Oatmeal - The Seed Beneath the Snow

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The Seed Beneath the Snow

Jimmy Miller wrote a lovely response to Sean Goedecke’s “Seeing like a Software Company,” which you know is itself riffing on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. I loved Jimmy’s response, and it felt to me like it walked right up to the edge of a different conclusion, but didn’t make it all of the way there. I want to directly point at and name the thing I see in Jimmy’s response:

Jimmy is making an anarchist argument.

Not the Hollywood kind. Not the broken windows kind. Random looting in the streets kind. The real one. The one carried by Yiddish-speaking garment workers in the Lower East Side, by Kropotkin cataloguing mutual aid from exile, by Emma Goldman insisting that revolution that doesn’t include joy isn’t worth having, and by Ursula K. Le Guin building an entire planet (well, moon) around the idea in The Dispossessed. The anarchism that’s about how people take care of each other when they’re failed by the official systems.

Here’s a version of the argument as I see it if you haven’t read the pieces: Scott argues that states impose “legibility” on complex systems, like neat rows of trees, standardized naming, legible taxation, and in doing so destroy the messy, illegible structures that made those systems work. Sean applies this framework to software companies. He lays out with a lot of coherent balance that legibility is a tradeoff: companies need it for enterprise deals and long-term planning, but they also depend on illegible work, like backchannels, favors, and tacit knowledge to actually function. Jimmy then takes Sean’s balanced view and pushes it slightly askew by arguing that legible processes aren’t just inefficient, they’re coercive. They don’t measure values; they replace them. The metric becomes the value. The thin rule kills the thick one.

And then Jimmy ends with this:

choose to truly care about something.

Push back. Be essential.

I love this. I also think it’s not taking the idea far enough.

Individual refusal is powerful and necessary but the anarchist tradition that I think Jimmy is channeling — whether he’d call it that or not — has more to say about what comes next after choosing to care. You can’t do this alone. Individual resistance without mutual aid is burnout with a backstory.

Sean describes these “permanent zones of unsanctioned illegibility” where the actual work happens like when someone on a team reaches out to someone else on another team and says “hey, can you make this one-line change for me?” No ticket. No planning process. One person helping another because they have a relationship and the work needs doing. Sean frames these as workarounds. Necessary but awkward and illegible.

But what if they’re not workarounds? What if they’re the actual thing?

Colin Ward spent a lot of his career arguing for this. A thing he claims is that anarchist society already exists everywhere, like “a seed beneath the snow.” The informal, self-organizing networks that people build to take care of each other aren’t a fallback for when institutions fail. They’re the primary social reality that all institutions are layered on top of.

Ward built on Kropotkin who argued for cooperation, and that cooperation isn’t naive idealism. Instead, it’s the mechanism on which complex communities survive. The old-growth forests that Scott writes about, the ones the German state replaced with legible monocultures? Those forests worked because of the messy web of mutual dependence between species. The underbrush was load-bearing. The diversity was structural. Remove it for legibility and the whole thing becomes fragile.

Sean’s backchannels are underbrush.

A potentially less esoteric thing to ground this in is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

I think it is essential reading for anyone who recognized themselves in Jimmy’s piece, because it (kinda spoilers for The Dispossessed, here) suggests the understanding that this fight never ends. Anarres, the anarchist moon, doesn’t have laws. But it develops conventions, soft bureaucracies, social pressures that function like laws. The Division of Labor posting system isn’t formally coercive because you can refuse any assignment, but the social cost of refusal is expensive. People who are “willing to make lists” accumulate power. The revolution calcifies into process.

This is every software company that started with “we don’t have process, we just talk to each other” and ended up with SAFe Agile, and a quarterly OKR ceremony. Le Guin teaches us that legibility isn’t something imposed once by villains. It’s like a totally entropic force. It accretes. And the response isn’t to win once and declare victory. It’s permanent revolution. Not in the dramatic sense, but in the sense of continually choosing the thick over the thin, the contextual over the mechanical, the human relationship over the ticket.

And you can’t do that alone. That’s the whole point.

Which...