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 "Seeing Like a State"
=======================

This time I have read two books: J. L. Austin's "How to Do Things with
Words" and James Scott's "Seeing Like a State".

From "How to Do Things with Words", a collection of lectures on speech
acts, I learned (or confirmed) mostly that I do not enjoy poking at
linguistics. It is somewhat interesting, but there are many
arbitrary-looking abstractions, which are understandable when studying
natural languages, but which always repelled me from
linguistics. Perhaps those are needed to make sense of languages, even
if imperfectly, but I think it would be more satisfying if there were
examples of the usefulness of those abstractions, and it was not just
"here is one of the many ways to slice the language". There was still
something to think about, and it is useful for the context (I saw it
referenced from both "A Theory of Justice" and a lecture on sociology
I watched recently).

"Seeing Like a State" was more interesting. It describes and
criticizes "high modernism", with examples from different times,
regions, and areas (including monoculture forests, Le Corbusier's
architecture, Soviet collectivization, Tanzanian villagization). I
think people working on automation, myself included, are prone to such
aspirations, so it is particularly useful for us to be aware of the
issues described: the attempts to simplify and structure the reality,
cram it into a neat model, to make it easier to read and manipulate,
have often led to ugly results when done with arrogance and without
care. And it does suggest methods to proceed carefully: to advance in
small steps, favor reversibility, plan on surprises and human
inventiveness. It speaks at length of "metis", practical (and often
local) knowledge, its destruction and deskilling of workers as they
are moved to factories or other managed facilities, the corresponding
loss of autonomy and growing dependence on whoever manages
them. Mentions a few particularly disastrous implementations of such
plans, leading to famines. Draws parallels between practical knowledge
and spoken language, formulated knowledge and grammar (a recurring
metaphor, mentioned in the past posts, along with recurring
aspirations to approach mathematical formulations in Western
philosophy, which James Scott touches on in this book). Plenty of
interesting bits there, and it is another book focusing on tendencies
that shaped the modern world.

Aside from reading, I injured my hand while killing a mosquito on the
ceiling. It is getting better, but it takes a while: 5 weeks and
counting. Skipping piano exercises because of it, but going to resume
them soon.

My primary VPS went down almost a month ago, later I learned that the
hosting company's servers were powered off by the data center company,
due to some issues with another hosting company originating from
around here. I use such a hosting company because it accepts payments
from local banks, as mentioned previously. They take a while to
restore those, but report working on it. Meantime, my XMPP server and
one of the homepage mirrors are down, I switched DNS to Cloudflare,
and one of my emails to Zoho, though it is quite awkward: no IMAP or
SMTP, so no synchronization with my local mailbox, and the
correspondence from this period, if there will be any, will likely be
missing from the primary mailbox (unless I will copy messages
manually). It also takes more than 700 HTTP requests to load, and
sometimes it takes more than 3 minutes here, possibly due to DPI or
adjacent censorship measures.

I noticed that plain Shadowsocks ceased to work here, and so did my
list of Tor bridges. But still managing to stay connected. Fastly CDN
is blocked, among many others, and recently I noticed that it actually
does block deb.debian.org connections sometimes, as well as
pypi.org. In other bad local news, imports from Armenia are banned
(including the Jermuk mineral water; for various silly reasons
officially, but because Armenia tries to turn towards the EU);
"traditional values" keep being pushed everywhere (e.g., the Ministry
of Education prepares a list of allowed toys for kindergartens with
those in mind); a law was adjusted to arrest citizens' property if
they speak out from abroad; reportedly ISPs extend cooperation with
RKN to better detect VPN traffic; the "Memorial" human rights
organization is included into the registry of "terrorist and extremist
organizations"; fines are introduced for authentication via foreign
services; a law is passed to introduce an IMEI database; the number of
allowed bank cards per person is reduced to 20; multiple Yabloko party
members are sued and temporarily labeled as extremists or arrested to
prevent them from running in the upcoming elections, with the help of
a far-right nationalist paramilitary organization, joining the usual
team of the secret police and the ruling party.

I have finally decided to join the Yabloko party. Though it is unclear
whether it could lead to any improvement, but joining it looks like
the right thing to do, and an improvement -- like a worthwhile thing
to attempt. An organized society is supposed to be at least
inconvenient to a tyranny. Now trying to figure out how I can
participate there. Probably will describe the experience in more
detail later.


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:Date: 2026-06-28