CONCEPT
Legibility Trap
The institutional tendency to treat the legible representation as equivalent to the complex reality it describes — simplifying first to govern, then governing the simplification as though it were the thing itself.
The legibility trap operates in two movements. First, simplification: the complex reality is reduced to a set of categories that the governing authority can process. Second, inscription: the simplified categories are treated as the reality itself, and the complex reality they were derived from is forgotten, dismissed, or actively suppressed. The forest becomes a timber count. The city becomes a zoning map. The worker becomes a productivity metric. The AI interaction becomes a logged transcript. In each case, the simplification produces a representation that is useful for governance and catastrophically incomplete as a description of what is actually happening. Scott was careful to emphasize that legibility itself is not the problem. States and institutions need to see. The problem is legibility as a substitute for understanding — the map that replaces the territory, the metric that replaces the knowledge, the dashboard that replaces the judgment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Scott traced the legibility project through the cadastral map, which converted the customary
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