book / recommends
Seeing Like a State
“It depends on the person. I would say ... So Code by Charles Petzold, which is The Secret Language of Hardware and Software. It basically is like, "Do you know how computers actually work?" It is actually surprising to me how many professionally employed programmers don't know how computers work. That one, the funny thing is it does not have a line of code in it until chapter 27, so exceptionally good book. I have a weird one, which is Tools of Conviviality by Ivan Illich. It's the contrast between, you look at the history of technology and tools that let users exercise human ingenuity and autonomy versus tools that are more at industrial scale that almost have become destructive to human autonomy. And then the last one that I give mostly to executives that I think are creating a lot of systems is Seeing Like a State, which I think there is a famous stack overflow that popularized this, but it's the idea of, are you actually just designing a system so that you have legibility, but the way that you've created that legibility completely neglects the reality of the system on the ground. And so I think of it as, great, you're the executive and you have these status reports and you think you know exactly how your teams work. If you actually spend time with the teams, you would realize that none of that is actually true. And so I think executives love creating fake legibility for themselves because we don't like noise as humans, right? We want the signal, but there's often less signal in it than one might think.”