In episode 17 and episode 18, I discuss Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott puts a lot of the blame on people's love of formalized systems (and the closely related concept of "legibility"). Fair enough. But I recently read this bit of text from a New Yorker interview with Cory Doctorow (Note: don't follow link if you're prone to seizures from flashing lights - pretty irresponsible, New Yorker):

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So here's a question. As an XP person, my consulting leaned into saying people should for real try all of XP for a while before passing judgment. I think that was fairly common, back in the day. The Scrum approach was different in two ways. First, they were clever enough to realize they could get rich through the "certified Scrum Master" scam. I'm going to leave that aside. The other way is they didn't make teams do the hard technical stuff.

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