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Example: if a state can only see 2 genders (through official forms) for example, one way to cripple it is to force it to see 10 kinds of gender instead of 2, thereby 5x-ing the computational load and breaking the simplifying function. You don’t resist the ontology. You judo it.
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Another: state-religion relations generally date to eras when there were only 1-2 official religions. Make it 10, and add a zero (atheism) and you break the ability to “see” religion. This is not a comment about the politics of these things, just on the mechanics of governance.
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Traditional governance *depends* on fixed ontology and low information. If you directly challenge ontology, you’ll invite repression. If you directly try to overload info channels you’ll get filtered out. But if you expand the dynamic range of the ontology, you’re in business.
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I’m not sure activists get this. They discover exploits by accident, and then use them for goals like inclusion, not realizing that they’re fatally crippling the institutions whose power they seek to partake in. This is a way to kill rather than remake orgs in your ideal form.
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If you want a traditional “seeing like a state” org that reflects your values, you’re going to have to invent one. Which means making your own legibilizing choices to stay within information bandwidth limits. You can’t get to “seeing like a different state” via blinding.
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Aah like taping a bunch of addendums to the map so that it becomes a big unwieldy mess that you can't fold up and put in your pocket anymore.
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I worked at a small county government org that was always eagerly glomming onto the latest trendy channels for public communication (social media videos, adobe software suite), not understanding how much crippling compounding complexity they were adding to everything.
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