In case you missed it, the Ministry of Culture (MOC) believes that the State Administration of Press, Publication, Ratio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT) only has authority over physical forms of content like CDs and DVDs, and no ongoing authority after initial approval.
SAPRFT disagrees, and thinks it has a lot of other powers besides those.
Activision – the owner of World of Warcraft – thus ran into sort of a buzzsaw when changing providers –
“Notwithstanding the fact that the World of Warcraft had been operated in China for four years at the time Activision Blizzard and NetEase announced the new license, shortly after that announcement, both MOC and SAPPRFT indicated that the game would need to apply for a new approval, undergoing another content censorship review, prior to the commencement of commercial operation by the new domestic operator. Although there was no rational basis to require a second round of censorship for a game with four years of operating history inside the country, the requirement for a new censorship review of any foreign game when transferring from one domestic operator to another is now the law in China.
“On July 21, 2009, MOC reapproved the World of Warcraft for commercial operation. By mid-September, three months after the term of the original license [in China] ended and commercial operation of the game ceased, SAPPRFT had not yet reapproved the game.”
So – World of Warcraft had shut down in China and was trying to get restarted.
“One interpretation of this circular [clarifying regulatory authority] is that SAPPRFT’s approval was not required for the commercial relaunch of the World of Warcraft since the game had previously been available online and thus should fall under the regulatory authority of MOC. On September 19, 2009, apparently in reliance upon this interpretation, NetEase relaunched the World of Warcraft without having first received the approval of SAPPRFT. On November 2, 2009, however, SAPPRFT declared the relaunch of the game illegal and demanded a halt to its commercial operation. Nonetheless, on February 12, 2010, SAPPRFT approved the commercial relaunch of the World of Warcraft, apparently after NetEase reached a negotiated settlement with SAPPRFT that included issuing a self-criticism for its prior actions.”
***
LIEUTENANT, YOU WERE GIVEN SPECIFIC ORDERS
AGENT SMITH
Lieutenant, you were given specific orders --
LIEUTENANT
I'm just doing my job. You gimme that Juris-my dick-tion and you can cram it up your ass.
AGENT SMITH
The orders were for your protection.
Agent Smith is, obviously, the bad guy in The Matrix.
Did you realize, though, that when he spoke the Police Lieutenant that he was right?
I sent two units. They're bringing her down now.
No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead.
The various overlapping American government, police, and regulatory agencies work rather hard towards legibility; it’s a common hook in cop movies that the federal agents show up, who take precedence over local police, and then get it wrong.
Typically, the local cop on the scene is the good guy – the feds are from out of town and “don’t get it.”
Though, not quite in The Matrix.
That’s the tradeoff when there’s high legibility – you know who reports to whom, the structure all be managed and governed. When federal agents and the local police are on the scene, the feds are in charge. Why? Because someone has to be, and it’s the feds.
People, of course, sometimes chafe at this.
Thus, you get the common cop movie plot where the local police officer stays on the case even after the federal agents tell him to get lost, and he solves the crime.
You also get situations where the local officer doesn’t listen to the typical command chain, says “You gimme that Juris-my dick-tion…” and – well, it didn’t work out so well in that movie.
But perhaps what’s most noteworthy about all this is that the movie The Matrix just takes it for granted that you get what’s going on. The flippant remark about jurisdiction – the writers figured you just knew about it already. It’s so common.
American government officials, generally speaking, work rather hard to clarify chains of command, to neatly and clearly divide authority lines into specific boxes, and to assign them to specific jurisdictions, with clear precedence for who defers to whom if multiple agencies are involved.
China works a little differently.
***
FORMLESSNESS
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. “ – Sunzi, The Art of War, 5th Century BC
It should be noted that illegibility is the default position in just about everything. Organically evolved systems are typically not easily legible; organically evolved governance likewise trends towards an illegible patchwork.
The Chinese are much more comfortable with illegibility and ambiguity than Western powers, and we should note – their system has successfully produced one of the largest and greatest transformations of a nation over a single generation in basically all of history.
Legibility has some significant advantages, but is by no means universally better; in fact, both Rao and I believe it’s the cause of many problems in the West.
We can see both the advantages and disadvantages in illegibility in display in how Activision had to navigate the regulatory agencies of China when re-launching World of Warcraft –
“Notwithstanding the contradictory position of MOC and SAPPRFT regarding their respective regulatory authority, both the text of the various Three Determination Regulations and the actual resolution of the World of Warcraft relaunch approval discussed below, suggest that both MOC and SAPPRFT will continue to have significant regulatory authority over the industry. Accordingly, most game companies work hard to maintain positive relations with both MOC and SAPPRFT, regarding each authority as a primary regulator for the industry.”
***
I CAN’T UNDERSTAND THIS, THEREFORE IT MUST BE FLAWED
The discussion around legibility spread through our social circle when Venkat Rao wrote A Little Big Idea Called Legibility in 2010 –
“The book begins with an early example, “scientific” forestry. The early modern state, Germany in this case, was only interested in maximizing tax revenues from forestry. This meant that the acreage, yield and market value of a forest had to be measured, and only these obviously relevant variables were comprehended by the statist mental model. Traditional wild and unruly forests were literally illegible to the state surveyor’s eyes, and this gave birth to “scientific” forestry: the gradual transformation of forests with a rich diversity of species growing wildly and randomly into orderly stands of the highest-yielding varieties. The resulting catastrophes — better recognized these days as the problems of monoculture — were inevitable.”
There’s a lot of failures of this type.
Rao –
“Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).
Here is the recipe:
*Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
*Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
*Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
*Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
*Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
*Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
*Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality
.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.”
In the rest of the piece, Rao explores why legibility became such a popular idea and fashion – his best guess is that it arises from a mix of governments needing to rationalize and simplify the resources within their domain to manage and tax them, and psychologically, as a defense against chaos and seeming randomness.
Rao notes that legibility doesn’t always go poorly – standardizing time into timezones allowed railroads to operate across continents; the metric system might have been a little worse at a lot of things, but was broadly better once diffused across Europe by Napoleon.
But there are downsides, and foolish attempts to legible-ize otherwise illegible systems produce many of them.
The final reason it occurs? Rao names pseudo-scientific naive utopianism, which is, well, at least as funny as it is insightful –
“In all these cases, you could argue that the formula merely replaced a set of locally optimal modes of social organization with a globally optimal one. But that would be missing the point. The reason the formula is generally dangerous, and a formula for failure, is that it does not operate by a thoughtful consideration of local/global tradeoffs, but through the imposition of a singular view as “best for all” in a pseudo-scientific sense. The high-modernist reformer does not acknowledge (and often genuinely does not understand) that he/she is engineering a shift in optima and power, with costs as well as benefits. Instead, the process is driven by a naive “best for everybody” paternalism, that genuinely intends to improve the lives of the people it affects. The high-modernist reformer is driven by a naive-scientific Utopian vision that does not tolerate dissent, because it believes it is dealing in scientific truths.”
***
ILLEGIBILITY: ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES
Rao –
“The application of these ideas in the personal/corporate domains actually interests me the most. Though Scott’s book is set within the context of public policy and governance, you can find exactly the same pattern in individual and corporate behavior. Individuals lacking the capacity for rich introspection apply dumb 12-step formulas to their lives and fail.”
I’m probably less hostile to legibility than Rao – I think it has also led to some major gains – but there are certainly a legion of tradeoffs between legibility and illegibility; it’s an incredibly powerful mental model to take into account when designing personal operating structures, organizations, and for seeing and making sense of the world-at-large.
Advantages of Illegibility –
1. Diffuse authority and “plausible deniability” are incredibly valuable for members of an organization to have in some instances (though this is also one of the major downsides). You’ll often find sophisticated Chief Executive Officers saying “I have to check with my board” and the Board saying “I’ll lean towards following the CEO’s call on the decision” – as such, outsiders cannot infer much about the actual decisionmaking authority of the Board or CEO, whereas those inside the company can and do understand it well. This is very common and is a genuine advantage for those inside a power structure who understand how things actually happen.
2. Flexibility: when the American Congress passes a law about exactly who will report to whom in what situations, it often takes a second Act of Congress to change the structure, which is slow and expensive. By having illegibly distributed authority, the relative power and decisionmaking can shift more seamlessly over time without the need for a formal ruling or adjustment.
3. The “best man for the job” can step up from a variety of places. If you have a Head of Marketing and a Head of Sales on the same level in a company, the relative distribution of decisionmaking power between them can flow towards whoever is doing the best job on a particular matter. Sometimes, formalizing this with one reporting to the other, or a Chief Revenue Officer above both, can lead to putting decisionmaking and power in the hands of someone less capable.
Neutral aspects of illegibility –
1. Lack of transparency: while transparency is a buzzword in the West right now, we class this as a neutral and not a negative because there are at times significant advantages to not being transparent. If you’re a military commander, you want your troop strength and levels of training and equipment to be invisible to the enemy. If you’ve got some nearly magical trade secrets working in your company, it might be useful to diffuse those through unexpected areas so a rival company cannot easily scout a single division of your company to pick them up. Illegible structures tend to be less transparent, which can be bad in a lot of situations – maybe most situations, since most corruption requires a lack of transparency – but it can be advantageous in certain cases.
2. Rivalry: as noted in the MOC and SAPPRFT example, there might be something of a rivalry between these organizations. This is again not entirely good or bad – rivalrous behavior can result in many downsides, yes, but it can also keep people on their toes, having them fight to out-innovative and out-shine the department they’re in rivalry with.
Disadvantages of illegibility –
1. Harder to understand, measure, manage, and so on – of course, this is the main reason that the trend towards forced legibility started.
2. Lack of predictability: both internally and externally, it’s easier to do good and consistent business with any organization that acts predictably. Unpredictability can occasionally have some advantages – especially in direct conflict – but the majority of the time, it’s far more damaging for one’s own side in that it becomes unclear how to get things done, as the same types of actions generate very different responses.
3. Destructive power struggles: ambiguity is one of the primary drivers of any sort of direct conflict – if you know that starting a war means you’re going to lose and have terrible things happen to you, you don’t start a war and try to avoid it. It’s when it’s unclear who will win a war that the most destructive wars happen. Likewise, ambiguous and diffused authority can lead to friendly rivalry, but also to outright destructive power struggles.
4. No clear decisionmaker or responsible party: Ray Dalio, in Principles, wrote: “The most important decision you can make is who you choose as your responsible party” for generating a result. It’s generally accepted wisdom at this point that “two responsible parties = no responsibly party at all”… when you have a single clear final decisionmaker on an issue, they’re responsible for the entire outcome, and it becomes clear how to get things done. The lack of an RP can often happen in diffuse and illegible structures.
***
GUIDANCE
The rise of the drive towards legibility only arose relatively recently – sometime in the last few hundred years, likely hitting its peak in the generation after World War II.
As in all cases in Dubious Battle, there are less right and wrong answers here, and more tradeoffs.
Let’s look at Rao’s definitions one more time –
“Legibility: A system is legible if it is comprehensible to a calculative-rational observer looking to optimize the system from the point of view of narrow utilitarian concerns and eliminate other phenomenology. It is illegible if it serves many functions and purposes in complex ways, such that no single participant can easily comprehend the whole. [...] Illegible systems are generally more robust than legible ones, and Scott’s model is mainly about the failures caused by imposing legibility on an initially illegible reality.”
And,
“Calculative rationality: The classical approach to decision-making, based on goals, plans, utilities and means-end reasoning methods. Calculative rationality does not usually encompass mental models, background narratives or situational tempo.”
Guidance, then –
1. Recognize that smart people in the modern West might be drawn to legibility even when it’s harmful; be aware of this and mitigate it over time. Legibility sometimes helps one gain control and management, but often it only creates an illusion of contro
l while simultaneously making a system more fragile and making it perform less well. If you have a natural inclination towards legibility, it’s imperative to study the topic and its failures at least a bit so you don’t dive headlong into them.
2. Make hypotheses of what will happen if you attempt to legible-ize a system beforehand. Mandatory topical meetings in a company drives towards legibility in communications – if done well, this can result in regular knowledge sharing and a net decrease in the amount of communication needed. But before you set mandatory meetings, you might study how things are happening informally, get the best data you can on that (which is admittedly hard to get), and then predict whether the new meetings will increase or decrease the amount of communication, increase or decrease quality, and speed up or slow down work happening. It’s critical to approach these as hypotheses and then check to see if you were correct. If mandatory meetings automatically invite a large number of people, it’s very possible that nothing gets done except busywork in them – and that people still have smaller ad hoc meetings to actually get things done, while silmultaneously feeling less responsibility for final outcomes. Or perhaps it’ll work marvelously and things will run more efficiently and better. Make predictions – hypotheses – before putting enforced legality and attempts at rationalization in place, and ensure you double-check they’re working afterwards.
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