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Alice and Riley Present: The Brane Zone Book Club, Part 2 (Seeing Like a State) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-03-30 16:22:50
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

Alice and Riley are back and cracking the books. For the second Brane Zone this month, Riley read James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State,” (1998) and contend with a man contending with solving political problems at the end of history.

Comments

etienne

my brain is so ready for this. I got way into this book when i was a Slate Star Codex fan

Magnus Cooper

Excited to listen to this. Used this book extensively for my dissertation on special settlers

etienne

the Radio War Nerd fb page had a good chat a while ago about Scott's time in Indonesia gathering intel for the CIA and the general tendency of anarchists to end up as spooks

theo bradshaw

Should've called it seething like a state

Marty Shambles (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-06 17:00 I wanted to second somebody else’s name of “Writtenology”
2023-03-30 16:35

Jonas Schwammberger

As a little example for models: There are traffic planers who have to design spaces for truck+trailers, buses etc. The question is, can a truck+trailer make that turn? You could use fancy software, or: You buy toy trucks, print out the plan in the same scale, and go 'vrooom' (but professional). The toy models are insanely accurate.

Karl Childers

28:30ish wait did alice just say that the prussians did governance via warhammer 40k

Serjeant

I had very complex feelings listening to Riley (seeming) to go really hard on Scott since it was 'cause of this book (and the work of David Graeber) that I moved leftward of being a liberal/social democrat and I hope he hasn't completely put Alice off of reading it for herself regarding Riley's critique of the third definitional point of "prostrate civil society", I think we should keep in mind that Scott is laying out what causes a FAILURE of High Modernism; like we might say that the NHS (when created) was a High Modernist SUCCESS because the then extent British civil society was receptive to it, maybe? like I think the point of the third criteria is the semi-liberal point is that a prostrate civil society can't even offer constructive criticism of a bad High Modernist plan *slash* is sorta under coercion to pretend the scheme is working even when it isn't... then again, maybe I'm just falling into the narcissism of small differences...

Oscar Heath

i think Levi-Strauss’s “La Pensée sauvage” would make a great counterpoint to this book for anyone interested, or possibly even for a future episode. in particular, i think LS is acutely aware that the communities he was engaging with were responding — sometimes deftly, sometimes ineffectually, often frantically — to crises and shifts, whether that be centuries of imperialism or a decade of very local political conflict, which requires radical and active thinking. as such, it seems right to me that their distinctive forms of knowledge is better understood not a timeless μῆτις but a dynamic and resourceful bricolage. obviously not a perfect book but i think this helps avoid some of the fetishism and historical (and geographic!) reductionism which you rightly identified in Scott, and grants indigenous people greater scope for political, intellectual and aesthetic agency

Eric Adams (German)

I don’t know much about the Tennessee Valley Authority. Was there an implied failure of the authority in the conversation? Or was it being touted as the counter example for the effects of planning (opposite from Prussian tree fuckery)?

Genevieve R

When you swap to one $5 and one $10, will you still be swapping who's reading every episode, or every two episodes? Just wondering if I'll be getting an all Riley/all Alice run

UltraCoil

So the idea of a "good enough" representation is absolutely central to statistics, but rarely made explicit and it's so interesting to watch it suddenly lurch to the fore when a statistical model is found to be inadequate after the fact. The state does this a lot.

Nemo

I still like The Brane Zone

Ken Olendorf

Potential name Two Trunkless Legs

sudonim2

Now this is the sorta hardcore nerd shit I pay money to you guys for!

Allen

Name suggestion: TF University (semi-serious)

Lilith Dyke

"alice's proclivities" god does this woman have proclivities

Patrick Lopez

Really interesting conversation. I'm...uhh...reasonably...well-read, and I was off to Wikipedia and Better World Books several times.

Oliver Cant

Would it cool if you could do more sci-fi book and such? Cos I'm cool with theory, but it would be fun to hear talk like Ian Bank's Culture novels or get really into the weeds of the latter Dune books.

Alyoshka

I think it would work better if you presented the ideas before you critique them. Foregrounding the critique keeps you from engaging with the book. You don't need to agree that planning is bad but it bears thinking about the tradeoffs between state capacity and adaptability and the general underestimation of pre-modern forms od organisation.

Maggie+Al

Scott is kinda the perfect airhead Nat sec court radical, never ask why as you condem Robert MacNamara a bunch of his acolytes keep giving you grant money and asking you to write reports for the CIA.

Tom Navidson

Please talk about blind sight!

Zhan Ping

Alice keeps teasing "fanshen" as a book which I'm super down for. I'm writing my dissertation on "fanshen" at the moment and there are a few interesting critiques that Chinese historians have of it that aren't really available in English language sources. I don't know if it's of any interest but I'd be happy to shoot over a message giving the lowdown of them if it's helpful.

Autumn Cedar

Just about done with the dawn of everything, really recommend you guys check that out if you haven't yet

Ava Usagi

This dude wrote 300 pages to arrive at a liberal version of material conditions.

Michael Eckhardt

Wanting to read this now. From the background I had on it, I thought it was a much more overtly right wing libertarian book than it sounds like it is. Sounds like an interesting critique.

TV

The thing about using local knowledge and avoiding abstraction in administration is that that is how exploration and conquest were commonly done in antiquity and at least the early Middle Ages. And that didn’t stop any of those rulers or states from being brutal and dehumanising to those they conquered. Maps and planning surely made it easier, but the dehumanisation that comes with coercive power predates modernism by millennia.