Keeping the Cultural Uplands Alive | Jay MollicaSkip to main contentKeeping the Cultural Uplands Alive<br>May 18, 2026
Aerial view of Cape Coral, FLSam Altman doesn’t understand the technology he’s building. In a recent New Yorker profile, neither he nor anyone else interviewed could quite explain how large language models produce what they produce, or what they’ll do next, or whether they pose an existential threat to the species. Altman holds this opacity up as a reason he should be the one in control of it. The move should be familiar to anyone who has watched an institution justify its authority by pointing to the complexity of what it manages and it is the latest, most aggressive instance of a much older pattern of governance, one that is also reshaping cultural institutions in ways the AI conversation may have missed.<br>In Seeing Like a State, the anthropologist James C. Scott describes how modern states make populations governable by making them legible: imposing surnames, fixed addresses, standardized measures, censuses, and cadastral maps until a messy social reality resolves into something a bureaucracy can act on. The defining feature of this legibility is its asymmetry. The state sees you; you do not see the state. Anyone who has tried to correct an error on a tax record, contest a charge with an insurer, or navigate an immigration office knows the texture of this asymmetry: the sense that you are intimately known by an entity you cannot reach.<br>David Graeber, in The Utopia of Rules, names what this asymmetry costs. He calls it interpretive labor: the work of understanding flows uphill from the weaker party to the stronger. Servants must read their masters; the master need not bother. Citizens must learn the state’s forms and categories; the state processes them as data. The labor of being understood is paid by whichever side can’t afford opacity. Bureaucracy, on Graeber’s account, is not really a system for managing complexity. It is a system for distributing the costs of being managed.<br>This is the framework worth bringing to the AI moment, because the AI moment is a legibility regime with new properties. Prompt engineering is the clearest example: we iterate endlessly to extract usable outputs from systems we are not permitted to see into, learning the system’s preferences without the system disclosing them. We trim our questions to fit token limits, reshape our intentions to navigate content policies, and contort our data into API schemas. Every interaction makes us slightly more legible to the systems behind the interface, while the systems remain (by design and by the admission of their builders) illegible to us. Altman is not unusual in claiming AI is too complex to be made transparent. He is simply naming, as a feature, what the entire industry treats as a structural commitment.<br>Scott’s later work, The Art of Not Being Governed, asks where people go when they want to live outside such regimes. He studies the highland peoples of Southeast Asia, a region he calls Zomia, and argues that their apparent backwardness is a deliberate political achievement. They chose crops that ripen underground and resist auditing, settlement patterns that resist mapping, fluid ethnic identities that resist classification. He calls some of them post-literate, meaning that they have set aside or refused writing systems because writing is a technology of capture. A literate population is a recordable population, and a recordable population is one that can be taxed, conscripted, and forced into labor.<br>The honest version of this story has to acknowledge what Scott himself eventually conceded: the uplands are mostly gone. The roads, helicopters, satellite maps, biometric IDs, and financial dragnets of the modern state have closed the escape valves. The Americans who live most ungovernably today, the undocumented, the unhoused, the deeply rural poor, did not choose the condition and pay severely for it. Vulnerability to violence, no medical infrastructure, foreclosed futures for their children. The territory in which to construct a life outside state and corporate operators is shrinking, and what little remains is not romantic.<br>What’s worth attending to is that this shrinkage was not sudden, and AI did not start it. The legibility regime has been advancing across sectors at different speeds for decades, and the sectors that have been under it longest can tell us what comes next for the ones just entering it. Cultural production is one of those sectors, and what has happened there is a preview.<br>Historically, the avant-garde lived in territory that markets and states could not see: bohemias, backrooms, immigrant neighborhoods, queer undergrounds, the cheap rents of cities the financial system had given up on. These were uplands in Scott’s sense, and they were generative precisely because they were illegible. The institutional compact that emerged in the postwar...