Cove @ La Jolla
AI will be the consummation of bureaucracy as regime-type. The official, Weberian appeal of bureaucracy is that it takes discretion out of the hands of individuals, who may abuse it, and subjects decisions to procedures that will be fair and neutral. It depends on having a comprehensive representation of the field to be governed, so one can subject its various parts to a rational calculus. But the conceit that one has such a representation in hand is almost always a fiction, nicely illustrated by the effectiveness of “work to rule” strikes. […]
Bureaucracies build their legitimacy on the idea that they have rendered the field of forces perfectly legible, and can therefore exert a perfect mastery over them. It ain’t so.
Currently reading: Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman 📚
Currently reading: How to Know a Person by David Brooks 📚
San Diego, day 1
Currently reading: Weird City by Joshua Long 📚
Finished reading: Lost in Austin by Alex Hannaford 📚
This Texas Monthly review, while harsh, is basically correct:
Like it or not, the Austin of today is a product of choices made by the electorate, by various local and state officials, and by forces that were beyond anyone’s control. So the last thing anyone needs is more Austin Jeremiahs—who those of us living elsewhere find insufferable, anyway. What the city does need, at this point, is better planning for the future—though, to be honest, it’s not always clear what that informed thinking might look like. Is the city trying to curb growth to preserve what’s special about the place, or shape its rapid development so that most of the people moving there can afford the rent?
Ross Byrd’s 20 Proverbs for the Digital Age is worth revisiting annually.
Currently reading: Untamed Hospitality (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life) by Elizabeth Newman 📚
Representational speech will carry a good many features that are irrelevant to prediction and control, but answer to something more like a sheer desire to understand and to deploy verbal symbols in ways that enlarge the repertoire of communication that can be both purposive and more playful or (to use a loaded word) contemplative—attuned both to scientia and sapientia in the language St Augustine used to distinguish instrumental and reflective or contemplative knowing, knowing whose point is simply knowing, in the sense of intelligently enjoying the presence of the other.