Anson Li

Paul-Émile Borduas, author of the manifesto Refus global (1948), used the term plastic reality for the material truth behind a painting:

The plastic reality, the only reality of the work, remains hidden under a mass of illusions: woman, chair, smile, dress, etc.; unknown, untouched, unseen either in detail or in totality. — Paul-Émile Borduas, "Qu'est-ce que l'automatisme?" in L'Autorité, 29 May 1954.

Borduas built a taxonomy to distinguish how different practices relate to this plastic layer. Mechanical automatism (dripping, folding) produces universal plastic qualities governed by physical laws, qualities that belong to the process and carry only generic traces of whoever initiated it. Psychic automatism, which he identified in the painting of Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy, works through remembered dreams and hallucinations arranged into imagery. Because memory is involved, Borduas wrote, attention drifts toward the depicted subject and away from the material surface. His own contribution, surrational automatism, is unpremeditated writing in plastic matter, where one shape calls up another with "complete moral independence" toward the result. He cited Isidore Ducasse (Lautréamont), author of Maldoror: form is inevitably linked to content. The hand adjusting to the resistance of charcoal on paper produces plastic content that belongs to one person's sensibility in one encounter with one material.

The painter's song is a vibration imprinted on matter by a human sensibility. Through it, matter is made to live. — Paul-Émile Borduas, in conversations with Maurice Gagnon

Francis Bacon's claim that knowledge is power was a description of a relationship, not an observation about epistemology: to know something is to be positioned over it. When a person becomes a behavioral profile, the profile does not passively record them but begins to act on them. Insurance rates, credit decisions, content recommendations, policing patterns: these are responses to what the data says the person is, which is fundamentally different from who the person actually is. That gap between the record and the self is constitutive, not a technical limitation to be eventually resolved.

Paul Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another, distinguishes between two modes of identity: idem and ipse. Idem is the identity of pattern and habit that persists through time, the regularity that makes a person predictable, systematic, legible. It is what a database is designed to capture. Ipse is something altogether different: the identity constituted by the capacity to make and keep promises, to say "I will" across an open future and act upon it. It cannot be stored, because it consists solely of an individual’s potential. Data captures a fragment of the idem identity and cannot touch ipse at all. By treating the idem fragment as an adequate representation of the person, the data apparatus locks itself into a fundamentally backward-facing understanding: who this person has been, with no structural place for who they might become.

James C. Scott further adds metis as local, embodied knowledge: insight that cannot be reduced to formal rules or captured because it is constituted by context and relationship. High-modernist legibility projects, from colonial land surveys to smart city dashboards, have characteristically destroyed metis not out of malice but out of the structural requirement that knowledge be transmissible and standardized.

We frame data as a resource: who owns it, who profits from it, how it should be regulated. Shoshana Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism, and she argues that human experience is claimed as raw material for behavioral prediction. Modern platforms no longer make money by selling products to users but by selling predictions about users to third parties. Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias extend this diagnosis beyond the market in their concept of data colonialism: "Data colonialism combines the old logics of colonialism, the appropriation of bodies and territories, and emerging practices of data relations." The value generated flows right out of the community in which it was produced.

Sometime around 2015, hundreds of technology companies began reorganizing themselves into Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds. The vocabulary came from a blog post about how Spotify had structured its engineering organization. The model was coherent, attractive, and provided enormous quantities of status to whoever introduced it. There was one problem: Spotify had already moved on from it. The company had found that the model didn't work for them. The blog post's author said this repeatedly, at conferences, in interviews, on the internet. It didn't matter: the language game had escaped its origin and was now self-sustaining, propagating through the industry on the strength of its own vocabulary rather than any demonstrated results.

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations introduced Sprachspiele to show that the meaning of a word is not some inner essence but simply its use within a particular social practice. Different games are not just different vocabularies for the same underlying reality — they constitute different realities. Drop a user into a SAFe PI Planning event and you have your lion who speaks but cannot be understood.

The language games of software development (Agile, Scrum, OKRs, "digital transformation,") have now subsumed value delivery as the reason of work. The game comes to feel like the thing itself, and this abstraction serves specific interests at the expense of the one party who is never in the room: the person the software is supposed to help.

The Agile Manifesto of 2001 was a genuinely game-changing document. Seventeen practitioners gathered at a ski resort and produced a text that redefined how people thought about software development. "Working software over comprehensive documentation." The thing they were rebelling against was waterfall project management, which had imported its vocabulary from manufacturing and applied it to knowledge work with the confidence of someone using a power drill to do surgery. The problem, as with all successful rebellions, was institutionalization. Within a decade, "Agile" had become a multi-billion dollar certification industry. SAFe was essentially Taylorist management reorganized into Agile vocabulary — PIs instead of quarters, ARTs instead of departments. Ron Jeffries, one of the Manifesto's original signatories, eventually published "Developers Should Abandon Agile." Dave Thomas declared "Agile is Dead" at a 2014 keynote. Neither intervention made much difference, because as Kuhn observed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shifts are generational. The game perpetuates itself through credentials, hiring patterns, and software tools.