The James C. Scott Memorial Episode

Summary

Statecraft Podcast — The James C. Scott Memorial Episode

Host: Santi Ruiz
Guest: Dan Wang (writer, thinker, author of "China’s Quest to Engineer the Future")
Date: July 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode is a deep and celebratory dive into the legacy of James C. Scott, the influential political scientist and anthropologist. Host Santi Ruiz and guest Dan Wang, both personally and intellectually influenced by Scott, explore his body of work, particularly his explorations on how states seek to impose legibility and how ordinary people resist. The conversation traverses Scott’s fieldwork, signature concepts, critiques, and his resonance in modern policy debate, while maintaining warmth, wit, and a healthy skepticism of state power.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why James C. Scott? Introducing the Man and His Ideas

• Scott’s Influence:
  • Santi: “For me, I would say he’s been really influential to my thinking.”
  • Dan: “I would say he is the greatest influence on my thinking, Santi. Scott is kind of this role model...” (01:07)
• Background: Scott’s career spanned almost the entire 20th century, much of it in Southeast Asia (notably Malaysia and Burma), blending fieldwork with broad theoretical scholarship.

2. Seeing Like a State: Legibility and Its Discontents

• Key Idea: States attempt to make societies “legible”—imposing order, grids, and systems onto messy real life.
• Legacy: Scott’s "Seeing Like a State" is part of the Silicon Valley canon, albeit perhaps misunderstood there.
• Dan’s Critique:
  • “Silicon Valley is usually directionally right, but it always misses the target in some pretty crucial way... Seeing Like a State is kind of a summation after decades of fieldwork. It’s not representative, I think it is relatively boring.” (05:10)
  • Scott’s genius lay not just in synthesis, but in bold, readable, field-driven insight.

3. Bottom-Up Resistance: The Real Heart of Scott’s Work

• Host/Guest Attraction:
  • Both Santi and Dan discuss their interest in Scott’s insights into how ordinary people resist state power, often through subtle, everyday tactics.
  • Santi: “A lot of Scott’s most interesting work is about the bottom up: how people try and resist the state seeing them.” (03:51)
• Dan’s Personal Connection: Growing up in mountainous Yunnan, China—mirroring Scott’s focus on “zones of freedom” outside state reach.

4. The Art of Not Being Governed: Geography as Freedom

• Mountains as Liberty:
  • “Mountains tend to be refugees, asylums of liberty into which many refugees are able to flee. The fact of statecraft that Scott lays out is that states are able to govern very well in accessible and flatlands. As soon as something becomes steep, states cannot climb very, very well.” (18:02)
• Practicality of Escape:
  • Examples from Yunnan, Afghanistan, Appalachia—zones where geography frustrates state ambition.
• Contemporary Relevance:
  • Santi: “Surely modern states...have overcome the challenge. But when you think about Afghanistan or China’s southwest...this terrain point has a deeper resonance today.” (21:22)

5. Weapons of the Weak: Subtle Sabotage, Everyday Resistance

• Concepts:
  • Small, decentralized acts—foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, sabotage, malicious compliance, gossip, rude nicknames for superiors. (32:24–44:37)
• Aggregated Impact:
  • Scott: “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.” (38:03, quoting Scott)
• Limits:
  • “In the end, the weak, in his book, lose and the Green Revolution comes...It is a challenge to Scott that the weapons of the weak in this story don’t seem to end up winning the battle.” (39:14)

6. Personal and Family Connections

• Both Santi (Lebanese mountain ancestry) and Dan (Yunnan heritage) reflect on legacies of escaping or evading state power, reinforcing the continuing relevance of Scott’s arguments. (27:10–29:09)

7. Illegibility and Digital Modernity: LLMs and Data as New State

• Reinvention of Legibility:
  • Santi: “Any LLM relies on legibility...to do reinforcement learning, you need legible data. To the extent we care about protecting things...they’re going to have to be illegible to the machines.” (46:08)
  • Dan: “It is really important to be illegible. Maybe the general question is: How do we sort of survive and drive value in the age of large language models?” (47:26)
• Practical Steps:
  • Santi: Deliberately restricting social media sharing of children, cultivating “offline umwelt,” hosting phone-free gatherings (52:15–53:38).

8. The Limits of Anarchism: Two Cheers, Not Three

• Scott’s late work—against cereals and in praise of floods—critiqued for perhaps pushing anti-modernity too far (54:09–55:50).
• Dan: “Perhaps Scott would give two cheers for anarchism. Maybe I would give one cheer.” (59:44)
• Santi: “At times I’m one, at times I’m two and a half. Even those of us who are big fans of state capacity...may wish for the era when [lower] enforcement was possible, versus the automated imposition.” (60:11)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Scott’s Appeal:
  • Dan: “Scott is kind of this role model that I really adopt as kind of what is important for a career.” (01:07)
• On Legibility:
  • Santi: “[Scott’s] Seeing Like a State is a book about…how a state tries to impose legibility, systems that let it ‘see’ things, quote unquote, on the messy real world terrain that it governs.” (03:51)
• Dan’s Critique of Silicon Valley:
  • “Silicon Valley is usually directionally right, but it always misses the target in some pretty crucial way. This is why we think these people have such low taste, despite talking about taste all the time.” (05:10)
• On Mountains & Liberty:
  • Dan: “Mountains tend to be refugees, asylums of liberty into which many refugees are able to flee...States cannot climb very, very well.” (18:02)
• On Weapons of the Weak:
  • Santi: “All these are in his category of weapons of the weak...foot dragging, feigned ignorance, sabotage, false compliance, gossip…” (36:52–38:03)
  • Dan: “One of my favorites is rude nicknames for officers of the state.” (36:52)
• On Bureaucratic Resistance:
  • Santi: “There’s all kinds of compliance or really kind of procedural obedience that can do the same things that don’t have to be malicious...in government implementation, or the deep state, all these conceptual categories are very useful for understanding those dynamics.” (44:37)
• On Digital Illegibility:
  • Santi: “To the extent that there are things that we care about protecting...they’re going to have to be illegible to the machines.” (46:08)
• Dan’s Career Principles:
  • “Number one is don’t go insane...Number two, continue to put out analytically rigorous intellectual work...Number three, learn from people who are older and younger...” (49:58)
• On Anarchist Calisthenics:
  • Dan: “As soon as you jaywalk [in Germany], that very act will conjure a crone who starts yelling at you...We should all be practicing a little bit of the calisthenics to avoid the commands of the state.” (57:39)
• Cheer Quotient:
  • Dan: “Perhaps Scott would give two cheers for anarchism. Maybe I would give one cheer.” (59:44)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–02:13| Introductions & Scott’s Significance | | 05:10 | Dan Critiques the Reception of Scott in Silicon Valley | | 13:15 | Discussion of “The Art of Not Being Governed” | | 18:02 | Geography as State Resistance | | 32:07 | Move to “Weapons of the Weak” | | 36:52 | Techniques of Subsistence Resistance | | 44:37 | Bureaucratic Weapons of the Weak | | 46:08 | Illegibility & Digital Life/LLMs | | 49:58 | Dan’s Career Principles for Staying Human | | 54:09 | Final Scott Books (“Against the Grain,” “In Praise of Floods”) | | 59:44 | How Many Cheers for Anarchism? | | 61:24 | Community Norms vs. State Power |

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Final Reflections

• Scott’s Grand Arc: Both Santi and Dan admire Scott’s movement from specific fieldwork to grand abstractions—earning his right to theorize through observation and engagement.
• State and Anti-State: They note Scott’s ambivalence, their own oscillations between loving modernity/state capacity and yearning for pockets of autonomy and resistance.
• Contemporary Challenge: As digital tools bring ever more legibility and capacity to institutions, Scott’s warnings about the price and power of legibility may become more, not less, relevant.
• Personal Takeways: Both host and guest find “illegibility”—personal, social, physical, or digital—not just a matter of politics but a necessary tool for autonomy, creativity, and balance in modern life.

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For listeners new and familiar, this episode is a lively, affectionate, and intellectually rich tribute to James C. Scott—his provocations, his insights, and the enduring value of appreciating both the state’s ambitions and the often-invisible everyday arts of resistance.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Hi, I'm Santi Ruiz. Welcome back to Statecraft Today. My guest is writer thinker friend Dan Wong. Dan, welcome to the show.

[B]

Great to be here, Santi.

[A]

Dan was on, I suppose it was about a year ago to talk about his book China's Quest to Engineer the Future, which I think many listeners will have read. I think it did quite well and so I imagine it's in the water supply.

[B]

Not so bad.

[A]

Not so bad for a first book is what I. Is what I'm told. Dan argued in Breakneck that China is an engineering state and the United States a lawyerly society. This distinction explains a lot of the differences between our two societies. And I'm not going to make Dan retread the talk track on this book. Instead, Dan and I are going to talk about an author who we like. Dan, for me, I would say he's been really influential to my thinking. I'm curious, would you say James C. Scott has been a great influence on your thinking?

[B]

I would say he is the greatest influence on my thinking. Santi. I think that Scott is kind of this role model that I really adopt as kind of what is important for a career.

[A]

Scott may be familiar to listeners as the author of Seeing Like a State. If I remember correctly, the subtitle is something like How Great Plans to Improve the Human Condition have Failed.

[B]

That is exactly right. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed.

[A]

There we go. That's his most famous book, I would say. But Scott had this long career. He died two years ago this week, actually, basically throughout through the whole 20th century, into the 21st century as a political scientist and anthropologist who spent a huge amount of time in Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Burma. And so my sources tell me he became one of the most widely read social scientists of his generation. But Dan, I wonder if you're 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?

[B]

Not exactly, Santi. My skill is email. I have an email job. That is all I do. My interest in Scott came mostly from having been born in one of the central areas that he wrote about in southwest China, a heavily mountainous zone into which a lot of different folks have escaped. And I started thinking a lot about Scott when it occurred to me that mountains are zones where people can be a little bit more free. And this is kind of a global phenomenon. So we associate the Highland Scots as being kind of an ornery, drunk people who brought their culture to rural Appalachia in which they were even more drunk than before. And Appalachia is today thought of as kind of the Scots, Irish born borderlands zone where people are really into the booze and really into the guns. If we think about the political culture of Colorado, I haven't actually spent very much time there. But the idea is that Colorado is full of libertarians who are pro weed and pro guns. And after having spent a little bit of time in mountainous southwest China, which you can also call Southeast Asia, I started seeing how people have considerably more freedom in steeper places. That led me more to the work of Scott, and that's been kind of the initial attraction for me. What was the initial attraction of Scott for you?

[A]

I came into Scott the way I think many young men of my generation did, which is that I read one of. I think I read both of these kind of canonical book reviews of Scott Seeing Like a State on the Internet. I'm told the reason Scott is a fixture in the Silicon Valley canon, if you go back far enough, is that the essayist Venkatesh Rao at vgr, his wife was assigned this book in grad school and VGR ended up writing an essay on the Internet about it that led to eventually Scott Alexander, no Relation, writing an essay about the same book, and it got into the water supply. To recap, Scott is very interested in the relationship between states and the people they try and govern. And 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, quote unquote, on the messy real world terrain that it governs. I think eventually I came to the realization that you came to before me, which is that a lot of Scott's most interesting work is about the bottom up, about how people try and resist the state, seeing them resisting being legible to the state. That's the part that you've, I think, fallen in love with of his work.

[B]

So Seeing Like a State is part of the Silicon Valley canon, and as usual, Silicon Valley got it wrong. And Silicon Valley is usually directionally right, but it always misses the target in some pretty crucial way. This is why we think these people have such low taste, despite talking about

[A]

taste all the time.

[B]

Yes, indeed. And that is why they do not have the taste, because they have to think about it. The people with true taste never have to talk about it. They just do it. Santi so the issue with Seeing Like a State is that I think it is a very important work for Scott, but it is kind of a summation of his work after he has spent basically decades doing his fieldwork in especially Malaysia as well as Burma, but throughout Southeast Asia, all his career. And it was after doing a lot of bottom up work that he decided that he could offer this sort of summation about what it is that, you know, state makers do to practice their state craft. And I think that it is not representative, I think it is relatively boring. Scott is Hadold's appeal for me because he is not just a great social scientist, he is also an excellent writer. And so I started the conversation by saying that he is very much one of my greatest role models. That he is someone who did the work, he read essentially all of these political science works. Then he moved to a village of 70 persons strong in. In Malaysia. And then he learned the language and then he spent a lot of time chatting with these people. And he did the same exercise also in Burma, Myanmar, in which he learned the language, spent the time, read the work and then produced some excellent readable results. And in my mind this is actually a great refutation to the idea that humanities, social sciences, so many of these people just sit in their offices, drop stream up big thoughts and then write them down without great basis in reality. Scott is someone who is based in reality and not just purely being observational and descriptive. He is making these super bold arguments to advance the state of the field and offer something to even the rest of us relatively unread people of Santi who have not read as much of the literature as all the grad students, but they have something in there even for us.

[A]

I think that's right. And Scott, I mean the. My initial framing question for this conversation was why do you and I, Dan, like this guy so much when in some ways I think you would have been critical of our projects? I'm interested in state capacity. You're interested in state capacity as well. We've taken different lenses but interested in how can modern states function well, how can they govern well. And Scott to a certain extent thought, I mean he was a self described anarchist at various points in his life. He thought perhaps the whole project of governance was a mistake. One of his more recent books about a decade ago, against the Grain, ended up arguing that agrarian society itself was a mistake or may have been a mistake for most people through most of history, I think he says because it led to sedentary lifestyles and then oppression by the state. But at least one answer to this question, why do you and I like him so much if he might not have liked our work? I think he might have liked our work. He was, he's very interested in everything, incredibly interested in the actual daily life of, in the actual daily life of a 70 person Malaysian village. He's interested in what the gossip and the back talk in that village meant about class relations. He was interested in what that meant for people's responses to technological progress. He's interested in what that meant for the state and modernity. And he's interested in this grand sweep of human civilization itself, every level. He's curious about things and I have to hope that he would have found us like minded individuals in that sense.

[B]

I think the career arc of Scott is again something worth thinking about, reflecting and perhaps studying and emulating. This is someone who began his earlier books, the Moral Economy of the Peasant as well as Weapons of the Weak by moving from the U.S. i believe he was. He started his career at University of Wisconsin Madison and moved to Southeast Asia to study the peasants. And being embedded in these communities was his earlier work through which he combined basically intense observation of people with his voluminous reading to offer a couple of interesting theories that are very well encapsulated by these phrases, Weapons of the Weak and the Moral Economy of the Peasant. And where did Scott move to towards the end of his career? Well, towards a denunciation of grains, namely wheat, cereal crops, rice, and having his final book be called In Praise of Floods. So, you know, moving from the intensely personal to the grand environmental, you know, to announce what is an essential source of carbohydrates as well as one of these biggest threats to human life, namely floods. That is kind of a really interesting move as well. I believe it was George Saunders who said that writers need to earn the ability to go abstract. And Scott, by God, that man has earned it.

[A]

That's absolutely true. You and I can both go abstract once we spend a couple years in rice paddy villages. I want to ask you about one of your favorite Scott books, but before I do, I should mention Scott died in July 2024 and I believe shortly thereafter you picked up a bunch of his personal library. Will you remind me the context?

[B]

Yeah. At the time I was a fellow at the Yale Law School and Scott again, this very radical professor, earned one of the top positions in academia globally. So Scott went to emeritus as a Sterling professor at Yale University. And the Sterling professor is the highest rank at Yale, which is a pretty nice gig. And Scott spent his entire, essentially most of his career at Yale University in part farming and raising, I believe it was sheep and chickens as well as other sorts of crops. Props. He told the New York Times in an interview that this considerably informed his scholarship. Unfortunately, by the time that I was at Yale, Scott had already been relatively frail. And I never had the chance to meet Jim, as they call him at Yale. But once he passed away, he gave away essentially most of his books to one of my favorite secondhand used books bookstores, Gray Matter Books in New Haven. It's very centrally renovated. It's right off of campus. That's right. And I visited all the time. And it would be a reason for me to make the trek up to New Haven from New York, taking the Metro north up there, because I enjoy this bookstore so much. And one day I came across on my. One of my regular visits to the bookstore, the little sign saying, from the library of James C. Scott. It was an entire bookshelf of Scott's books, and I was relatively restrained. I think it would not have been very Scots like for me to have bought the entire shelf, which would have, well, been within my powers and desires, Santi, if I did not have a bit of restraint.

[A]

You're superhuman restraint, indeed. You're a better man than me, Dan. Those will all be in my closet.

[B]

They would be in my basement, eventually funneled to your closet. So I picked up only a few volumes, and I think it would have been a really good thing for more people to have touched a piece of greatness as I have.

[A]

Well, let's talk about one of the books that you love so much from Scott. Maybe we can trade Appreciations, because you've read the Art of Not Being Governed and I have not. And although many of his field work books are all about these related themes, what would I learn from reading the Art of Not Being Governed that I might not have picked up elsewhere?

[B]

I think it is a great idea to trade appreciations. And so for our listeners, I think that after we think a little bit about the art of not being Governed, I want to ask you a little bit about one of your favorites, Asanthi, the Weapons of the Week. So what do I find so appealing about the art of not being Governed? Well, if someone wanted to ask for my politics. Go on, Asanti. Ask me. What are my politics?

[A]

Dan, what are your politics?

[B]

I would say that I am a crude Hegelian with an emphasis on crude. So after having spent quite a few years living under the regime of Beijing, living in China, thinking about what's going on over there, one of my ideas about really trying to appreciate modern China is that it is a place in which the state feels the need to squeeze ever tighter, to understand what is going on in this extremely large, diverse country, which it feels like it does not have a great understanding of. And the harder it squeezes, the more that people wish to flee, wish to avoid, wish to evade the tightening grasp of the state. In other words, it's dialectical. And I think that one of the main ways to appreciate China is that what you are seeing are a population adapt to kind of the craziness of state control as well as the state feel like the tighter it squeezes, the more it needs to squeeze. And again, having been born and spent life as a child in southwest China, in one of the more mountainous regions of China, I felt like there was a certain amount of freedom that could be afforded in southwest China, which is one of the furthest points that are distant from Beijing. So I think there is a well known saying that has gotten into the water supply even in English, that in China one might say that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. And in Yunnan, place where I spent time as a child, the mountains are high and the emperor is pretty far away. And this was a zone in which it was pretty poor. I grew up in one of the poorer regions of China that people were still essentially growing opium by the time that I was born in the early 1990s, that there was all sorts of poppy and heroin cultivation. There's these gigantic rainforests in which people were still poaching for different exotic animals. The north of the province was Tibet, that Yunnan has around something like 25 of China's official 56 ethnic groups. These are all made up categories, but a lot of the ethnic groups are clustered in the southwest in these diverse zones that range from rainforest to essentially the Himalayas. Tibet in the north. And so just thinking about this region was pretty attractive to me. And it was really wonderful to see that got offered an entire theory of what is going on in highland Southeast Asia.

[A]

I hope you won't think this tacky, Dan, but there are a number of emojis in the IFP Slack channel, which I've added, which correspond to ancient Chinese sayings. And one of them is in fact, the mountains are high and heaven is far away.

[B]

And what are the others?

[A]

My personal favorite is a photograph of Deng Xiaoping, who I believe was a fan of the phrase that predated him of crossing the river by feeling the stones to signify a step by step feeling out process, rather than having a grand plan in mind from the beginning. There are others. My favorite was heaven is high and the emperor is Far away. And I'm curious, in the region of China that you described, which Scott buckets into like a super region which he calls Zombia, includes the whole Burmese and, and Southeast Asian protrusion in that region of mountainous, you know, highland Scot type peoples, what does the dialectic look like? So the state wants to impose itself on these people. It wants to tax them and wants them to stop, to stop them from doing illicit and illegal things. How do people respond? What is the art?

[B]

The art stems mostly from geography. So the terrain determines a lot of freedom. As I mentioned earlier, mountains tend to be refugees. Mountains tend to be asylums of liberty into which many refugees are able to flee. And the fact of statecraft that Scott lays out very well here is that states are able to govern very well essentially in accessible and flat lands. And as soon as something becomes slightly inaccessible, namely steepness, states cannot climb very, very well. They are only able to govern a pretty flat lands. Whereas if you are able to find kind of a congenial spot in the mountains, becomes really, really difficult for a tax assessor to find you there. It's not only mountains that one can avoid the state from there could also be, let's say, marshland and swampland. And so this is where, let's say there are parts of Southeast America in which people are able to essentially hide in the swamps and cultivate whatever it is that they want to cultivate over there. And deserts can also be pretty inaccessible. But mountains have always been places where people are able to hide because it is able to support more people, let's say, than desert and marshes as well. So people escape the various reaches of the state because I think the Scots central contribution here is that the idea that many people have of a state is that it is kind of this luminous court center in which many people are simply waiting to be allowed into civilization. And Scott is very skeptical of this view. And he points out that states are usually one of the greater threats to liberty. And many people are very intent to flee away from the state because the state is very active in, let's say, making warfare, conscripting giant numbers of people in order to defeat another kingdom nearby that states collect taxes. And taxes have not been the norm until something like, let's say, at least in the United States, oh, just over a century ago when the income tax was enshrined into law. So when we have states, they are usually trying to take away your life, your liberty or your grains. And when you concentrate into these flat valley lands cultivating monocrops Whether that is rice or wheat or something else. Something else that attracts not just the tax assessors, but it is also mice as well as all of these other pests that are really into your home. And so flatlands are also where diseases spread the most easily. And if one can run away into the mountains, then plenty of people have. And for me, the appealing message in the Art of Not Being Governed is to point out that terrains have been rough for states and that people are very eager to flee into these places if they can.

[A]

There's something interesting about Scott's emphasis on physical terrain here is, you know, most of his work is looking either backwards. You know, towards the end of his life, he was very interested in kind of prehistory or very early history or, you know, societies that were slowly being, you know, colonized by modernity, in the case of the rice villages. And so he's very interested in physical landscapes because, you know, the state can't reach these places. And you might think, okay, well, like, what's the application today? Surely it can't be about terrain. Surely modern states, 21st century states, have overcome the challenge of the tax assessor to climb up into the mountains and figure out what your property is worth. When you think about, you know, the American engagement in Afghanistan, say, or the Chinese states experience today in southwest China, maybe this terrain point has a deeper resonance today. Obviously, there are other forms of retreat to the Internet, to digital life, to illegibility, but I think his basic point about physical landscapes has more staying power than you might think at first glance.

[B]

Satya, do you know what my problem is?

[A]

Which one?

[B]

I have so many. But maybe the main thing as a scholar is that my job is email. And I dare say that your job is also email. And for those of us who spend all of our time doing email, we can't appreciate the terrain. But Scott, as someone who did the work and moved to highland Southeast Asia, that man appreciates terrain. Now, at the very start of the book, the Art of Not Being Governed, Scott said that a lot of terrain has indeed been conquered by the state. With the invention of all weather, roads, helicopter, everything else, the state has been, in principle, been able to penetrate into a lot of these communities that have tried to avoid it.

[A]

But he's not a hopeless romantic in this sense.

[B]

Yes, he is a very hopeful romantic, in fact. But I think what we can see is that it is definitely the case that political cultures vary somewhat by geography. As I mentioned, Appalachia, America, perhaps the mountain states in the west, Colorado, Utah, still highland, Southeast Asia still a lot of Southeast Asia, more liberty can be found in these pretty rough terrain areas. The Southeast Asian states in this great super region of Zombia was responsible for growing quite a lot of the opium poppy up until the 1990s, when national governments coordinated by the United nations decided essentially to eradicate the opium poppy and to try to stop these highland farmers from growing what is a very dangerous substance. And it was very successful. And the only place that it has not eradicated the opium poppy is in the Shan State of Burma, in which people are still able to resist these efforts because heroin is such a lucrative cash crop. And perhaps one way to detect the mountain people is, you know, wherever they are growing the opium poppy. Because Afghanistan has been able to grow the opium poppy for quite a while and I believe the American state has not been all that effective at eradicating it. Now, one of my initiatives at the Hoover Institution is that I am working on a project on state capacity with my colleague Francis Fukuyama.

[A]

The esteemed Francis Fukuyama, or Frank as his friends call him, I assume Frank,

[B]

as his colleagues also call him. But I think that one of the, you know, Frank is one of the great giants, perhaps on par with Jim Scott. And I think that one of his interesting little ideas was that when he was trying to help the State Department rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, Fukuyama said, well, the American government is very poorly suited to help other countries build states when it has such a kind of an anti state attitude itself. And part of that is because I think that there is this element of libertarianism and state avoidance that still exists in many parts of the United States, which I think exists less in a place like, let's say Austria, which has been so dominated by the court in Vienna, even though the Austrians have plenty of mountains in the west, they have actually eradicated a lot of the liberties in a way that the Americans and the Chinese still have not been able to do.

[A]

My first instinct to do this episode was on a maybe a year and a half ago where somebody mentioned Scott in passing and I thought we should do a James C. Scott special. You are making me think we should do a David Hackett Fisher special to discuss the borderland Scots Irish who made Appalachia and Fisher would argue, gave America some of its particular instinct towards liberty or anti state politics. I'm going to put a pin in that one for later. Very good. Because I recently finished his book Albion's Seed, which was wonderful and also something of like an Internet cult classic. I'm not necessarily charting new terrain here.

[B]

The Scott Alexander review of Albion's Seed is something that turned me on to a lot of Scott Alexander and still one of the best essays on the Internet.

[A]

I submit it is very good. However, I will say the book rewards a full reading. Don't. If you liked the review, you'll love Albion Seed by David Hag Fisher. Okay, that's my infomercial. I didn't plan to talk about this, but I grew up in the very modern and state society where state is very present.

[B]

Yeah, where did you grow up, Santi?

[A]

All over the place really. A bunch of cities on the Eastern seaboard and then Los Angeles and Sacramento before ending up in Northern Virginia.

[B]

And why did you move around so much?

[A]

For a number of reasons, but mostly because my father worked for a Spanish language TV company and so I lived in, you could say many of the major Spanish TV markets in this country, including Miami and the Sacramento Modesto area. 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 of Beirut. And I would submit this might be self psychoanalyzing, but some of my appreciation for state resistance or the weapons of the week is in fact that Maronite and Melkite ancestors in the mountains outside of Lebanon resisted Ottoman domination by escaping to the hills for several hundred years. That might be a bridge too far. Maybe that's has not had an influence.

[B]

No, I do not accept that as a bridge too far. I think this is why we are interested in Scott as we are and I am very happy. And by the way, I guess we have a a little bit of a similarity here. My mother was a radio news anchor and a TV news anchor. And so you know, both of us have one parent in the TV business and this must be why we are the talking heads and the sparkling voices that we have because of our parents.

[A]

Surely there's a funny inversion here, Dan, which is that you're very good on TV and I have a face made for radio, so perhaps we would have been better suited in opposite careers.

[B]

My mother tells me that I have a face for radio but a voice for printing. That is exactly where I am. And so she. She's right. My mother is right about this. Now what I appreciate about my family heritage is that growing up in Yunnan is that there is people in southwest China generally don't think that hard about what is going on in Beijing and people are not poaching as they do. They smoke a lot of cigarettes. I think I come from the Part of China that has the highest per capita smoking rates.

[A]

China is generally quite a high smoking rate society. So that's quite an achievement for you.

[B]

Yeah, we didn't have that, you know, 1980s, 90s woke era against the cigarettes. We're still pre woke in terms of the tobacco usage. So I smoked my first cigarette at I think like something like age 12. And so, you know, these are the sort of practices that are afforded to this area of zombia. And what I appreciate the most about Scott's book is that he lays out all of these things that I feel like I sort of recognize with the rural Chinese in which they are much more eager to plant different root crops, let's say cassava or sweet potatoes, because that is a way to avoid assessment by the tax collector. And Scott points out that if you grow rice in a patty, it is really easily accessible. So the assessor will just come over and say, well, 15% of that, please. Or yes, if you're growing sweet potatoes for cassava. This is underground. Often they have no way of seeing what is actually growing, especially if you are high up in the mountains. The tax collector in his carriage, driven by a mule is not that inclined to come up to the mountains to assess for taxes. That many people are post literate. They don't have a writing system which gives them more malleable ethnic identities. And so in my family, there's slight speculation that we are partially Tibetan, maybe partially the Wa people. Who knows? Officially, when I was born in China, I was classified as Han, but in those mountain regions, who the heck knows? And there's all sorts of practices that people maintain to kind of avoid the state foot drag and not think too hard about what is happening in the luminous center of the Communist party. And that is one of these really great contributions that Scott has, I think.

[A]

Scott also points out in Against Grain, which is one of his later books, it's not just that row crops are visible, but you can see the size of the rice paddy and the expected yield. But you also often have a very narrow window for harvesting. And so you can come back around August and you know that the farmer must, must harvest his grain or his wheat. Whereas many tubers, yams and cassava, you've got a big broad range. You could harvest them and then tamp the ground back down and say, oh no, the yield was poor this year and escape taxation that way.

[B]

I am pro tuber.

[A]

Yeah, we're, we're tuber maxing here. Scott really likes the physical material world and he pays close Attention. And I really appreciate that.

[B]

We gotta be anti cereal pro tuber, pro pulses and this. On this podcast, we are reducing our. Our intake of carbohydrates and we are going to be increasing our consumption of the beans.

[A]

The beans and the starches. Maybe we should talk a bit about Weapons of the Week here, which is a Scott book that basically drills down much further on the exact particular ways that these mountain peoples or these swamp peoples try and resist legibility.

[B]

So let's talk a little bit about your heritage of resisting the Ottoman Empire. So what exactly were the weapons available to your ancestors and how much of it was weak? What does it mean to have weapons of the weak?

[A]

Anyway, here's where my. My kind of just so heritage story gets a little bit complicated, I think, because the mountains are in some ways quite treacherous as you move east. In Lebanon, on the other hand, you're quite close to some of the major trading ports of the Eastern Mediterranean in Beirut and Tyre, and of course, further south in Israel and Palestine. The famous tourist line about Lebanon before its civil war was that you could go skiing in the morning and swimming in the afternoon, which is a wonderful dream. And one day I would like to do that. That would be a great daily achievement. But so in some ways there's always more contact, I think, with the. With the Metropole if you're in the Levant, even if you are up in the mountains. But the main escapes were just being able to protect and retain a distinct religious identity and a distinct religious schooling system, such that there are very few Christians broadly in the Middle East. Obviously, there are fewer today than there were even 20 years ago because of some of the effects of the war on terror and other secular trends. But that would be the retention, the thing that those people protected.

[B]

Santi, I declare you a member of the mountain tribe, just like me, just

[A]

like the Borderers and the Highland Scots. We're all in this one together.

[B]

We're all in this one together. So I believe it was Pope Urban IX who said that a heresy is not dangerous until it passes through Switzerland. And Switzerland, of course, is also another area in which one can go skiing in the morning and go swimming in the afternoon. But Switzerland is full of these different heresies that the Catholic Church was not able to stamp out. And what is your Christian faith but another heresy in that corner of the world? Wouldn't you agree that's true.

[A]

No, that's right. But I confess I don't know as much about the particular weapons of the week from my great, great grandfather as I Do about the weapons of the week of the 70 household rice village in Kedah, Malaysia between 1978 and 1980.

[B]

Tell us about the weapons of the week in Kedah, Malaysia.

[A]

So Kedah is, I believe, the province. And Scott gives a pseudonym to the actual rice village. He calls it Sadaka, but it's his good anthropologist. He doesn't want to expose or make legible the particular village he's in. But this is a village outside of a very small town, which itself is quite far from any major village. Malaysian cities of entirely rice farmers, tenant farmers. So they don't own the land, they rent it. The landowners and Scott is very interested in the ways that these people who are dirt poor, who have very little at all, both avoid doing things they don't want to do, avoid being forced into things they don't want to do, and the way that they retain the kind of, I think he, he talks about it as class consciousness, you know, that they. They have a little society the man can't break into. And it's interesting in, in some ways because in the United States we have a tradition of civil disobedience or direct action, which is a number of very well fleshed out techniques to get the attention of the state or of the broader culture of mass society. They're all products of mass media. The sit in, the, you know, being arrested, the boycott. And all of these, Scott would say, require direct symbolic confrontation with authority. What Scott is interested in here in Malaysia are techniques that do the opposite, that avoid any direct confrontation. They require little or no coordination or planning, says Scott. So these are things like foot dragging, like doing something you're asked to do, but doing it very slowly or pretending to be stupid. Feigned ignorance. I don't understand what you are saying to me. Sabotage, sometimes, you know, some kind of more direct action, you could say. But still, you know, one person can do it. Does not require organization, necessarily. False compliance. Saying you're going to do something and then simply not doing it. Stealing and then gossip is a big one. Just, just chatter behind the back of the man. All these are in his category of weapons of the week.

[B]

One of my favorites is rude nicknames for officers of the state. Just being rude and backbiting. Now, I think it is important that these are indeed weapons, but why are they exactly. Weapons of the weak.

[A]

This is a point I think you can argue with Scott on. Scott says, I've got a fun quote here about the power of these weapons. Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines, as we talked about, 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 or stealing or sanding in the gears, literally in the case of the tractors that are introduced to this village in the aggregate, can stop or slow the arrival of new technologies, of new modes of oppression. I think there's an interesting argument here. The problem for Scott is that in the end the weak, in his book Lose and the Green Revolution comes, we move to double cropping.

[B]

What is double cropping?

[A]

Double cropping means because of the innovations of men like Norman Borlaug, the American hero, really you can plant cultivars of rice that harvest more quickly. And so you can do two cycles of rice in a year instead of one, and you leave the patty fallow without growing anything for a period of a few months. You can actually pack two crops into a year. And so this, obviously, if you, if you're familiar with the kind of 20th century history is, this kind of innovation is responsible for saving the lives of millions who otherwise would have been swept away by famine. It also is of interest to the state of Malaysia because it helps Malaysia stop being a massive importer of rice. Despite being a rice cultivator, it had to import lots of rice. And so this. There's a keen interest in the state of bringing in tractors, of bringing in new cultivars of rice, of doing land reform so that they could stop being so reliant on outside imports, the price of commodities which they can control. It's complicated. There are winners and losers in each technological shift. But I think it is a challenge to Scott that the weapons of the weak in this story don't seem to end up winning the battle.

[B]

Well, the strong will take what they can and the weak will suffer what they must. And thus it has always been, whether that is Peloponnesian or Malaysian. I like this idea of the weapons of the weak, foot dragging, sabotage, gossip. Because I think that Scott pointed out very well that too many political scientists up until that time was studying peasants as being excessively passive people who suffered what they must, or they would engage in some sort of a great rebellion, as they often did. We have these sort of peasant mountain uprisings everywhere in Asia, including the time that Scott was approximately writing against the French colonial authorities and then second the American imperial authorities. So the Vietnamese were fighting off both of these very advanced powers. And so the mode of Analysis fluctuated between unchanging, passive peasants who have been immutable, inscrutable for millennia.

[A]

Ciphers, ciphers.

[B]

But, you know, adding in a few more modes, adding in a few more registers, introducing a few more rays of light into the shades of resistance. I think that is a very valuable contribution. What else did you like about the book Weapons of the Week, one of his, again, earlier works?

[A]

In one sense, it's interesting, not necessarily because of the political sociological lessons for us, because he's very interested in gossip and he spends a lot of time hanging out doing a fatload of nothing with peasants who are sitting around and trading stories about the land, devouring misers who rule over them, and generally ruining the reputations of wealthier men. So there's a lot of just. If you lighten gossip, it's a book that's largely about gossip. I also think I'm going to argue against myself here for a second. In some ways, you know, America is the, for a while at least, the forefront of modernity. We've been very interested in legible systems, and we like fights where we can see all the moves. I think the civil rights story is one of these stories where a lot of it played out in these striking acts of resistance. There's a lot that happens. I feel like I learned this through statecraft, through doing these interviews where all kinds of people use these weapons of the week. It's not just peasants, you know, against the landowners. A lot of the moves of people in the bureaucracy who want to stop something from happening, from a political appointee who rules over them. Say you can go through this list of weapons of feigned ignorance and dissimulation and sabotage and gossip, and you can say, wow, all of these tools and techniques are actually available to people who are middle managers or who are civil servants. It turns out that many more stories of failures of corporate implementation or implementation of a project within the government or the deep state, all these conceptual categories are very useful for understanding those dynamics. That was a big unlock for me.

[B]

I love this American term, malicious compliance. I don't know who first came up with that. Yes, that is another weapon of the week, isn't it? So I wanted to ask you to put this into contemporary terms. You're in Washington, D.C. right now as we speak. I hear there's a lot of gossip in that town. But tell us a little bit more about what are some of the weapons of the week available to essentially the bureaucracy, Aside from foot dragging and not understanding, feigning ignorance of what their political bosses, political Appointees demand what are some of the weapons of the week available to the deep state?

[A]

I think malicious compliance is a fabulous term but. But it's one way of looking at a problem that is really much broader. Right. Malicious compliance implies, Dan, you tell me, you know, carry out such and such directive from the deputy director of the agency. And I say certainly, and maybe I willfully misunderstand or I execute it in such a way as to stifle your stymie your attempts at success. There's all kinds of compliance or really kind of procedural obedience that can do the same things that don't have to be malicious or me against you. It may just be that my interests as a peasant bureaucrat are to minimize the downside risk to myself. And even though I have no, I'm not opposed to the big Dan initiative that will set you up for your presidential run in 2028. I just don't want to be holding the bag if something goes wrong. And so I'm going to make sure that we get all the paperwork and cripplicate. We have to convene the stakeholders. We can't communicate about it openly because of a variety of Congress imposed rules and what we can say and can't say without formally writing it up in a meeting. So we're going to have to space out those meetings and send around a poll to figure out when we can all meet. And none of that may be malicious. I think this is, this is one of the, maybe a useful point that Scott makes is that some of these are very intuitive moves. If your interests, if you have a principal agent problem, if you're the agent, your interests are different from those of the principal. They emerge naturally. Nobody has to teach you these things.

[B]

Yeah, we just call that compliance.

[A]

This is compliance, normal compliance.

[B]

What are some of your favorite rude nicknames for officers of the state?

[A]

I couldn't possibly say, Dan. There was, oh, what was his name? Bill Nelson, who was I believe NASA administrator in the last administration was a senator who was also an astronaut. And by that I mean he had gotten the chance to ride along, some would say had forced his way as a very important senator onto this NASA space shuttle expedition. But he was known in the space community for a long time as Bill Ballast Nelson. In the aftermath of that.

[B]

That's a good one. That is a good one, Mr. Ballast.

[A]

It's not too mean, but it is pretty mean.

[B]

Let's think a little bit about weapons of the week that are available to those of us who are not in the American bureaucrac Now, Santi, I accuse you now that you are working for one of these big frontier labs as being today the symbol of hated imperial authority against the rest of us. Against the rest of us in poor little universities who are very scared about what AI is going to do to students, to ourselves.

[A]

A little village called Stanford.

[B]

Yes, Stanford University. We are cowering at the frontier AI labs. So pray tell us, what is the weapons of the week that is available to those of us who are very nervous about imperial authority in the form of frontier lapse, like Anthropic, your employer?

[A]

Well, I have to reject the premise, Dan, about imperial authority. I'm going to make a big stink about that to you. I don't think that's at all the right mental model. But I will say the idea of illegibility is one which I think is probably only more important now than when Scott was talking about it. He was very early, in some sense. He wasn't very early because he thought this was relevant way back in prehistory. So he was relatively late to the idea of modern powers imposing legibility on illegible systems from above. But in some ways, any LLM any of these systems relies on legibility. And the only way you can do any kind of reinforcement learning, for instance, is by having a map of data that can be legibly fed to the machine to the process. And to the extent that there are things that we care about protecting, we care about doing that we don't want the machines to do for us, to a very great extent, they're going to have to be illegible to the machines. And so I would be curious, Dan, maybe we can both speak to this, but are there practices in your life that you do that you execute regularly to maintain illegibility? Before I make you answer the question, I'll say this is kind of unfair because you can't very well explain them on a podcast and keep them legible. So this might be a quixotic question.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this is one of these really important things, I think, for us to learn how to be illegible to the machine. So I think that would be like a good, useful exercise, personally, for all of us. Now, I find anthropic to be in intimidating authority indeed. Whenever Santia, you host, you hoist your standard of, I call it double E. Effective altruism and export controls. I get. I cower.

[A]

I would not call anthropic an ineffective altruist institution. I know many will disagree with me on this, but I would not describe it that way.

[B]

The hated orange splotch of your brand. I think that is kind of. Kind of what makes us all quake in our boots. Now, I do think that it is really important to be illegible. Maybe the general question is how do we sort of survive and drive value in the age of large language models? Now you and I are both word cells with email jobs. The way that I am thinking about it is that while we still have to continue writing what we do and we can't be writing the slop, and I have actually just tried using Pangram recently, and I was very pleased that when I submitted my letters to Pangram, it claims that it is 100% human generated, which I feel very validated about.

[A]

Why would you be pleased about that? You knew that already, Dan.

[B]

I know that already. But that, to me, that's actually a pretty good use case for the tool that I know that this validates something that I know is true. And so the more that any of us are able to have a high score on Pangram, I think that is actually a very positive thing. I've been doing quite a lot of speaking over the past year since my book has been out, and I think it is probably a good thing to just put yourself out to human audiences in flesh and blood that people can see that you are not just some sort of phantasm tramped up by the large language models. Somehow that still seems to have a lot of value. Now, 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 books and I still believe that there is something to this book that I suspect that effective altruist export control company is not going to be able to devour so quickly. Even though I believe you guys have just lost this copyright suit against a bunch of authors. I'm sorry to be teasing you without mercy, Santiago Cullet, A weapon of the week myself.

[A]

It could be.

[B]

Could be. Now, I think that it is still really valuable to continue writing books and let me freely share what I think are three guiding principles of a career that I am adopting. Number one is don't go insane. You and I both read social media in which we see that there are people having three meltdowns a day before breakfast. And it is important not to do that, number one. Number two, continue to put out analytically rigorous intellectual work. I think that is something that we need to do for the rest of our careers and the rest of our lifetimes. And number three, it is to learn from people who are older than us and to learn from people who are younger than us. And if we are able to maintain that for a while, I think that is kind of just a way to have a career. And to have a career, I believe in this moment means to stay outside of the reach of the large language models that are craving our jobs to automate. Maybe that also involves reading very broadly rather than just narrowly, because that is something that the large language models are able to do. But those are my couple of weapons of the week. Tell us, Santi, what are your guiding principles not to be devoured by the slop.

[A]

There's, I think both and Scott would point out there there are weapons of the week for protecting your economic interests, for making sure that the modern machine or the tractor doesn't does your job. And then there are weapons which are just about protecting other kinds of your life from legibility. And I think this is one where, Dan, you may rightfully accuse the LLM of being a a machine for legibility, but it is yet another modern machine for increasing legibility in modernity and in digital life in particular. So I would say many of the same instincts that you might have had before the rise of the LLM and its capabilities about what you share in your digital life, about which parts of your personal life or your family life you don't expose to the digital those practices are just as important after 2022 as they were before 2022.

[B]

So have you uploaded your baby into the large language model?

[A]

Into the large language model? No, I have turned off, I'll say the social media platform's automatic access to all my photographs and I'll pick and choose. I have to. It's quite arduous process. You have to give Instagram access to an individual photo and you have to go back and find it again. But I think it's probably best and this is a, this is a personal choice, but I think it's probably best not to let these institutions naturally train on my children's faces. Although I don't know what specifically I worry about. But I have a, I have a general call it a distrustful, mountainous, anti authority instinct here which says maybe I just don't want them to have automatic access to that image.

[B]

How else are you staying illegible?

[A]

Well, I'm not going to tell you, Dan, I'm blessed to have a wife who thinks more about this than I do. But I'm trying very hard to cultivate offline umwelt a world that is just unrelated entirely to the email job and the Email world. Some of that has to do with my immediate family. Some of that has to do with hosting. Do a lot of bringing people into our home. Increasingly I think I should be asking them or directing them to leave their phones in a little basket at the door as my wife keeps insisting that we do. This conversation is making me think maybe that should put my money where my mouth is and make that a prerequisite for some forms of convening.

[B]

I love that and I would be happy to be invited by you and your wife and leave my phone at the door.

[A]

Dan, you're welcome anytime. I would love to see you on your next in New York. But before we get to the illegible chit chat, are there other books by Scott that you've appreciated that we haven't managed to get to here? Because I think this ground up illegibility and these weapons of the week are very useful underappreciated piece of Scott's work. But there's a lot, I mean he covered a lot of. A lot of the waterfront.

[B]

Yeah. A bit big terrain that he moved through. Now I wonder if we should dwell just very slightly on the very end of Scott's career in which he his final two books were called against the Grain and in Price of Floods. Now this is about how he believes that probably that the cultivation of cereals, wheats, grains was probably just a mistake, that humanity would have been better off if we were living more like hunter gatherers, practicing sweetening agriculture in which we burn quite a lot of land and live generally healthier lives, even though there would be many fewer of us. Now, I think it is kind of a crazy position to be against the green revolution. To be against, I imagine, something like the Haber Bosch process, which were trumped up by two Germans that allowed perhaps 4 billion people to exist in the 20th century. And possibly Scott, probably Scott among them, was a beneficiary.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

How are we supposed to think about sort of this final tilting at windmills to say, well, we shouldn't put up so many hydraulic dams because that kills the rivers and somehow against the grain was a correct position. But in praise of floods, in which rivers twists and turn as they might along the Yangtze or the Yellow Rivers, which destroyed millions of people in the aggregate. Why should we be in favor of these sort of things rather than the sort of engineering practices that have enabled so many more people, including probably you, me and Scott, to have lived?

[A]

Well, what do you think, Dan? Because this is maybe where I'm interested in ending you and I For all of our complaints about modernity and travails against it, we appreciate it more than Scott did, at least in our public writing. Maybe, quietly, you are as turbulent about it as Scott was. Maybe you and I are more resigned, right, to modernity and modern states and modern markets.

[B]

You know, you started out the conversation by saying that Scott possibly might have objected to our work, and I'm not so sure. I think that Scott is someone maybe a little bit like Peter Thiel, who on the surface has all of these contradictions, denouncing the Internet while being an investor in Facebook and, let's say, being Christian and being gay on the surface, perhaps some people would say there are some contradictions here. And we may well do the same exercise with Scott, who, yes, he was kind of a peasant rebel on the one hand, in his public Persona, on the other hand, having arguably the most prestigious professorship in global academia, being a sterling professor at Yale University, there are, on the surface, these sort of contradictions. And I think that he would probably exceed very much that. Modernity has been important, that people in Southeast Asia, among all these peasants, are probably much better off, even though they may not feel it with modernity, that it was probably very much a good thing that the States have been able to reach much further into the world. And that, you know, he did write one of his. More like an essay collection called Two Cheers for Anarchism, which is great.

[A]

I recommend it.

[B]

I recommend it very much as well. And I read it a while ago and sort of the image that has stuck with me is what he calls anarchist calisthenics, which he spent a little bit of time in Germany, in which, as those of us who do visit Germany, as well as different parts of northern Europe, as soon as you jaywalk, that very act will conjure a crone who starts yelling at you to say, you. You're killing children by jaywalking.

[A]

The bonds of society which bind us are being flouted. You're degrading civilization through your reckless act.

[B]

It is cut at one stroke when you are jaywalking at 11pm in the streets of Berlin or some other Prussian city. And I think that Scott points out very well that the Germans were. Germans in particular were perhaps a little bit too obedient roughly a century ago when someone commanded them to commit everything that was done in the name of the Third Reich. So, you know, we should all be practicing a little bit of the calisthenics to avoid the commands of the state. So Scott was offering two chairs for anarchism, but there was One third of a chair that he was missing. And I think that was his appreciation for the state. And that is very much my view as well, that I, having grown up among the peasants of Southeast Asia, Scots term, not exactly mine, I think peasant is a little bit out of fashion these days. But having grown up among my family members who I could tell were very eager to cheat the authorities if they could get away with it, who were a little bit too keen to offer 12 year old me a cigarette because that was just one did at the time. My family did not cultivate the opium poppy because the states had eradicated it for the last few decades. But I am sure they would have if they could make money on the cash crops. And myself, who am more attracted to the world of books, I am not yet post literate, although I am sure that fate is coming to all of us. I am really into that.

[A]

Don't be so sure, Dan. It's about these little choices those present make.

[B]

But anyway, sorry, I am much more into the opera, which was a creation of the Viennese court, much more so than the creation of the mountain peoples in the Alps. So I am very much into modernity. Perhaps Scott would give two cheers for anarchism. Maybe I would give one cheer for anarchism. So that is kind of my ratio. What's your ratio, Santi?

[A]

I think I'm much more schizophrenic about this than you are. I think at times I'm one and times I'm two and a half. I do think I would dispute most of your anti LLM hatred, but I do think one of the great challenges for us individually and civilizationally as states will be simply that these tools enable a kind of state capacity, a kind of state ability to do things, to surveil, to monitor or to enforce that might be far beyond what we actually want. Even those of us who are big fans of state capacity, who like when states are able to do things that they're commissioned to do effectively and efficiently, it may be that the perfect enforcement even of the law against jaywalking, for example, would be a horror and that the capabilities to enforce it perfectly will exist. And we may wish for the era when the old men and women of Germany were the ones enforcing that rule instead of the automated imposition. So there will have to be a variety of settlements and many of us will have to think far harder about what kinds of legibility and illegibility we care to protect in our own lives. That's where I think Scott will be even more resonant than he has been so far.

[B]

Maybe you will crave for these old ladies of Germany. I am not sure that I will. But I certainly see your point. It is good to have some enforcers of social order upon us. And this is why again, maybe, maybe one and a half. Half is the correct number of cheers for anarchy.

[A]

I'm planting a flag here for our future. David Hackett Fisher episode on Albion Seed but one of the things he's very interested in is how you can have both state enforcement of the laws or often you can have even more aggressive communal enforcement of the norms without the force of law. And so there are historically all kinds of ways in which you and I might feel very oppressed by our community despite the state have nothing to do with it. So there's no easy answers here is I guess what I would say.

[B]

It is really interesting to hear your language choice, Santi. You are planting a flag now, isn't that what imperial authorities do writ large, aren't you part of the language of the oppressors against the rest of us imposing, you know, planting your flag of anthropic conquering the lands that are hoping to be illegible. You're an enforcer, Santi.

[A]

I accuse I resemble this remark. No. We will have to defend the small rice paddies of Stanford and Yale. The long arm of the state reaching into the Francis Fukuyama staffed Hoover Institution. That illegible mound of Metis that it

[B]

is indeed it is just going to be the future of is going to be Frank Fukuyama stand. Stephen Kotkin and I cultivating our cassava fields and a sweet potato up in the mountains of Los Altos or something.

[A]

The ivory towers.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Yes. The illegible mass audience books that are produced. I find your books very legible, Dan. That might be a problem in the future. Your books are quite good.

[B]

Probably.

[A]

Indeed, Dan, it's been a pleasure to have you on. Come back anytime.

[B]

Santi. I cannot wait to join one of your wonderful gatherings that you and your wife can host.