2026 Mar 23
- Slop-Machine Future • Buttondown
- The Atlantic
- - “The pathologies of Seeing Like a State - of failing to observe or understand problems that cannot be broken down into simple metrics and regularized categories are very well documented. The state can’t easily coordinate its activities to deal with problems that cannot be expressed in terms that it understands. The pathologies of Seeing Like an Idiot are worse understood, because we haven’t had to think so hard about them. They don’t just involve ineptitude and blunders, but a nearly complete incapacity to see or talk about the much wider set of problems that can’t be expressed via goonability. By and large, the abstractions of goonability carry sparser and less useful information than the abstractions of bureaucracy.”