I am a software engineer by trade, available for freelance and consulting. These are my writings; mostly non-professional. You can also find me on Bluesky and Github.
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Book Review: Seeing Like a State
September 16, 2022
In which humans try to control complex systems at their peril.
Seeing like a State by James C. Scott is an exploration of the ways that governments have shaped the world to their ends over the past few hundred years. The enlightenment created a new faith in science, and the use of the scientific method to understand and dramatically reshape society and culture. Scott ambitiously groups together many separate social phenomena, as disparate as the creation of standardized units of measurement, the adoption of permanent surnames, the central planning of economies, scientific agriculture, and modern city planning, into a coherent process of centralization and standardization undertaken by states, calling the philosophy underlying all of these developments high modernism. High modernism is essentially the belief that “traditional” forms of knowledge and ways of doing things are backwards and outdated, and that the application of central planning by trained experts using science ought to replace these traditional ways. In the case of standardizing measurements, this looks like replacing local, colloquial measurements, which are based on the industries that use them and vary greatly from region to region, with standards like metres, kilograms, etc. In the case of city planning, this means replacing ancient, dense, unplanned cities with centrally planned grid cities zoned to create order and regularity. The book is generally a critique of high modernism, and especially the application of this philosophy in authoritarian settings like communist states and European colonies.
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The Bear is a Breath of Fresh Air for TV
August 30, 2022
Note: this post contains spoilers for FXs “The Bear” season 1.
It was after watching two seasons of Succession that I finally realized it is a show where each and every character is evil and incapable of change. At first I rooted for Shiv. She seemed reasonable in those first couple of episodes! Then Gerri, Kendall, then even Roman for a bit. The show settled into a kind of rotation where each of the siblings has their turn to display a glimmer of likeability. The audience grasps onto these moments like a life raft; anything to avoid drowning in the cynicism! But then, gotcha! It was a ruse; the life raft is actually a lure, and you’re caught and pulled further down into the dark world of the Roys. This gridlock became frustrating after a while. I continued to watch Succession loyally of course, unable to abandon such an otherwise well-written show; but I wisened up and accepted that each of these characters is rotten to their scheming, power hungry cores; they will never see the light.
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On Land Ownership
August 19, 2022
Negara mawi tata, desa mawi cara (The capital has its order, the village its customs).
—Javanese proverb
I have recently been reading Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, a book about ways in which governments create simplified schemas in order to make complex systems “legible”; i.e. understandable, measurable, manipulatable. It’s also about how these schemas, applied by the power of the state, actually end up shaping what they measure, usually along the lines of creating an optimization process for the metric or narrow set of metrics being measured, often at the expense of the system as a whole. For example, if you were a state managing a forest for lumber, you might track the number of trees of a certain variety and their heights and diameters as a way to know how much lumber you might expect to be able to extract from the forest per year, and ignore such things as the density and diversity of undergrowth, animals that live in the forest, etc. However, this might lead you to begin planting rows of trees of all the same species to replace the old growth forests you cut down, because according to the way you “see” the forest this is optimal for maximizing lumber. Your schema for seeing the forest ignores the necessity of its diversity, and this results in some unforeseen side-affect like disease destroying your whole crop of planted trees, or declining soil fertility which results in poor yields several generations down the line.
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The Breadmakers (short story)
August 14, 2022
Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four.
Ezekiel 1:15-18
I was biking home from work on one of those days of summer when it’s not too humid outside and I can expect to arrive at my office without getting sweaty. I was nearly home, and since I can hop into the shower as soon as I get there I like to push it a bit harder when heading that way. Cassie had asked me to grab a couple of things from the store. Butter, some salad greens, mustard. She was baking at home; it was her dinner night. Sausages, salad, fresh bread; I was hungry. I dodged through an intersection after a quick glance to each side, ignoring the stop sign. Iowa stop. I looked up at the shady green street ahead of me, panting, working the pedals like a steam engine. Then something unexpected happened. I don't know exactly what, really. I was here and then I wasn't. Well, I was riding my bike and then I wasn't riding my bike, home from the store, my groceries in my pannier bags. But then I didn't have groceries or panniers, and I was on my feet in an empty room. That’s the only way I can really describe it. I was riding my bike, and then I was standing in this room; dimly lit, appearing to be a perfect cube, with a kind of grey cement-like interior. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I noticed a figure standing in front of me, humanoid. It was exactly my height, of this I'm quite confident, and it was grey, appearing to be made of the same cement as the walls. The jolt of my apparent teleportation had me in a decidedly uncomfortable state. I did not know at this point that I had been abducted by aliens. I figured that out later.
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On "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
July 28, 2022
Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens- and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
This quote from “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr. stood out to me as a distillation of one of the main themes from the book; that destruction is as natural to humans as creation. The plot of this novel makes it seem that an advanced human culture will destroy itself with nuclear bombs as surely as it will become advanced enough to develop them. Humanity is trapped in an eternal cycle of blasting itself back to the stone age, then slowly crawling back towards enlightenment, again and again forever.
Another related philosophical musing expressed in this novel is that it is easier for humans to exist in a state of desperation; groping for survival and living in ignorance, wishing for a better future; that once we attain comfort and knowledge we are discontent with the present and are not sure why, so our only outlet is to lash out with destructive impulse. This novel was first published in 1959, when complete nuclear destruction was a very real and tangible danger. We have now survived long enough under “mutually assured destruction” that most of us don’t worry too much about this metaphorical Sword of Damocles above our head, though the possibility of nuclear apocalypse will never go away.
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