"The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered"
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Panic has a habit of dressing up as professionalism. Thompson’s line nails a modern reflex: when the world feels ungovernable, “science” (standing in for technocratic rationality more than lab work) tightens its grip on clean, abstract models that promise control. The twist is that the tightening doesn’t just fail; it reproduces the very disorder it claims to tame. The sentence is built like a feedback loop, and that’s the point: control begets chaos, which demands more control, which begets more chaos.
The intent reads as a critique of late-20th-century systems thinking and managerial culture: a world of cybernetics, operations research, economic modeling, and institutional planning where complexity is treated as a problem to be optimized rather than a condition to be lived with. “Abstract systems of control” implies distance from the mess of actual bodies, communities, and ecosystems. When policy, technology, or expertise flattens lived reality into variables and dashboards, the unmodeled remainder doesn’t vanish; it reappears as side effects, backlash, black markets, ecological blowback, social distrust.
The subtext is also psychological. Abstraction is comfort: numbers don’t argue, models don’t grieve, flowcharts don’t riot. Thompson suggests that this comfort is purchased by making the system more brittle. Over-control strips resilience, invites perverse incentives, and amplifies shocks. In an era that still believes better data will save us from uncertainty, he’s warning that the hunger for total legibility is itself a generator of illegibility.
The intent reads as a critique of late-20th-century systems thinking and managerial culture: a world of cybernetics, operations research, economic modeling, and institutional planning where complexity is treated as a problem to be optimized rather than a condition to be lived with. “Abstract systems of control” implies distance from the mess of actual bodies, communities, and ecosystems. When policy, technology, or expertise flattens lived reality into variables and dashboards, the unmodeled remainder doesn’t vanish; it reappears as side effects, backlash, black markets, ecological blowback, social distrust.
The subtext is also psychological. Abstraction is comfort: numbers don’t argue, models don’t grieve, flowcharts don’t riot. Thompson suggests that this comfort is purchased by making the system more brittle. Over-control strips resilience, invites perverse incentives, and amplifies shocks. In an era that still believes better data will save us from uncertainty, he’s warning that the hunger for total legibility is itself a generator of illegibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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