Not today, fed

navigating legibility, measurement and power

I was recently listening to Jason Snyder, Gregory Landua and Matthew Pirkowski on the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. At minute 2 hours, 21 minutes they got into a little discussion when Jason brought up Josh Heling’s appearance on our Doomer Optimism Podcast, wherein Josh admits that he seeks to create a system on his farm that is more or less unable to be automated.

Gregory, Matthew and Jason then go into a debate about where and when legibility is useful. Gregory suggests that when one of his kids gets sick, he takes their temperature so that he is gaining information about the state of their health.

The metaphor Gregory uses here is instructive. I know for a fact that Josh uses all sorts of measurements on his farm. But the key is: Josh uses that knowledge for his own information. What he opposes, and I hope I am not putting words in his mouth, is making a system that is legible in its entirety, so much so that it can be totally automated.

The real distinction here is: are the measurements used internally to advance his holistic understanding of his own land, or externally with a fully unknown interest?

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Josh tells a story about how he went away from his farm for a few days and made a list of instructions for handling the farm. He put the instructions in the hands of a very competent farm-sitter, which was several single-spaced-pages long. I witnessed the complexity on Josh’s farm first hand. Josh is handling ecosystem restoration not only through time, but through space, through geography, through climate, through seasons and through specific agricultural uses - including different animal groups that interact with the land in different ways.

All of this information simply could not be made legible, nor should it. Most farming, most human interaction with nature, is so complex that there is no way it could be made entirely legible by scientific ways of knowing that can be transferred and made legible to someone not on that specific piece of land.

That doesn’t mean we can’t use tools of science to measure and understand the world. These are two separate questions: measurement and legibility¹. One question is whether or not we can use measurement in order to enact a variety of ways of knowing. Of course we can. Certainly most people I know use the most useful tools they can get their hands on for understanding the problems they face. The other question is whether or not we could make an entirely legible system. The answer to this second question is unclear to me.

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If we want to trace the etymology we can remember that legibility is a core concept in James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State. In it, Scott more or less argues that the state imposed top down standardization practices in order to make the mostly illegible local folk practices known and therefore under the purview of a centralized authority. Jason mentions this text in the interview.

For someone who was once interested in making a web platform for local economies, you would think I wouldn’t mind legibility. But I truly think that we need the minimum viable legibility to solve the problems at hand.

For local economies, we more or less just need to be able to find one another, and get basic information about what’s on offer and what it costs. In an ideal world, people would be able find one another through a web platform, build a relationship, and quickly migrate off the platform to in-real-life commercial relationships. Best case scenario these relationships are informal, even the economic ones.

I am reminded of David Graeber’s body of work, and this tweet:

Hamilton🌲🛠🌳📐🐸☀️ @Watchman_motto

@SolitaryBeast_ Problem with money is, the value it stores is different than the value barter stores. Barter, whether work for goods, or work for work, or goods for goods, transfers goodwill and neighborliness.

For lots of human history, economic transactions were necessarily illegible. People more or less kept track of sharing, bartering and trading goods over time, within complex cultural contexts. Graeber tells a story about how there was an annual settling a debts in a small town. After all was said and done, everyone decided that Mr. X owed Mr. Y a beer and all was even. Totally illegible.

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For something like farming, the question gets more complex. For whom do you need to be legible? What are the ends? How is the information being used? I simply do not know the fine grained detailed answers to these questions. If it is decentralized, peer to peer, who are the people actually trained in this way of knowing? I sure as hell know the majority of my community of agroecological farmers here in Uruguay aren’t going to be partaking in globalized tech farm vetting system anytime soon.

We are entering a world in which data can be used as power. This is a world where information, something like carbon soil sequestration rates, is being sold for actual money in the real economy. In this world, it’s very important to know who is collecting data and to what ends?

Some people’s vision includes the appropriate use of data to build new (drawing on old) social relations. The goal is to make an economy that actually builds and incentivizes regenerative relationships between people and the planet. This vision is beautiful, idyllic. But, having been around people who manipulate data for prestige, or use data to wield power, I remain skeptical of how the data will be used, and by whom.

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I am reminded of a recent debate in Uruguay wherein the Federal government was trying to stop the local agroecology network from certifying agroecological products, in favor of standards from the European Union! The response of the farmers in Uruguay was more or less “what does a farmer in Europe know about what’s going on in [the small agricultural state of] Canelones?”

The agroecological network in Uruguay is made by farmers, for farmers. People certify each other through site visits and certain standards and practices set and monitored by the group itself. The data remains local and legible within a trusted community that understands the data and its use.

In the end I think the legibility question needs more litigation, in specific contexts. What are we measuring? Who does it serve? To what ends?

I remain open to the possibility that certain aspects of measurement can be valuable. In almost all contexts it seems to me individual measurement for one’s own sake is useful. The question of power comes in as the data moves to larger and larger contexts outside of the individual.

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One last argument against legibility is simply that it takes the fun out of life. Have you ever tried to explain a joke to someone? Explain why it’s funny? Once the mechanism becomes fully legible, it becomes less fun, less mysterious, less complex.

Now imagine the only jokes you can tell are the ones you know you can prove are legibly funny. To some authority. Not so fun anymore.

To me, there is a lot of magic in embracing the mystery. To be unknown. To skirt the gaze of authority and judgment. To offer only glimpses into the complex reality in which you live.

After all is said and done, until I see how information about me is used, I will for now and forever respond, “not today, fed.”

1. Thanks to Joe Norman for this insight!