Seeing Like a Data Structure

This essay contends that technology, data structures, and AI have moved from amplifying human intent to shaping how society perceives and organizes reality, repeating the pitfalls of high-modernist efforts to impose legibility on complex, messy systems. Drawing on Scott, Mumford, and Chapman, it argues that rigid, optimization-driven institutions and algorithms fail to cope with real-world nebulosity, fueling fragility, mistrust, and manipulation. The authors advocate for "fluidity": designing sociotechnical tools and organizations that support contextual understanding, human-scale belonging, and flexible interaction with large systems—augmenting sense-making without reducing reality to brittle abstractions.