Today, my guest is writer, thinker, and friend Dan Wang. He was on Statecraft a year ago, to talk about his book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, which many of you will have read. Dan argued that China is an engineering state and the United States a lawyerly society, and that this distinction explains a lot of the differences between our two societies.
But this time, we’re talking about a scholar who has deeply shaped both of our thinking, the great James C. Scott, author of (among many other classics) Seeing Like a State.
We discuss:
How Scott’s fieldwork helped him understand peasant life and state capacity
How mountains impede state power, in Southeast Asia and the USA
How peasants and civil servants resist authority
The advantages of tubers over rice
Dan’s guiding principles for a career in an era of large language models
Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood, Shadrach Strehle, and Jasper Placio for their support in producing this episode.
For a printable PDF of this interview, click here:
Today, we are going to talk about an author who died two years ago this week. He has been influential to my thinking. Dan, would you say James C. Scott has been a great influence on your thinking?
He is the greatest influence on my thinking. Scott is this role model I adopt for a career.
Scott may be familiar to listeners as the author of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. But he had this long career through the 20th century into the 21st, as a political scientist and anthropologist who spent a huge amount of time in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, and Burma. He became one of the most widely read social scientists of his generation. I wonder if your special interest in him is because he was also a farmer who raised animals, kept bees, and sheared his own sheep. Is that part of your professional ambition?
Not exactly. My skill is email. My interest in Scott came from having been born in one of the areas he wrote about — Southwest China, a heavily mountainous zone into which a lot of different folks have escaped. I started seeing how people have considerably more freedom in steeper places. That led me to the work of Scott. This is a global phenomenon. We associate the Highland Scots as being an ornery, drunk people who brought their culture to rural Appalachia. The idea of the political culture of Colorado is that it is full of libertarians who are pro-weed and pro-guns.
What was the initial attraction of Scott for you?
I came to Scott the way many young men of my generation did — I read both of the canonical book reviews of Seeing Like a State on the internet. I’m told the reason Scott is a fixture in the Silicon Valley canon is that the essayist Venkatesh Rao — his wife was assigned this book in grad school. He ended up writing an essay about it. That led Scott Alexander (no relation) to write an essay about it, and it got into the water supply.
Scott is interested in the relationship between states and the people they try to govern. Seeing Like a State is a book about that relationship from the top down — how a state tries to impose legibility, systems that let it “see” things on the messy real-world terrain it governs. Eventually I came to the realization that a lot of Scott’s most interesting work is about the bottom up — how people try to resist being legible to the state. That’s the part that you’ve fallen in love with.
Silicon Valley is usually directionally right, but it always misses the target in some pretty crucial way. Seeing Like a State is a very important work for Scott, but it is a summation after he has spent decades doing fieldwork — especially in Malaysia and Burma, but throughout Southeast Asia.
It was after a lot of bottom-up work that he decided he could offer this summation about what it is that state makers do to practice their statecraft. Scott has a lot of appeal for me because he is not just a great social scientist, he is also an excellent writer. He did the work. He read all of these political science works. Then he moved to a village 70 people strong in Malaysia, learned the language, and spent a lot of time chatting with these people.
He did the same exercise in Burma/Myanmar — learned the language, spent the time, read the work, and produced excellent, readable results. This is a great refutation to the idea that in the humanities and social sciences, people just sit in their offices, dream up big thoughts, and write them down without great basis in reality. He is based in reality — not purely being observational and descriptive. He is making super bold arguments to advance the state of the field, and to offer something to the rest of us, who have not read as much of the literature as the grad students.
My initial framing question was, “Why do you and I like this guy so much when in some ways he would have been critical of our projects?” We’re both interested in state capacity — how modern states can function and govern well. Scott was a self-described anarchist. He thought perhaps the whole project of governance was a mistake. In Against the Grain, about a decade ago, he argued that agrarian society may have been a mistake for most people through most of history — because it led to sedentary lifestyles and oppression by the state.
One answer is that he might have liked our work. He was interested in everything: the daily life of a 70-person Malaysian village, what the gossip in that village meant about class relations, what that meant for people’s responses to technological progress, and what that meant for the state, modernity, and the grand sweep of human civilization. At every level he’s curious, and I have to hope he would have found us like-minded.
The career arc is worth studying and emulating. He began his earlier books — The Moral Economy of the Peasant and Weapons of the Weak — by moving from the US. He started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then moved to Southeast Asia to study the peasants. Being embedded in these communities was his earlier work, through which he combined intense observation of people with voluminous reading, to offer a couple of theories well encapsulated by the phrases “weapons of the weak” and “the moral economy of the peasant.”
Towards the end of his career, he moves towards a denunciation of grains — wheat, cereal crops, rice — and a final book called In Praise of Floods. He moved from the intensely personal to the grand environmental: to denounce an essential source of carbohydrates, and one of the biggest threats to human life — floods. I believe it was George Saunders who said writers need to earn the ability to go abstract. [Harry: It was Natalie Goldberg, in Wild Mind.] Scott, by God, that man has earned it.
He died in July 2024, and shortly afterwards you picked up some of his personal library.
At the time I was a fellow at the Yale Law School. This very radical professor earned one of the top positions in academia globally: he went emeritus as a Sterling Professor — the highest rank at Yale, which is a pretty nice gig. He spent most of his career there, in part farming: raising sheep and chickens, as well as other crops. He told The New York Times this considerably informed his scholarship. Unfortunately, by the time I was at Yale he was already frail, and I never had the chance to meet Jim, as they call him there.
Once he passed away, he gave away most of his books to one of my favorite secondhand bookstores, Grey Matter Books in New Haven. I visited all the time — it was a reason to make the trek up from New York. One day I came across a little sign saying, “From the library of James C. Scott.” It was an entire bookshelf, and I was relatively restrained. It would not have been very Scott-like to buy the whole shelf, which would well have been within my powers and desires.
You’re a better man than me — those would all be in my closet.
Indeed. They would be in my basement, eventually funneled to your closet. I picked up only a few volumes. It would have been a good thing for more people to have touched a piece of greatness.
You’ve read The Art of Not Being Governed — what would I learn from it that I might not have picked up elsewhere?
If someone wanted to ask for my politics... go on Santi, ask me what my politics are.
Dan, what are your politics?
I am a crude Hegelian, with an emphasis on crude. One of my ideas about modern China is that it is a place where the state feels the need to squeeze ever tighter to understand this large, diverse country it does not feel it has a great understanding of. The harder it squeezes, the more people wish to flee — in other words, it’s dialectical. One of the main ways to appreciate China is that you are watching a population adapt to the craziness of state control. The state feels that the tighter it squeezes, the more it needs to squeeze.
Having spent my childhood in the mountainous regions of Southwest China, one of the points furthest from Beijing, I felt there was a certain amount of freedom there. There is a well-known saying that has gotten into the water supply even in English: “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away.” In Yunnan, where I spent time as a child, the mountains are high and the emperor is pretty far away. It was a poor zone. People were still growing opium when I was born in the early ‘90s — all sorts of poppy and heroin cultivation — and there are gigantic rainforests where people were still poaching exotic animals. The north of the province was Tibet. Yunnan has something like 25 of China’s official 56 ethnic groups. These are all made-up categories, but a lot of them are clustered in the southwest, in diverse zones ranging from rainforest to the Himalayas. Thinking about this region was attractive to me, and it was wonderful to see Scott offer an entire theory of what is going on in Highland Southeast Asia.
I hope you won’t think this tacky, but there are a number of emojis in the IFP Slack channel that I added, corresponding to ancient Chinese sayings. One of them is, “The mountains are high and heaven is far away.”
What are the others?
My favorite is a photograph of Deng Xiaoping, who I believe was a fan of a phrase that predated him — “Crossing the river by feeling the stones,” signifying a step-by-step process rather than having a grand plan in mind from the beginning.
In the region of China you describe — which Scott buckets into a super-region he calls “Zomia,” including the whole Burmese and Southeast Asian protrusion, with mountainous, Highland Scot-type peoples — what does the dialectic look like? The state wants to impose itself, tax them, and stop them from doing illicit things. How do people respond? What is the art?
The art stems mostly from geography — terrain determines freedom. Mountains tend to be asylums of liberty into which refugees are able to flee. The fact of statecraft Scott lays out well here is that states govern well only in accessible, flat lands. As soon as something becomes slightly inaccessible — steepness, mountains — states cannot climb very well. If you can find a congenial spot in the mountains, it becomes difficult for a tax assessor to find you. It’s not only mountains — there can be marshland and swampland: parts of the American South where people hide in the swamps and cultivate whatever they want. Deserts can be inaccessible. But mountains have always been where people hide, because they are able to support more people than deserts or marshes.
Scott’s central contribution is against the idea of the state as a luminous court center that many people are simply waiting to be allowed into. He points out that states are usually one of the greater threats to liberty. Many people are intent on fleeing them, because the state makes warfare and conscripts giant numbers of people to defeat another kingdom nearby. It collects taxes — and taxes have not been the norm; in the United States, the income tax was enshrined into law just over a century ago. States are usually trying to take away your life, your liberty, or your grains.
When you concentrate into flat valley lands cultivating monocrops — rice or wheat — that attracts not just the tax assessors but also mice and every other pest. Flatlands are also where diseases spread most easily. If one can run away into the mountains — plenty of people do. For me, the appealing message in The Art of Not Being Governed is that terrain has been rough for states, and that people are eager to flee into these places if they can.
Most of his work looks backwards — towards the end of his life he was very interested in prehistory — or societies slowly being colonized by modernity, as with the rice villages. He’s interested in physical landscapes, because the state can’t reach them. You might think: what’s the application today? Surely it can’t be terrain — 21st-century states have overcome the challenge of getting the tax assessor up into the mountains to figure out what your property is worth. But when you think about the American engagement in Afghanistan — as we’ve discussed on Statecraft — or the Chinese state’s experience today in Southwest China, maybe the terrain point has deeper resonance. There are other forms of retreat — to digital life, to illegibility. But his basic point about physical landscapes has more staying power than you might think at first glance.
Those of us who spend all our time doing email can’t appreciate the terrain. Scott, as someone who did the work and moved to Highland Southeast Asia — that man appreciates terrain. At the very start of The Art of Not Being Governed, he said that a lot of terrain has been conquered: with all-weather roads and helicopters, the state has in principle been able to penetrate the communities that tried to avoid it.
He’s not a hopeless romantic in this sense.
He is a very hopeful romantic, in fact. But political cultures vary somewhat by geography. More liberty can be found in rough-terrain areas: Appalachia; perhaps the mountain states of the West; Colorado; Utah; Highland Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asian states of Zomia grew quite a lot of the opium poppy until the ‘90s, when national governments, coordinated by the United Nations, decided to eradicate it. It was very successful. The only place it has not been eradicated is the Shan State of Burma, where people still resist, because heroin is such a lucrative cash crop. Perhaps one way to detect the mountain people is wherever they are growing the opium poppy — Afghanistan has managed it for quite a while, and the American state has not been all that effective at eradicating it there.
One of my initiatives at the Hoover Institution is a project on state capacity with my colleague Francis Fukuyama. He is one of the giants, perhaps on par with Jim Scott. One of his interesting ideas came out of trying to help the State Department rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the American government is very poorly suited to help other countries build states when it has such an anti-state attitude itself. Part of that is the element of libertarianism and state avoidance that still exists in many parts of the United States. It exists less in a place like Austria, which has been so dominated by the court in Vienna. The Austrians have plenty of mountains in the west, but they have eradicated a lot of the liberties the Americans and the Chinese still have not.
You are making me think we should do a David Hackett Fischer special on the borderland Scots-Irish who made Appalachia and, Fischer would argue, gave America some of its particular instinct towards liberty and anti-state politics. I recently finished Albion’s Seed, which was wonderful — and something of an internet cult classic.
The Scott Alexander review turned me on to a lot of Scott Alexander, and is still one of the best essays on the internet.
I didn’t plan to talk about this, but I grew up in a society where the state is very present.
Where did you grow up?
A bunch of cities on the Eastern Seaboard, then Los Angeles and Sacramento, before ending up in Northern Virginia.
Why did you move around so much?
Mostly because my father (who I interviewed for Statecraft) worked for a Spanish-language TV company, so I lived in many of the major Spanish TV markets in this country. But if you go back to my pre-Ellis Island roots on the other side of my family, my Lebanese heritage is all from the mountains outside Beirut. This might be self-psychoanalyzing, but some of my appreciation for Weapons of the Weak is that my Maronite and Melkite ancestors there resisted Ottoman domination by escaping to the hills for several hundred years. That might be a bridge too far.
I do not accept that as a bridge too far. This is why we are interested in Scott as we are. We have a similarity here, by the way — my mother was a radio and TV news anchor. Both of us have one parent in the TV business, and that must be why we have the talking heads and the sparkling voices we do.
There’s a funny inversion, which is that you’re very good on TV and I have a face made for radio. Perhaps we would have been better suited in opposite careers.
My mother tells me I have a face for radio but a voice for print. What I appreciate about growing up in Yunnan is that people in Southwest China don’t think that hard about what is going on in Beijing. People are poaching. They smoke a lot of cigarettes — I come from the part of China with the highest per capita smoking rates.
China is generally quite a high-smoking-rate society, so that’s an achievement.
We didn’t have that ‘80s and ‘90s era against cigarettes — we’re still pre-woke on tobacco. I smoked my first cigarette at something like age 12. These are the practices afforded to this area of Zomia.
What I appreciate most about Scott’s book is that he lays out things I recognize in the rural Chinese. They are much more eager to plant root crops, because that is a way to avoid assessment by the tax collector. If you grow rice in a paddy, it is easily accessible: the assessor comes over and says, “15% of that, please.” Sweet potatoes and cassava are underground. He has no way of seeing what is growing, especially high up in the mountains. The tax collector, in his mule-drawn carriage, is not that inclined to come up to assess your taxes.
Many mountain people are post-literate. They don’t have a writing system, which gives them more malleable ethnic identities. In my family there’s slight speculation that we are partially Tibetan, maybe partially the Wa people. Officially I was classified as Han when I was born, but in those regions, who the heck knows? There are all sorts of practices people maintain to avoid the state, to foot-drag, and to not think too hard about what is happening in the luminous center of the Communist Party. That is one of Scott’s great contributions.
He points out in Against the Grain that it’s not just that row crops are visible — you can see the size of the paddy and the expected yield — but you also often have a very narrow window for harvesting. You can come back around August, knowing the farmer must bring in his grain. With tubers, yams, and cassava, you can harvest them, tamp the ground back down, say, “The yield was poor this year,” and escape taxation that year.
I am pro-tuber.
We’re tuber-maxing here. Scott pays close attention to the physical and material world, and I appreciate that.
We’ve got to be anti-cereal, pro-tuber, pro-pulses. On this podcast we are reducing our intake of carbohydrates and increasing our consumption of beans.
Maybe we should talk about Weapons of the Weak, which drills down much further on the particular ways these mountain and swamp peoples resist legibility.
Let’s talk about your heritage of resisting the Ottoman Empire. What exactly were the weapons available to your ancestors? What does it mean to have weapons of the weak anyway?
The mountains are quite treacherous as you move east in Lebanon. On the other hand, you’re close to the major trading ports of the Eastern Mediterranean — Beirut, Tyre, and further south in Israel and Palestine. The famous tourist line about Lebanon before the civil war was that you could go skiing in the morning and swimming in the afternoon. One day I would like to do that. There is always more contact with the metropole in the Levant, even up in the mountains. The main escape was being able to protect and retain a distinct religious identity and schooling system. There are very few Christians in the Middle East, fewer today than 20 years ago, because of the effects of the War on Terror and other secular trends. That was the thing those people protected.
Santi, I declare you a member of the mountain tribe, just like me.
Just like the Borderers and the Highland Scots. We’re all in this one together.
I believe it was Pope Urban IX who said a heresy is not dangerous until it passes through Switzerland [Harry: although Statecraft can’t find a Pope Urban IX, or a source for this quotation] — another area in which one can go skiing in the morning and swimming in the afternoon, but full of heresies the Catholic Church was not able to stamp out. What is your Christian faith but another heresy in that corner of the world?
I don’t know as much about my great-great-grandfather’s weapons of the weak as I do about those of a 70-household village in Kedah, Malaysia. Scott gives a pseudonym to the village — he calls it Sedaka, because he’s a good anthropologist and doesn’t want to make the particular village legible. It sits outside a very small town, itself quite far from any major city, and it is entirely made up of tenant rice farmers. They don’t own the land, they rent it from the landowners. Scott is interested in the ways these people, who are dirt poor, avoid being forced into things they don’t want to do, and retain what he calls “class consciousness” — a little society the man can’t break into.
It’s interesting because in the United States we have a tradition of civil disobedience or direct action — well fleshed-out techniques to get the attention of the state or of mass society: the sit-in, being arrested, the boycott. They’re all products of mass media, and all of them, Scott would say, require direct, symbolic confrontation with authority. What Scott is interested in are techniques that do the opposite — that avoid any direct confrontation. They’re very ordinary, and require little coordination or planning:
Foot-dragging: doing what you’re asked, but doing it very slowly.
Feigning ignorance: “I don’t understand what you are saying to me.”
Sabotage — more direct action, but still something one person can do without organization.
False compliance: saying you’re going to do something and simply not doing it.
Stealing.
Gossip is a big one — chatter behind the back of the man.
One of my favorites is rude nicknames for officers of the state — backbiting. These are indeed weapons, but why exactly are they weapons of the weak?
This is a point you can argue with Scott on. Scott says, “Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do the multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion create political and economic barrier reefs of their own.”
The idea is that the aggregation of these petty acts of non-compliance, stealing, or sanding the gears — literally, in the case of the tractors introduced to this village — can stop or slow the arrival of new technologies and modes of oppression. The problem is that in the end, the weak in his book lose, and the Green Revolution comes. We move to double cropping.
What is double cropping?
Because of the innovations of men like Norman Borlaug, an American hero, you can plant cultivars of rice that harvest more quickly. You can do two cycles in a year instead of one, then leave the paddy fallow for a few months. If you’re familiar with 20th-century history, this kind of innovation is responsible for saving the lives of millions who would otherwise have been swept away by famine. It is also of interest to the state, because it helps Malaysia stop being a massive importer of rice, despite being a rice cultivator. There was a keen interest in bringing in tractors and new cultivars, and doing land reform, so they could stop being reliant on outside imports and commodity prices they didn’t control. It’s complicated: there are winners and losers in each technological shift. But it is a challenge to Scott that the weapons of the weak don’t end up winning the battle.
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” [as Thucydides put it]. Thus it has always been, whether Peloponnesian or Malaysian. I like this idea of weapons of the weak — foot dragging, sabotage, gossip — because Scott pointed out that too many political scientists, until that time, were studying peasants either as excessively passive people who suffered what they must, or as engaging in a great rebellion. We have peasant mountain uprisings everywhere in Asia, including at the time Scott was writing — the Vietnamese fighting off the French colonial authorities and then the American imperial ones. The mode of analysis fluctuated between unchanging, immutable, inscrutable ciphers [and rebels]. Adding a few more registers — more rays of light into the shades of resistance — is a very valuable contribution. What else did you like about Weapons of the Weak?
He’s very interested in gossip. He spends a lot of time hanging out, doing a fat load of nothing with peasants sitting around creating stories about the land-devouring misers who rule over them — generally ruining the reputations of wealthier men.
Let me argue against myself for a second. America, at the forefront of modernity for a while at least, has been very interested in legible systems. The Civil Rights story played out in these striking acts of resistance. But I learned through doing these Statecraft interviews that all kinds of people use these weapons of the weak — not just peasants against landowners. Take the moves of people in a bureaucracy who want to stop something a political appointee above them wants. You can go through this list — feigned ignorance, dissimulation, sabotage, gossip — and say, “All of these tools are available to middle managers and civil servants.” For stories of failed implementation, these conceptual categories are very useful.
I love this American term, “malicious compliance.” That is another weapon of the weak, isn’t it? You’re in Washington, DC. I hear there’s a lot of gossip in that town. Tell us more: what are some of the weapons available to the bureaucracy, aside from foot dragging and feigning ignorance of what their political appointees demand? What is available to the deep state?
“Malicious compliance” is a fabulous term, but it’s one way of looking at a much broader problem. Malicious compliance implies you tell me, “Carry out such-and-such directive.” I say, “Certainly,” then execute in a way that stymies your attempt at success. There are all kinds of procedural obedience that do the same thing, that don’t have to be malicious. It may be that my interests as a peasant bureaucrat are simply to minimize my own downside risk. Even though I’m not opposed to the “Big Dan initiative” that will set you up for your presidential run in 2028, I don’t want to be holding the bag if something goes wrong.
I make sure we get all the paperwork in triplicate.
We have to convene the stakeholders.
We can’t communicate openly, because of Congress-imposed rules on what we can say without formally writing it up in a meeting, so we have to space out those meetings and send around a poll to figure out when we can all meet.
A useful point Scott makes is that these are intuitive moves if you have a principal-agent problem — if you’re the agent and your interests differ from the principal’s. They emerge naturally. Nobody has to teach them.
What are some of your favorite rude nicknames for officers of the state?
I couldn’t possibly say. No, let’s think. Bill Nelson, NASA administrator in the last administration, was a congressman who was also an astronaut. By that, I mean he got the chance to ride along — some would say he forced his way on — the 24th Space Shuttle mission. He was known among some in the space community for a long time as Bill “Ballast” Nelson.
Let’s think about the weapons of the weak available to those of us not in the American bureaucracy. Santi, now that you work for one of these big frontier labs, I accuse you of being the symbol of hated imperial authority — against the rest of us in poor little universities, very scared about what AI is going to do to our students and ourselves. Pray tell us, what weapons of the weak are available to those of us nervous about imperial authority in the form of labs like Anthropic, your employer?
I reject the premise about imperial authority, and I’m going to make a big stink about it. That’s not at all the right mental model. But I will say the idea of illegibility is probably more important now than when Scott was writing about it. Any large language model (LLM) relies on legibility: the only way to do reinforcement learning is to have a map of data that can be legibly fed to the process. To the extent there are things we care about protecting — that we don’t want the machines doing for us — they are going to have to be illegible. Are there practices you execute regularly to maintain illegibility?
Learning how to be illegible to the machines is a useful exercise for all of us. I find Anthropic an intimidating authority indeed. Whenever you hoist your standard of what I call “double E” — effective altruism and export controls — I cower.
I know many will disagree with me on this, but I would not call Anthropic an effective altruist institution.
I do think it is really important to be illegible. The general question is: “How do we survive and drive value in the age of large language models?” You and I are both wordcels with email jobs. We have to continue writing; we can’t be writing the slop. I tried Pangram recently, and I was very pleased that when I submitted my letters, it came back as being 100% human-generated.
Why would you be pleased about that? You knew that already.
I did, but that is a good use case for the tool: it validates something I know is true. The more of us who can score high on Pangram, the better. I’ve been doing a lot of speaking over the past year since my book came out, and it is probably a good thing to put yourself in front of human audiences in flesh and blood, so people can see you are not some phantasm dreamed up by the large language models.
After writing my first book — one is not supposed to be a serial offender so quickly, but I’ve already plotted out my second and third. I still believe there is something to books that the effective altruist export control company is not going to devour so quickly — even though I believe you have just lost a copyright suit against a bunch of authors. I’m sorry to be teasing you without mercy. I call it a weapon of the weak.
It is still valuable to continue writing books. Let me freely share three guiding career principles I am adopting:
Don’t go insane. You and I both read social media, in which we see people are having three meltdowns a day before breakfast. It is important not to do that.
Continue to put out analytically rigorous intellectual work, for the rest of our careers and lifetimes.
Learn from people older and younger than us. Maintain that for a while and you have a career. To have a career in this moment means staying outside the reach of the large language models craving our jobs. Maybe it also involves reading very broadly rather than narrowly, because that is something the large language models are able to do.
Those are my weapons of the weak. Tell us, Santi, what are your guiding principles not to be devoured by the slop?
Scott would point out that there are weapons of the weak for protecting your economic interests — for making sure the tractor doesn’t do your job — and weapons for protecting other parts of your life from legibility. An LLM is one more modern machine for increasing legibility. The instincts you might have had before it arrived about which parts of your personal life you don’t expose — those practices are just as important after 2022 as before.
Have you uploaded your baby into the large language model?
No. I’ve turned off the social media platforms’ automatic access to all my photographs — I choose instead. It’s quite an arduous process — you give Instagram access to an individual photo, then you have to go back and find it again. But it’s probably best not to let these institutions train on my children’s faces by default. I don’t know what specifically I worry about. I have a general distrustful, mountainous, anti-authority instinct that says I don’t want them to have automatic access to that image.
How else are you staying illegible?
I’m not going to tell you, Dan. I’m blessed with a wife who thinks about this more than I do, but I’m trying hard to cultivate an offline umwelt — a world entirely unrelated to the email job. Some of that is my immediate family, some of it is hosting — we bring a lot of people into our home. I should be directing them to leave their phones in a little basket at the door, as my wife keeps insisting. This conversation is making me think I should put my money where my mouth is and make that a prerequisite for some forms of convening.
I love that. I would be happy to be invited by you and your wife and leave my phone at the door.
You’re welcome anytime. Are there other books by Scott you’ve appreciated that we haven’t got to?
I wonder if we should dwell on the very end of his career — his final two books were called Against the Grain and In Praise of Floods. He believes that the cultivation of cereals — wheat, grains — was probably a mistake. Humanity would have been better off living more like hunter-gatherers — practicing swidden agriculture, burning a lot of land, and living generally healthier lives, even though there would be many fewer of us. It is a crazy position: against the grain revolution, and against, I imagine, something like the Haber-Bosch process, which allowed perhaps 4 billion people to exist in the 20th century.
How are we supposed to think about this final tilting at windmills? To say we shouldn’t put up so many hydraulic dams because they kill the rivers, that we should be in praise of floods — of rivers twisting and turning as they might along the Yangtze River — which have destroyed millions of people in the aggregate? Why should we favor this over the engineering practices that have enabled so many more people, including probably you, me, and Scott, to have lived?
For all our complaints about modernity, you and I appreciate it more than Scott did, at least in our public writing. Maybe quietly you are as turbulent about it as he was. But maybe we are simply more resigned to modernity.
You started the conversation by saying Scott might have objected to our work, and I’m not so sure. He is maybe someone like Peter Thiel, who on the surface has all these contradictions — denouncing the internet while investing in Facebook, being Christian and gay. We may well do the same exercise with Scott: a peasant rebel in his public persona and the holder of arguably the most prestigious professorship in global academia. But he would probably concede that modernity has been important — that the peasants of Southeast Asia are much better off with it even if they may not feel it, and that it was a good thing states have been able to reach further into the world.
One of his essay collections was called Two Cheers for Anarchism. The image that has stuck with me is what he calls “anarchist calisthenics.” He spent time in Germany, and as those of us who visit Northern Europe know, the moment you jaywalk, that will conjure a crone who starts yelling that you are killing children.
The bonds of society that bind us are being flouted.
They are cut at one stroke when you are jaywalking at 11:00 p.m. in the streets of Berlin. Scott points out that Germans in particular were perhaps too obedient roughly a century ago, when someone commanded them to commit everything that was done in the name of the Third Reich. We should all be practicing these calisthenics to avoid the commands of the state.
Scott was offering two cheers for anarchism, but there was one-third of a cheer he was missing, and that was his appreciation for the state. That is my view. Having grown up among the peasants of Southeast Asia — his term, not exactly mine; peasant is out of fashion these days — my family members were very eager to cheat the authorities if they could get away with it, and too keen to offer 12-year-old me a cigarette, because that was what one did at the time. They did not cultivate the opium poppy, because the state had eradicated it decades before, but I am sure they would have if they could have made money. I myself am much more attracted to the world of books. I am not yet post-literate, although I am sure that fate is coming for all of us.
Don’t be so sure. It’s about these little choices those peasants make.
I am much more into the opera, a creation of the Viennese court, rather than of the mountain peoples in the Alps. I am very much into modernity. Perhaps Scott would give two cheers for anarchism; maybe I would give one. That is my ratio. What’s yours, Santi?
I’m much more schizophrenic about this than you are. At times I’m at one, at times two and a half. I would dispute most of your anti-LLM hatred, but one of the great challenges for us will be that these tools enable a state capacity to surveil, monitor, and enforce, far beyond what we want — even those of us who are big fans of state capacity. It may be that the capability to enforce even the law against jaywalking perfectly will exist, and that we will wish for the era when the old women of Germany were the ones enforcing that rule. Many of us will have to think far harder about what kinds of illegibility we care to protect. That’s where Scott will be even more resonant than he has been.
I am not sure I will crave these old ladies of Germany, but I certainly see your point. It is good to have some enforcers of social order — maybe one and a half is the correct number of cheers for anarchy.
I’m planting a flag here for our future David Hackett Fischer episode. One of the things he’s interested in is that you can have state enforcement of the laws, or communal enforcement of the norms — which is often more aggressive — without any force of law. There are all kinds of historical ways in which we might feel very oppressed by our community despite the state having nothing to do with it.
It is interesting to hear your language choice, Santi. You are planting a flag. Isn’t that what imperial authorities do writ large? Aren’t you part of the language of the oppressors against the rest of us — planting your Anthropic flag, conquering the lands that hope to be illegible?
We will have to defend the small rice paddies of Stanford from the long arm of the state reaching into the Francis Fukuyama-staffed Hoover Institution, that illegible mound of metis that it is.
The future is going to be Frank Fukuyama, Stephen Kotkin, and I cultivating our cassava fields and sweet potatoes up in the mountains of Los Altos.
I find your books very legible, Dan. That might be a problem in the future — they’re quite readable. It’s been a pleasure. Come back anytime.
I cannot wait to join one of the wonderful gatherings you and your wife host.
