Seeing the World Through Facebook’s Eyes

Why trying to perfectly manage a thing usually kills the thing

Modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization. — James C. Scott

A long time ago in Prussia, around the time of the Seven Years War, the king ordered the measurement of the forests.

Fiscal officials had become aware of an alarming shortage of wood, which meant fewer revenues, which meant fewer muskets and pikes and musketoons, which meant fewer victories against Austria, and France, and Russia.

The problem, as Prussian officials saw it, was that many of the old growth forests of beech, elm, oak, and spruce had been degraded by felling, and the kingdom’s methods of predicting new growth — basically, dividing the land into plots and expecting every plot to grow as quickly as the next — were inadequate.

And so, the task of precisely measuring the forests fell to an assortment of foresters and cameral scientists, including an inspector in Saxony named Johann Beckmann — a man we remember today for coining the term “technology.” Beckmann’s task was to forecast revenues by measuring the number and growth of a widely varying population of trees.