Judging Like a Machine

Abstract

The subtitle of James Bridle’s (2012) South by Southwest panel on the New Aesthetic was ‘seeing like digital devices’ (Bridle 2012). Whether that subtitle expresses a desire, a statement of purpose, or an analysis of what Bridle takes the current state of the world to be has never been clear. The subtitle has given rise to the even pithier notion of ‘seeing like a machine’ (Ballvé 2012; Sterling 2012), which, in addition to its pithiness, appears to derive at least in part from the title of James C. Scott’s fascinating 1998 book Seeing Like a State. A critical difference between Scott’s work and that of the New Aesthetic is that for Scott the word Tike’ is meant relatively literally: Scott wants his readers to understand how the world looks to the ‘engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries’ who rule and make plans for what he calls ‘high modernist’ state (Scott 1998, 88). This state is embodied in people with political power — the ‘ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement’ (Scott 1998, 89). As in most political theory, the state is understood as being in a substantive sense constituted by the people, especially the people in power, of whom it is made up.