CONCEPT
High Modernism
James C. Scott's term for the ideology of centralized, rationalist planning — the assumption that complex human systems can be redesigned from above by administrators armed with technical knowledge. The ideological precursor to solutionism and the template for AI-era planning failures.
High modernism names the particular confidence — dominant in twentieth-century planning — that complex social, economic, and ecological systems could be comprehended, simplified, and redesigned through expert knowledge applied from above. Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998) documented the consistent failure of high-modernist projects: forestry schemes that destroyed forests, urban planning that destroyed cities, agricultural schemes that destroyed villages. The failures shared a common structure: the state could see only what its categories rendered legible, could act only on what it could see, and ignored or destroyed the practical local knowledge (mētis) that had sustained the systems before the expert intervention. The AI era is producing high-modernist schemes at unprecedented scale, with the same structural features and the same predicted outcomes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Scott's four conditions for high-modernist catastrophe — high-modernist ideology, an authoritarian state willing to act on it, a prostrate civil society unable to resist, and