlated with legibility.
For the record, I'm strongly against these companies having free reign over markets and societies, but opportunistically sympathetic towards them sometimes counterbalancing arbitrary government actions. Of course I'd prefer having sane governments controlled by the public, but that is a pipe dream in most countries.
>And yet, very few people emigrate from highly legible countries in the United States and Western Europe in order to live in more informal ones. Meanwhile, many people around the world do choose to immigrate to those hyper-legible societies.
I don't think this is completely accurate. Really old republican democracies, mainly the US and Switzerland, seem to have less legibility than more modern, centralized and top-down states (model: France). There are more independent local institutions and old privileges of the populace that no autocratic government managed to remove. Things like guns, lack of compulsory IDs, local direct democracy, electing small local officials. Mind you, I'm not saying that the US is some civil rights paradise in practice (in fact, I'm happy to not be living there), just that it has more historical mess to counteract easy legibility and centralization.
I'd say that the Eastern Bloc tends towards even more legibility than Western Europe, because totalitarian regimes (and even earlier, reactionary monarchies) have destroyed organic, grassroots social institutions. People were taught to resist bureaucracy by petty cheating, not by conscious political action. (This is slowly changing, maybe.) Even moreso, of course, mainland China.
In short: people immigrate to societies with high standard of living and rule of law. Both are loosely correlated with legibility.