5 ms·

> Imposing legibility is also a requirement to making a market. I agree with the idea but markets result in emergent legibility rather than imposed legibility.

Barrin92 6y ago
I don't see much evidence for that being true at least if we're talking about large, complex, modern markets. Whether it's the stock market, or the European common market, or the Amazon ecommerce section, everywhere you can see very strict, imposed legibility. Order, schemata and standardization and smoothing expectations through very formal, top-down rules on how to conduct oneself become more and more common as a market increases in size and/or complexity.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Order, schemata and standardization and smoothing expectations through very formal, top-down rules on how to conduct oneself become more and more common as a market increases in size and/or complexity. I agree on the legibility aspect. How are these being imposed? From what I understand, the joint-stock company was created before S corps, C corps, and LLCs were codified into law. Amazon's marketplace is not regulated according to any special rules except for what rules apply to everyone and the rules that Amazon sets forth for use of their own marketplace. I'm not seeing your point.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    The process of increasing legibility doesn't necessarily need to come in the from a legal authority. The point is that Amazon also 'sees like a state'. Everything is tagged, catalogued, marked with a date, taxed and charged at point of consumption. Amazon's full digitisation of its customers and ability to extract value and differentiate prices is effectively what every state would love to do. The same is true for social media companies of course, to the point where the form of discussion itself specified (280 characters!). The modern tech corporation and its users are essentially a more advanced version of what James C. Scott imagined the modern and competent state to look like. Of course we're not living in Shadowrun (yet) and they haven't claimed extraterritoriality or impose their own law in a literal sense, but we're not far off. (see the censorship debate)
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > The process of increasing legibility doesn't necessarily need to come in the from a legal authority. That is my point. I'm saying that legibility is not imposed by the state, but arises from market actors in an emergent fashion.
      - Barrin92 6y ago
        well the question is to what degree those interactions can actually be described as markets. Herbert Simon's made an observation in the 90s "Suppose that [“a mythical visitor from Mars”] approaches the Earth from space, equipped with a telescope that revels social structures. The firms reveal themselves, say, as solid green areas with faint interior contours marking out divisions and departments. Market transactions show as red lines connecting firms, forming a network in the spaces between them. Within firms (and perhaps even between them) the approaching visitor also sees pale blue lines, the lines of authority connecting bosses with various levels of workers. As our visitors looked more carefully at the scene beneath, it might see one of the green masses divide, as a firm divested itself of one of its divisions. Or it might see one green object gobble up another. At this distance, the departing golden parachutes would probably not be visible. No matter whether our visitor approached the United States or the Soviet Union, urban China or the European Community, the greater part of the space below it would be within green areas, for almost all of the inhabitants would be employees, hence inside the firm boundaries. Organizations would be the dominant feature of the landscape. A message sent back home, describing the scene, would speak of “large green areas interconnected by red lines.” It would not likely speak of “a network of red lines connecting green spots." And this has only accelerated in the last few decades. Walmart in a sense is the largest communist experiment in the United States.
        chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        The traditional way of demarcating those interactions into categories would be on the basis of consent and coercion. For example, people in the Soviet Union were compelled where people in the US were allowed to choose amongst the options available. This information is not accessible by observing aliens because their observations are limited to material interactions and they lack implicit knowledge necessary to make inferences that would allow them to distinguish between the two. From a macro perspective the difference would be whether the owner of a firm or conglomerate is able to make decisions that would cause him to lose his conglomerate or if he can compel people to continue to support him. Of course in the US we have plenty of enterprise that are "too big to fail" but to my knowledge amazon is not yet one of them.

Barrin92 6y ago

I don't see much evidence for that being true at least if we're talking about large, complex, modern markets. Whether it's the stock market, or the European common market, or the Amazon ecommerce section, everywhere you can see very strict, imposed legibility. Order, schemata and standardization and smoothing expectations through very formal, top-down rules on how to conduct oneself become more and more common as a market increases in size and/or complexity.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> Order, schemata and standardization and smoothing expectations through very formal, top-down rules on how to conduct oneself become more and more common as a market increases in size and/or complexity. I agree on the legibility aspect. How are these being imposed? From what I understand, the joint-stock company was created before S corps, C corps, and LLCs were codified into law. Amazon's marketplace is not regulated according to any special rules except for what rules apply to everyone and the rules that Amazon sets forth for use of their own marketplace. I'm not seeing your point.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  The process of increasing legibility doesn't necessarily need to come in the from a legal authority. The point is that Amazon also 'sees like a state'. Everything is tagged, catalogued, marked with a date, taxed and charged at point of consumption. Amazon's full digitisation of its customers and ability to extract value and differentiate prices is effectively what every state would love to do. The same is true for social media companies of course, to the point where the form of discussion itself specified (280 characters!). The modern tech corporation and its users are essentially a more advanced version of what James C. Scott imagined the modern and competent state to look like. Of course we're not living in Shadowrun (yet) and they haven't claimed extraterritoriality or impose their own law in a literal sense, but we're not far off. (see the censorship debate)
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > The process of increasing legibility doesn't necessarily need to come in the from a legal authority. That is my point. I'm saying that legibility is not imposed by the state, but arises from market actors in an emergent fashion.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      well the question is to what degree those interactions can actually be described as markets. Herbert Simon's made an observation in the 90s "Suppose that [“a mythical visitor from Mars”] approaches the Earth from space, equipped with a telescope that revels social structures. The firms reveal themselves, say, as solid green areas with faint interior contours marking out divisions and departments. Market transactions show as red lines connecting firms, forming a network in the spaces between them. Within firms (and perhaps even between them) the approaching visitor also sees pale blue lines, the lines of authority connecting bosses with various levels of workers. As our visitors looked more carefully at the scene beneath, it might see one of the green masses divide, as a firm divested itself of one of its divisions. Or it might see one green object gobble up another. At this distance, the departing golden parachutes would probably not be visible. No matter whether our visitor approached the United States or the Soviet Union, urban China or the European Community, the greater part of the space below it would be within green areas, for almost all of the inhabitants would be employees, hence inside the firm boundaries. Organizations would be the dominant feature of the landscape. A message sent back home, describing the scene, would speak of “large green areas interconnected by red lines.” It would not likely speak of “a network of red lines connecting green spots." And this has only accelerated in the last few decades. Walmart in a sense is the largest communist experiment in the United States.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        The traditional way of demarcating those interactions into categories would be on the basis of consent and coercion. For example, people in the Soviet Union were compelled where people in the US were allowed to choose amongst the options available. This information is not accessible by observing aliens because their observations are limited to material interactions and they lack implicit knowledge necessary to make inferences that would allow them to distinguish between the two. From a macro perspective the difference would be whether the owner of a firm or conglomerate is able to make decisions that would cause him to lose his conglomerate or if he can compel people to continue to support him. Of course in the US we have plenty of enterprise that are "too big to fail" but to my knowledge amazon is not yet one of them.