Res Extensa #4: On Legibility — In Society, Tech, Organizations, and Cities
Coleman McCormickresextensa.co
Res Extensa #4: On Legibility — In Society, Tech, Organizations, and Cities
For the modern state to exist, it must transform the vernacular and the idiosyncratic into a set of standardized units that can be properly analyzed and understood from a geographic and conceptual distance. Without legibility, the state is blind. But making things legible means reducing their complexity, their nuance, their crooked lines.
Steven Johnson • Future Perfect
Alongside the companies that gather data, there are newly powerful companies that build the tools for organizing, processing, accessing, and visualizing it—companies that don’t take in the traces of our common life but set the terms on which it is sorted and seen. The scraping of publicly available photos, for instance, and their subsequent labelin... See more
logicmag.io • Singular Plural
Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have)... See more
Frank Chimero • Everything Easy is Hard Again
The ways in which we develop and deploy smart city technologies will have vast political consequences: who gains political influence, how neighborhoods are policed, who loses their privacy.
Jascha Franklin-Hodge • The Smart Enough City
The extraction is so grotesque, so creepy, that it is almost impossible to see how anyone who really thinks about it lives with it – and yet we do. There’s something about its opacity, its insidiousness, that makes it hard to think about, just as it’s hard to think about climate change, a process that will inevitably undo society as we currently un
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