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The concepts in Seeing Like A State are very relevant to programmers and to anyone trying to “change the world” with technology. One of the main points is that

The concepts in Seeing Like A State are very relevant to programmers and to anyone trying to “change the world” with technology. One of the main points is that for a state to manage many people it tends to use power (hard and soft) to homogenize the populace. My belief is that tech necessarily does the same thing. Everyone in your app has permissions defined by some enum, a limited number of actions available, content moderation machinery. This has effects that are inescapable, especially in the fields of medicine, mental health, education, social engagement. Tech makes our levers to move the Earth more efficient, but at the cost of a lack of diversity of thought, lifestyle, and value.

jagged-chisel 2y ago
Diversity in [the featuresets of] software systems has led to reduced security. The only systems without the “rails” to keep the user on-track and out of danger zones are those that provide the user with the ability to program it themselves. Must it be this way? Can we provide the complexity of flexibility while protecting our users’ finances and other important information? I don’t know if we can, but our track record isn’t good.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  > Diversity in [the featuresets of] software systems has led to reduced security citation needed. one anecdote that comes to mind, the gnu build system had an odd assortment of machines. when they were hacked (very targeted attack) they only noticed because the malware crashed on a R6000 mips cpu or something.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    That's also a good reason to make your code portable to other architectures, even if you don't intend to support them. Doing so can shake out bugs that would otherwise not be so apparent.
  - jagged-chisel 2y ago
    I think anyone in the industry would agree that at some point, the increase in exposed surface area provided by the addition of features (and the complexity to support them) has indeed decreased security at least once in the history of software. My statement doesn't say that it always leads to reduced security. I would, however, posit that it's pretty darn close to "always."
- sameoldtune 2y ago
  In the context of my comment you’re thinking very small. Yes, providing more options for users can make an application less secure. But that force to make it secure is the very force I’m describing which locks down people’s options, their ability to self-express, and their options to create personal and societal value out of their actions. Every choice a programmer makes about how to model the world is a choice that is forced upon every user of their application. Many programmers lean left politically, but the same type of “fascistic” qualities they complain about in political leaders seems to go unquestioned when making a program, which dispassionately divides the world into rigid categories.
  - FreakLegion 2y ago
    Technological homogeneity also creates single points of failure, as we saw this week with CrowdStrike. Heterogeneity, on the other hand, can (not will, but can) improve security outcomes. I remember making a comment years ago about opening PDFs in PDF.js instead of Acrobat (12 years, it turns out [1] -- PDF.js had just started shipping in Firefox). At the time, Acrobat was the standard and widely exploited, but obviously none of those exploits did anything in the browser. Still, homogeneity isn't always bad. If I were in, say, the cyber insurance racket, I'd make any company not using U2F or FIDO2 pay up. Not all choices are good choices. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033804
  - polynox 2y ago
    It is not the "dispassionate dividing of the world into rigid categories" necessary in order to implement software that is morally or ethically problematic, it is the imposition of those rigid categories upon society at large, perhaps by itself or perhaps merely just the conflation of the separation between the categories that gets incorporated into the design as a subconscious or even conscious choice to reify the categorical differences that is the problem. It is not the knowledge itself that is the problem, it is how that knowledge gets incorporated into an overly simplistic and heavy-handed approach to act. Indeed that is the very thesis of the Seeing like a State book. To take the first example of scientific forestry that replaced the local control over the land in which the categories were the species of plants as an example, it was not the factual knowledge about the species of plants, which is an observation about the true nature of reality, it was the decision to use that fact about the distinction between the plants and decide to separate the plants geographically to uniform monoculture plots rather than allowing them to be mixed together (and, in the process, in fact destroying things that they did not understand, the ecosystem) that is argued to have been the cause of the scientific forestry failure. The plots were just fine before and after the knowledge about what plants were where and what the different types of plants there were became known; it was the act of separating the plants into the monoculture plots. The knowledge was a necessary prerequisite to do so, but it was not sufficient, and I don't know if I could believe that accurate knowledge of actual pre-existing categories that correspond to the actual universe could by itself be wrong. Certain plants really are different than other plants, species actually exist. What you decide to do with that information is up to you, but I don't know if I could support the suppression of the acquisition of knowledge merely because it might (but also might not) be used in ways we disagree. If they had merely studied the plants, that would not have been wrong. If they had created a map of where the plants were, that also would not have been wrong in my view. It was when they decided to change reality that the moral implications attach, in my view. They could have mapped out the plants and divided the map into categories: "there are oak trees here and not here", or "there are strawberry bushes here, and not here", and that is "dividing the world into categories" (namely: presence or absence of certain plants in certain locations), but that is merely the true expression of factual reality. It was how they decided as a separate step, "let's make all the strawberry bushes be in the same location" which incorporated many smaller actions like "let's move this strawberry bush from here to here" or "let's remove all the plants we have not specifically identified, as we (falsely) believe that they are not essential" in which reality was actually changed, and thus the moral or ethical implication attaches in my view. Those who act have a duty to act responsibly, to do no harm, and so on, and the duty scales with the scope of the action, and perhaps there is a scope of action which by itself is too large, the standard or duty of care too impossible to satisfy due to the sheer complexity, for any one person or collection of people to rightfully possess what would be obligatory in my view to have the permission to act. I would also not view the mere publication of software as action per se either. In your example, it is the utilization of the marketing channels to push the software onto users with or without their knowledge, to exercise editorial control over what software may or may not be used on one's supposedly own device, and so on that the duty applies. If someone publishes a program that divides the world into categories, but no one uses the program, it doesn't matter how wrong the program is. The program can have a field for skin color that is literally black and white for the purpose of calibrating an algorithm that divides pixels into skin-or-not-skin, for example to cut out the background, and yet if no one actually uses, much less is forced to use the program then the mechanism of distinguishing between skin-and-not-skin being incorrect and not for example a scalar or some other model does not harm anyone. It's just an overly simplistic program, a piece of text, an incomplete idea, a reflection of a categorical distinction that does not exist in reality but only in the mind of the programmer and in the software, but if no one ever uses the software let alone is forced to use it, who possibly can be harmed by it?
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
> My belief is that tech necessarily does the same thing [, homegenize people]. Great call out! This is very near the core of my technospiritual struggles, the issue of tech to me. First, I'd say it's important to open the framing some! Ursala Franklin contrasts perscriptive vs holistic technologies, tech which sets fixed order versus tech that expands the capability of people & craftsmem. Tech can expand not constrain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p... > Everyone in your app has permissions defined by some enum, a limited number of actions available, content moderation machinery. Alas, yes; most tech is of this variety! There were some very active submissions recently on Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers which is about exactly the opposite, about tech for personal & small scale itches, made as you like it. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 322 points, 40 days, 173 comments > Tech makes our levers to move the Earth more efficient, but at the cost of a lack of diversity of thought, lifestyle, and value. The largely unexplored alternate is malleable systems, is general systems research, rather than letting capitalism take the reign & crank out endless apps at ever more massified cloudified portions & scale. We can elect to make software soft & participative. https://malleable.systems https://malleable.systems
- sameoldtune 2y ago
  Thanks for this insightful response!
strken 2y ago
Depends which tech. I would argue that bash scripting or excel do almost the opposite.
- gavinhoward 2y ago
  Side effect of Turing-completeness, maybe?
  - ohlook 2y ago
    Is just one possible model for computation. How deep our reliance on it is just makes it another of those normalizers that round off analog buzz we seem to prefer as analog meat suits. Society is in a Goodharts Law phase; the last 50-60 years are increasingly seen as a shit measure for planning the future. Achievement using computers as we know them is tapped out due to physical limitations. Technical success there is too specific an output to be generally applicable. All the talk in IT about not making monoliths and the biggest portion industry is just 3 cloud providers, Python, Linux, network stacks, and the JS ecosystem. Ignorant business machine tech is dead to gen pop who are tired of giving up their time to tap on bullshit. It’s best put to real science and management of material logistics.
cryptica 2y ago
Both the state and corporations want to homogenize the population. The state wants a homogeneous population because it make it easier to obtain desired election outcomes and desired amount of power if people can be manipulated as large groups towards a limited subset of parties/options. The politician who promises "I will lower tax for the middle class by 1%" won't stand a chance if their opponent promises "I will completely abolish all taxes for the middle class." Corporations want a homogeneous population because it makes it easier to meet consumer needs if consumers all want the same things. Also, in terms of marketing, it's easier/more effective to target people based on their social groups; then let people expend the effort required to bring themselves into alignment with the group identity... As opposed to trying to target campaigns based on complex individual needs... When trying to create campaigns which cater to many unique individuals, there may be no clear, repeatable patterns that can drive predictable consumer behaviors. If the consumer can be tricked into adapting their own personal preferences to more closely match their group's preference... and if that group happens to be a large group, it creates predictable consumer behavior, at scale, at no cost. E.g. Identity = "I'm a creative individual" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy this Apple computer" Identity = "I'm a moral person" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy this book about DEI and corporate responsibility" Identity = "I'm a libertarian" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy some Bitcoin" Identity = "I'm a highly educated and caring person" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy this vaccine to protect your loved ones"
- crabmusket 2y ago
  As Ellul put it in Propaganda, > Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are. One must be sure the market will react rapidly and massively to a given proposal or suggestion. One therefore needs fundamental psychological unity on which advertising can play with certainty when manipulating public opinion.
svnt 2y ago
Things fade; alternatives exclude.

jagged-chisel 2y ago

Diversity in [the featuresets of] software systems has led to reduced security. The only systems without the “rails” to keep the user on-track and out of danger zones are those that provide the user with the ability to program it themselves. Must it be this way? Can we provide the complexity of flexibility while protecting our users’ finances and other important information? I don’t know if we can, but our track record isn’t good.

1oooqooq 2y ago
> Diversity in [the featuresets of] software systems has led to reduced security citation needed. one anecdote that comes to mind, the gnu build system had an odd assortment of machines. when they were hacked (very targeted attack) they only noticed because the malware crashed on a R6000 mips cpu or something.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  That's also a good reason to make your code portable to other architectures, even if you don't intend to support them. Doing so can shake out bugs that would otherwise not be so apparent.
- jagged-chisel 2y ago
  I think anyone in the industry would agree that at some point, the increase in exposed surface area provided by the addition of features (and the complexity to support them) has indeed decreased security at least once in the history of software. My statement doesn't say that it always leads to reduced security. I would, however, posit that it's pretty darn close to "always."
sameoldtune 2y ago
In the context of my comment you’re thinking very small. Yes, providing more options for users can make an application less secure. But that force to make it secure is the very force I’m describing which locks down people’s options, their ability to self-express, and their options to create personal and societal value out of their actions. Every choice a programmer makes about how to model the world is a choice that is forced upon every user of their application. Many programmers lean left politically, but the same type of “fascistic” qualities they complain about in political leaders seems to go unquestioned when making a program, which dispassionately divides the world into rigid categories.
- FreakLegion 2y ago
  Technological homogeneity also creates single points of failure, as we saw this week with CrowdStrike. Heterogeneity, on the other hand, can (not will, but can) improve security outcomes. I remember making a comment years ago about opening PDFs in PDF.js instead of Acrobat (12 years, it turns out [1] -- PDF.js had just started shipping in Firefox). At the time, Acrobat was the standard and widely exploited, but obviously none of those exploits did anything in the browser. Still, homogeneity isn't always bad. If I were in, say, the cyber insurance racket, I'd make any company not using U2F or FIDO2 pay up. Not all choices are good choices. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033804
- polynox 2y ago
  It is not the "dispassionate dividing of the world into rigid categories" necessary in order to implement software that is morally or ethically problematic, it is the imposition of those rigid categories upon society at large, perhaps by itself or perhaps merely just the conflation of the separation between the categories that gets incorporated into the design as a subconscious or even conscious choice to reify the categorical differences that is the problem. It is not the knowledge itself that is the problem, it is how that knowledge gets incorporated into an overly simplistic and heavy-handed approach to act. Indeed that is the very thesis of the Seeing like a State book. To take the first example of scientific forestry that replaced the local control over the land in which the categories were the species of plants as an example, it was not the factual knowledge about the species of plants, which is an observation about the true nature of reality, it was the decision to use that fact about the distinction between the plants and decide to separate the plants geographically to uniform monoculture plots rather than allowing them to be mixed together (and, in the process, in fact destroying things that they did not understand, the ecosystem) that is argued to have been the cause of the scientific forestry failure. The plots were just fine before and after the knowledge about what plants were where and what the different types of plants there were became known; it was the act of separating the plants into the monoculture plots. The knowledge was a necessary prerequisite to do so, but it was not sufficient, and I don't know if I could believe that accurate knowledge of actual pre-existing categories that correspond to the actual universe could by itself be wrong. Certain plants really are different than other plants, species actually exist. What you decide to do with that information is up to you, but I don't know if I could support the suppression of the acquisition of knowledge merely because it might (but also might not) be used in ways we disagree. If they had merely studied the plants, that would not have been wrong. If they had created a map of where the plants were, that also would not have been wrong in my view. It was when they decided to change reality that the moral implications attach, in my view. They could have mapped out the plants and divided the map into categories: "there are oak trees here and not here", or "there are strawberry bushes here, and not here", and that is "dividing the world into categories" (namely: presence or absence of certain plants in certain locations), but that is merely the true expression of factual reality. It was how they decided as a separate step, "let's make all the strawberry bushes be in the same location" which incorporated many smaller actions like "let's move this strawberry bush from here to here" or "let's remove all the plants we have not specifically identified, as we (falsely) believe that they are not essential" in which reality was actually changed, and thus the moral or ethical implication attaches in my view. Those who act have a duty to act responsibly, to do no harm, and so on, and the duty scales with the scope of the action, and perhaps there is a scope of action which by itself is too large, the standard or duty of care too impossible to satisfy due to the sheer complexity, for any one person or collection of people to rightfully possess what would be obligatory in my view to have the permission to act. I would also not view the mere publication of software as action per se either. In your example, it is the utilization of the marketing channels to push the software onto users with or without their knowledge, to exercise editorial control over what software may or may not be used on one's supposedly own device, and so on that the duty applies. If someone publishes a program that divides the world into categories, but no one uses the program, it doesn't matter how wrong the program is. The program can have a field for skin color that is literally black and white for the purpose of calibrating an algorithm that divides pixels into skin-or-not-skin, for example to cut out the background, and yet if no one actually uses, much less is forced to use the program then the mechanism of distinguishing between skin-and-not-skin being incorrect and not for example a scalar or some other model does not harm anyone. It's just an overly simplistic program, a piece of text, an incomplete idea, a reflection of a categorical distinction that does not exist in reality but only in the mind of the programmer and in the software, but if no one ever uses the software let alone is forced to use it, who possibly can be harmed by it?

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

> My belief is that tech necessarily does the same thing [, homegenize people]. Great call out! This is very near the core of my technospiritual struggles, the issue of tech to me. First, I'd say it's important to open the framing some! Ursala Franklin contrasts perscriptive vs holistic technologies, tech which sets fixed order versus tech that expands the capability of people & craftsmem. Tech can expand not constrain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p... > Everyone in your app has permissions defined by some enum, a limited number of actions available, content moderation machinery. Alas, yes; most tech is of this variety! There were some very active submissions recently on Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers which is about exactly the opposite, about tech for personal & small scale itches, made as you like it. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 322 points, 40 days, 173 comments > Tech makes our levers to move the Earth more efficient, but at the cost of a lack of diversity of thought, lifestyle, and value. The largely unexplored alternate is malleable systems, is general systems research, rather than letting capitalism take the reign & crank out endless apps at ever more massified cloudified portions & scale. We can elect to make software soft & participative. https://malleable.systems https://malleable.systems

sameoldtune 2y ago
Thanks for this insightful response!

strken 2y ago

Depends which tech. I would argue that bash scripting or excel do almost the opposite.

gavinhoward 2y ago
Side effect of Turing-completeness, maybe?
- ohlook 2y ago
  Is just one possible model for computation. How deep our reliance on it is just makes it another of those normalizers that round off analog buzz we seem to prefer as analog meat suits. Society is in a Goodharts Law phase; the last 50-60 years are increasingly seen as a shit measure for planning the future. Achievement using computers as we know them is tapped out due to physical limitations. Technical success there is too specific an output to be generally applicable. All the talk in IT about not making monoliths and the biggest portion industry is just 3 cloud providers, Python, Linux, network stacks, and the JS ecosystem. Ignorant business machine tech is dead to gen pop who are tired of giving up their time to tap on bullshit. It’s best put to real science and management of material logistics.

cryptica 2y ago

Both the state and corporations want to homogenize the population. The state wants a homogeneous population because it make it easier to obtain desired election outcomes and desired amount of power if people can be manipulated as large groups towards a limited subset of parties/options. The politician who promises "I will lower tax for the middle class by 1%" won't stand a chance if their opponent promises "I will completely abolish all taxes for the middle class." Corporations want a homogeneous population because it makes it easier to meet consumer needs if consumers all want the same things. Also, in terms of marketing, it's easier/more effective to target people based on their social groups; then let people expend the effort required to bring themselves into alignment with the group identity... As opposed to trying to target campaigns based on complex individual needs... When trying to create campaigns which cater to many unique individuals, there may be no clear, repeatable patterns that can drive predictable consumer behaviors. If the consumer can be tricked into adapting their own personal preferences to more closely match their group's preference... and if that group happens to be a large group, it creates predictable consumer behavior, at scale, at no cost. E.g. Identity = "I'm a creative individual" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy this Apple computer" Identity = "I'm a moral person" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy this book about DEI and corporate responsibility" Identity = "I'm a libertarian" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy some Bitcoin" Identity = "I'm a highly educated and caring person" -> Sales pitch = "Here, buy this vaccine to protect your loved ones"

crabmusket 2y ago
As Ellul put it in Propaganda, > Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are. One must be sure the market will react rapidly and massively to a given proposal or suggestion. One therefore needs fundamental psychological unity on which advertising can play with certainty when manipulating public opinion.

svnt 2y ago

Things fade; alternatives exclude.