In the grand, top-down plans of modern management, the American factory has been reduced to a legible object. No longer the messy, organic entity that grew over generations, accumulating the tacit knowledge of its workers and the physical patina of time. No, the factory, like a peasant village subjected to a cadastral survey, is now a series of neatly bounded metrics, a flow chart on a sterile whiteboard.

No longer a complex ecosystem of experience and tradition, it is now a legible object, a series of neatly ordered metrics on a spreadsheet. These executives, with their reductive gaze, see only the manipulable levers – cost centers to be trimmed, efficiencies to be extracted meticulously tracked and optimized. This, however, is a dangerous simplification.

These legible factories, their operations reduced to neat rows on spreadsheets, lose sight of the tacit knowledge, the invisible skills passed down through years of experience on the shop floor. This “metis,” as the Greeks might call it, cannot be captured in a quarterly report. It is the hidden transcript, the realm of the everyday worker, where problems are solved with ingenuity and improvisation, defying the sanitized plans drafted in sterile conference rooms.

Furthermore, the relentless focus on short-term financial gains leads to a neglect of the physical infrastructure. The factory, once a testament to human ingenuity, becomes a brittle shell. Deferred maintenance becomes the norm, as resources are channeled towards the manipulation of financial instruments rather than the upkeep of the very tools that generate wealth.

This is a recipe for disaster. The legible factory, a facade of perfect optimization, hides a growing fragility. A single, unforeseen event – a breakdown in a critical machine, a labor dispute, a shift in the market – can expose the hollowness beneath. The seemingly robust system, optimized for financial reports rather than the messy realities of production, can crumble with surprising swiftness.

Modern managers, in their quest for legibility, have created a system ripe for what Scott terms “high modernist disasters.” They have sacrificed the rich, often invisible, ecosystem of knowledge and infrastructure that sustains a truly functional factory in favor of a simplified, easily manipulated image. This brittleness, this lack of resilience, will come at a steep price when the next crisis inevitably arrives.

The intricate choreography of the factory floor, a ballet of experience and intuition, is reduced to a flow chart, devoid of the subtle adjustments and hidden resistances that keep the machinery humming– the feel of a bearing about to seize, the precise angle needed to coax a stubborn machine into operation – these are sacrificed on the altar of the quarterly report.

The infrastructure, once maintained through a constant process of tinkering and adaptation by those who used it daily,now crumbles unseen, its decay hidden by the sheen of manipulated numbers.

This is the folly of the “seen” – the attempt to render a messy, organic social system into a controllable, legible object. The factory, in its pre-modern form, thrived on its opacity. The imperfections, the workarounds, the unwritten rules – these were the very things that ensured its resilience. Now, with its legibility imposed, the factory becomes brittle, susceptible to unforeseen breakdowns, the hidden costs of a simplified vision.

The irony, of course, is that these breakdowns will not appear on the spreadsheets. They will manifest in the quiet grumbling of the workforce, the slow decay of infrastructure, the production line stuttering and seizing. The executives, lost in their world of legible metrics, will be caught unaware, their grand plans undone by the very illegibility they sought to erase.

The state planners, these modern-day high priests of the balance sheet, remain blissfully unaware of the hidden transcripts. They cannot see the knowing glances exchanged by grizzled veterans on the factory floor, the silent language that speaks of impending breakdowns and corners cut too thin. Theirs is a world of legible forms, a world blind to the inherent illegibility of any complex social order, a world that may, in its quest for perfect control, have unwittingly sown the seeds of its own downfall.