How Zamyatin's 'We' warned us about the modern state

Zamyatin paints the perfectly legible society where the system has all the information it needs to serve its purposes and, in doing so, to sustain the ciphers that were once people.

When people speak of dystopian fiction their eyes always turn to the two great 20th century British dystopias: ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’. This isn’t a bad thing because the two visions set out very distinct reasons for dystopia. For Orwell the terrible future was a consequence of totalitarianism, of government imposing controls on people, whereas for Huxley, the dystopia was willed by a populace seeking comfort and security, a world of drug induced happiness. There is, however, a third 20th century dystopia, one written by a Russian:

“I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?”

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote ‘We’ as a criticism of the utilitarian logic of Taylorism although, understandably the soviets quickly came to hate the book seeing it as an attack on central planning not of the time and motion study. The world Zamyatin paints is a world where everything is transparent, where privacy is forbidden, where people are quite literally ‘ciphers’, cogs in a carefully managed Fordist system. Zamyatin paints the perfectly legible society where the system has all the information it needs to serve its purposes and, in doing so, to sustain the ciphers that were once people. Zamyatin offers some hope of rejecting the state but then dashes it by having the main character telling us that the state will continue because it is founded on reason. And “reason should win”.

‘We’ is the logical end game of the state’s desire for citizens to be ‘legible’. Ian Leslie examines part of this question in a recent essay where he cites C, Thi Nguyen:

“Nguyen suggests we start with an inchoate, semi-articulated desire for something, like good health, or expertise, or a job we love, and then journey towards our own version of it through a process of trial and error. We try out different preferences, poses, ambitions, activities, getting feedback from experience along the way. If all goes well, we gradually adjust towards happiness and fulfilment, and away from unhappiness and boredom.”

But the problem, as Leslie observes, is that we become slaves to the metrics that measure whether we are moving towards our goal. The result is that our goals are no longer our goals but are a crude version of them crafted by an imperfect machine. This is not merely a curiosity, a side-effect of using technological aids, but a challenge to humanity. Leslie observes that organisations “increasingly assess employees on standardised measures which can be used in any department, office or country” thereby shifting Fordism into the realm of HR and echoing Zamyatin’s fearful world.

Writer and urbanist, Aaron Renn argues that people should resist this desire - from corporations and the state - for citizens to be legible. Renn draws on James C. Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ where Scott argues that “states seek to force "legibility" on their subjects by homogenizing them and creating standards that simplify pre-existing, natural, diverse social arrangements”. This is the same process that Nguyen describes, the ideal that Frederick Winslow Taylor set out in his ‘Principles of Scientific Management’, the thing that defines Zamyatin’s dystopia:

“What we are all looking for, however, is the readymade, competent man; the man whom some one else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom some one else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency.”

Our modern world is increasingly Taylorist in its outlook especially in how we understand the functions of government. When Zamyatin wrote that “(t)he only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom”, he presented an idea dear to the heart of every policeman, every bureaucrat and far too many politicians. Worse though, that familiar message, ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’, is widely and deeply believed to be a fundamental truism. Only people who want to do bad things are uncomfortable with their freedom being restricted or their privacy compromised in the interests of efficiency. But, when some of those metrics run counter to what we wish, our innocence is compromised. Renn talks about the men-only gathering observing that the few remaining places where there are still exclusively male spaces are stigmatised with the result that “becoming a member of it could be hazardous to your health, so to speak, if the media decided to make an issue of it”. The result isn’t the end of male spaces but that these spaces become informal - illegible. Here’s Renn:

“What I’ve seen developing organically in response to this is groups of men creating informal men’s retreats. These are not formally organized institutions or networks. Rather, they are friends or birds of a feather who get together for a “guy’s weekend” that is social, but critically also has some professional purpose such has having speakers giving talks on leadership or particular industries.

Because these groups are not incorporated, don’t have official membership lists, and may not even have a name, they are far less legible to society at large. It’s hard to tell men they can’t get together for a weekend with their buddies to drink beer and shoot guns, for example.

Informality - that is, having organizations that do not formally exist as either incorporated or unincorporated associations - is common in the developing world, where it is frequently seen as a barrier to economic development. However, adopting informality as a principal helps reduce legibility to people and entities that might not like you.”

Being legible is, for most of us, a convenience. That information held by utilities companies, insurers, banks, health service providers and, of course, the government enables the smooth use of technology to meet our needs, often at lower cost and more quickly than in the pre-digital world. The use of ‘Automated Number Plate Recognition’ (ANPR) systems is increasingly ubiquitous - it is used to run parking charge apps, to operate parking barriers automatically and much else, including of course fining us for being in the wrong part of the highway at the wrong time. It would be difficult to put this technology back in its box but we should also recognise that, as well as providing us with convenient services, ANPR provides greater legibility for government through the capacity to track our movements.

The same applies with photographs. Because we want to travel overseas, we happily apply for and receive a passport containing our photograph. We are pleased that facial recognition helps speed the process of going through passport control. Yet the state, seeing this piece of legibility, has (seemingly without asking our permission first) decided it will use the database of passport photographs “...to enable police to find a match with the “click of one button”. As before we see the convenience of this for us and especially for the police or border authorities, and you have nothing to hide, so nothing to fear.

Everywhere we look the state gathers more and more information. Much of this information is transactional rather than personal (akin to the data from bar codes that supermarkets  and fmcg companies use to improve their efficiency) but it also suffers from an obvious limit somewhat similar to the incomplete metrics that Leslie talks about in his article. We can gather lots of data on bus ridership, for example, but this only tells us about the people currently using the buses. It doesn’t tell us about the majority of the people travelling who aren’t using a bus. The result of this is that the public transport authority plans its services for people who are already users not to entice those who are not users.

One of the things that Zamyatin says repeatedly (in ‘We’ and in his other writings) is that we need heretics, people who reject the systems given them by the state and big corporations. “If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.” The state, and the large corporations that act as clients for the government, dislike heresy because it implies a rejection of received wisdom. And heretics need to be ‘illegible’ or else the state and its agents in wider society will shut those heretics up. We may not burn witches at the stake these days but we do actively seek to ‘cancel’ the non-conformist or at the very least confine them to sideline, low-status places.

The state also dislikes people who, as Renn describes, ‘decredentialise’ by replacing formal systems under state control with “informal networks of interpersonal trust”. These para-statal institutions are common in ethnic and religious communities in the west but are not unique to them. We can point to how sharia and beth din operate in Muslim and Jewish communities but there are other examples outside ethnic or religious groups where trust sits higher than it does in the formal systems of law. An example here would be the Showman’s Guild which operates its own systems of contract and agreements parallel to and complementary to the law of the land. Agreements are made with a handshake and the Guild protects its members in the enforcement of these agreements.

Zamyatin, like all writers of dystopia, posted a warning about the logic of scientific management and how that logic leads the state to demand ‘legibility’ from us in order to meet its objectives. And, in the manner of Huxley’s world, that state sells us contentment and security, the idea that ‘legibility’ makes your life easier. In accepting this sales pitch, we overlook that it means the state’s ideology takes control of the organisations and structures of wider society. Moreover this ideological control actively seeks out Zamyatin’s heretics so that they do not disturb the accepted order of things. The problem is not so much that individual legibility is a wholly bad thing but rather that those demanding it as a price of living in the developed world are not, in any recognisable sense, accountable. In ‘We’, the ‘Benefactor’ is nameless and faceless but is the person or entity that directs the programmes of the One State, which means all the programmes. The anonymity of the state is another feature of western society. We talk long and loudly about the people who we elect into governments but never that, so often, these people become mere pundits with seemingly little or no actual say over what is done or not done by the state.

While the warnings from Orwell and Huxley are important and powerful, the warning Zamyatin gave us in ‘We’ is just as important, perhaps more so. The crazed utilitarianism of Taylorism was Zamyatin’s target and he knew that scientific management was just another belief, like socialism and fascism, that with the right planning, organisation and training humankind can be perfected. And like those other beliefs, Taylorism is flawed and will fail because of heretics and because the things we measure and our measures are not good enough (and never will be) to create a process, programme and plan to perfect the world. Yet the Taylorist idea - described so beautifully by Ian Leslie - remains at the heart of the managerialist ideology of 21st century developed societies.

“Hard and fast numbers enable us to easily set goals, justify decisions, and communicate what we’ve done. But humans reach true fulfilment by way of doubt, error and confusion. We’re odd like that.”

And so it will be forever. We cannot perfect the human and because of this human systems can never be perfect. We should not trade contentment or safety for independence and liberty, not just because of the morality of such a trade but because the state can never deliver on that contentment and safety without, as Zamyatin said, ridding us of freedom - his great novel ‘We’ tells us what that loss of freedom might look like.