CONCEPT
False Compliance
The performance of adoption without its substance — Scott's term for the practice of satisfying the institutional demand while preserving the underlying work unchanged.
False compliance is the tactic through which subordinates produce the appearance of conformity while maintaining the practices the compliance was supposed to replace. Peasants required to plant new high-yielding rice varieties planted them in the visible paddies near the road while maintaining traditional varieties in the less accessible plots. Workers required to follow new procedures performed them for the observer and reverted when the observer left. The structural parallel in the AI workplace is precise: the engineer required to use AI coding assistants uses them for trivial tasks — boilerplate, documentation, unit tests — while reserving substantive architectural work for traditional methods. The usage metrics register adoption. The productivity dashboard shows AI-assisted output. The reality beneath the metrics is that the tool has been domesticated into a role that preserves the resister's professional identity rather than transforming it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
False compliance exploits the gap between what the metrics capture and what the work actually involves. Every measurement system creates a map of the territory