Thinking about a concept: Blinded like a state.
Any legibilizing mode a state uses to see can also be used as a way to blind it. It’s an attack surface. You attack through information overload, since “seeing like a state” is a simplifying filter to govern a messy reality.
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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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Some number of the activists don't intend to capture or reform, they intend to destroy.
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This is definitely understood by the intellectual architects of the current activism. I think it’s a good strategy. It’s not the best strategy. State capacity does some good things. But it’s maybe the best strategy for those well enough organized to replace those functions.


