Silicon Valley values clarity. Your friendships and social connections became your follower count, your resume became a public profile, your diary became your Tumblr, and your interests became your data contrails across the Internet. Silicon Valley prides itself on capturing and then monetizing what was once dispersed and mysterious. It turns the illegible into the legible.
I hadn’t heard the term “illegible” (beyond as a descriptor of my handwriting) anywhere until I started hearing it everywhere. I heard it at dinners about how to build something great, I heard it in communities of young people trying to connect with others, and amongst artists who were trying to write or paint or sit at the potter’s wheel with a less judgmental mindset. The more I thought about the “illegible”, the more I became convinced that we are in the era of illegibility, Era of the Gardener instead of the Carpenter. It is not time to build, it’s time to garden. Illegibility is our new watchword.
The origins of the term come from James Scott’s brilliant book “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.” Scott is a professor at Yale who was deeply critical of the top-down social planning schemes done by entities such as the British Raj. “Centrally managed social plans misfire,” Scott argues, “when they impose visions that ignore complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully understood.” These complex interdependencies and the local, practical knowledge that top down social planners ignore is described as “illegible,” while the formal, epistemic knowledge is considered “legible.”
To illustrate the concept, he includes a parable of a German forest in the late eighteenth century. The German state, bent on maximizing productivity of the forest, only comprehended and incentivized these legible measures of tax revenues, lumber yield, and market value. This enforcement of legible measures had some meaningful benefits: visibility for the state, stability in planning, ease of harvesting, and revenue smoothing. It also developed into a forestry practice that was easy to teach, and German forestry practices were exported to India and other Asian nations as a result. Meanwhile, traditional wild forests with a diversity of trees and species were destroyed in favor of these German higher yielding and orderly groves. As you might guess, this short term optimization eventually leads to the forests’ downfall. Specialized pests wiped out these monoculture forests, woodpeckers who ate the pests didn’t have homes in new forests because dead trees were removed, the soil was depleted, water management was difficult, and so on. Decades later, these factors eventually became recognized: the Germans, in fact, began to lead the world in bird houses as a part of forestry management. But to the eighteenth century state, all of these ideas were illegible and not valued.
“Illegibility” means that the mechanism for value creation is not obvious. It is unclear how the inputs yield the relevant output, and in turn, some “irrelevant” outputs may be under-valued – the German forest yielded all kinds of byproducts (woodpeckers etc.) that the German state didn’t know how to evaluate. I now spot this phenomenon everywhere. As a tech employee, I see illegibility in the “glue work” that women often undertake to ensure people work in a cohesive group. I see illegibility in the homemade bollards in my San Francisco neighborhood that people use to designate “slow streets.” I see illegibility in the communities of people that help each other across the industry (some of them benign collectives, others more toxic “inner rings” of power that secretly help each other progress.)
A property of illegibility is that it often requires participating in the illegible system to understand its value. In the wild forest, an aerial survey of the forest would be insufficient to demonstrate why it is special. Instead, one must stroll through it. Another example is from an acquaintance who described how she came to love her neighborhood in Brooklyn. For the tourist, the ugliness of Brooklyn’s car-laden streets, pawn shops, fast food chains, and warehouses seem immediately unappealing – the only appeal is the lower cost of living relative to Manhattan. But for the local, the beauty is revealed. The person checking you out of the store might be your secret DJ neighbor. The ugly warehouse might be hosting an incredible art exhibit. The diversity increases serendipity.
I’ve come to realize that there’s an essential amount of illegibility in everything beautiful. I thought that to do something well you had to understand what you were doing and create it consciously. But in practice, hardly anyone understands what they’re doing completely and consciously. There are a lot of people doing something that truly works without completely understanding why it works. In the book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Kenneth Stanley says that, “we need to stop attempting to purposefully reach the objectives beyond the adjacent possible and explore things, ideas, projects, decisions more freely and open-endedly, guided only by the interestingness of these things, and respecting only the constraints of the physical reality.” We always think we’re carpenters, but we might just be gardeners. For example, in a great company culture, the founders never truly understand exactly what the mechanisms of the culture are or who the true “culture bearers” might be. There are natural growths and evolutions to the culture, there is collective authorship, and there is a fundamental sense of illegibility and mystery in understanding why it works.
Venkatesh Rao, in a 2011 essay on Ribbon Farm, used the word “illegible” to describe his own career – he is a nomad but also not quite a nomad, a blogger but also not quite one. He often describes his career as an “independent consultant,” which, for many people, sounds like he’s saying he’s unemployed. “For the legible, the choice is between gainful employment and lossy unemployment. For the illegible, the choice is between gainful unemployment and lossy employment,” he says. I empathize! I am illegible these days – I’m on sabbatical doing mysterious projects. Working Assumptions is similarly illegible – as one of my friends described to me, “I never know whether I’m going to get a dissection of startup operating practices, or an essay about growing up.” The illegibility helps me by letting me write about whatever I want to write about. If I stumble on something great, fantastic! I’m not limited by a specific goal, but just by the interestingness of any topic.
Illegibility allows early concepts to swirl as misty clouds. It allows you to focus on improving the idea itself, where deposition into solid legibility would draw energy away from making the idea itself better. I’ve often experienced the opposite of this phenomenon when I come up with a clean and simple pitch for a new idea instead of indicating an amorphous direction. The former sometimes seems too developed for feedback, or too “far gone” to take the direction needed to make it great. However, illegible ideas can still receive feedback in a way that allows for collective authorship. To use our company culture example, early company cultures would suffer if a 10 person team tried to codify their still-nascent practices as hardcore operating values and norms. However, that act of legibility might be incredibly powerful to a 1000 person organization where the true culture was given time to gently and collectively grow amidst illegibility.
For old ideas, the illegibility of the idea allows it to be flexible, solving different problems over time. Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion and an infinitely adaptable system greatly benefits from illegibility. In Hinduism, there is no obvious set of rules and laws. It has so many layers: the devotional layer of the religion rooted in folk tradition, the Vedic layer in the philosophy of the Vedas, the Upanishad-based layer emphasizing metaphor and intellect, the Yogic layer emphasizing introspection. You might think that Hinduism is the exception, but even the Abrahamic religions are illegible. There are four layers of reading the Torah: the literal reading, the allegorical reading, the metaphorical reading, and the hidden meaning. Religion must maintain this illegibility to adapt over hundreds of years and allow different types of believers to find something they need. It wouldn’t be possible without illegibility.
The rules of an illegible system are hard to communicate. It therefore makes it hard to fix. In the German forest, legibility makes things clear, and allows others to diagnose the system without having to participate in the system. From an aerial survey of the German orderly forest, one could conclude that the forest might need pesticides of a certain type in the north most region. For a complex and illegible system where the value is still questionable and the mechanism remains inscrutable, it’s hard to provide a diagnosis of issues. The wild forest, for example, could have any number of things wrong with it at any point. Its diversity makes it resilient to single failures, but it’s also harder to mend. And of course, as a person in an illegible stage of my work, it’s harder to receive help from my friends and family in furthering it (what even is it, anyways?) without, ahem, writing long weekly essays on obscure topics and asking them to follow along. I’m not even going to touch on the issue of illegibility as an excuse for not producing anything of value – this issue, widespread amongst the dreamy youth, is more of an issue of self-deception than it is a true drawback of illegibility.
The era of illegibility is now. While the past 20 years in Silicon Valley was an era of builders of legibility, the next era seems to be one of the illegible and mysterious. It is the era of the gardener over the carpenter. The past 20 years were about bringing the Internet from the illegible to the legible — search engines organized the world’s information, video streaming captured the world’s attention, and social apps categorized the world’s relationships. However, this has a cost. By taking everyone’s ephemeral and illegible data contrails and turning it into hard “intent to buy” monetized clicks, we made everything commercial. By creating “followers” and “likes”, we made online relationships transactional. We took the illegible art of building something successful — illegibility evidenced by the fact that “building greatness” is only taught through case studies and apprenticeships — and made a dimension of it highly legible. I am of course talking about B2B SaaS, which has become so playbook’ed that the SaaS companies pursuing magic (Figma, Notion, etc.) are the exception, not the norm. The legible B2B products produced by this playbook are crappy and fragile. They are the modern version of the German forest that is fragile to threats, overly simplified, and unrealistic. We see these companies dying off in droves as the funding environment collapses.
In its wake, this AI era prizes the illegible. LLMs are fundamentally illegible, as it is hard to tell exactly what input lead to the output. LLMs, unlike other models, aren’t grounded in “truth” so much as they are grounded in “taste,” an illegible black box with very unclear rules that vary across subcultures and groups. Due to divergent tastes and divergent skills, we’ll see an increasingly divergent, curated, and illegible set of products, with much more mysterious mechanisms for value creation. It reminds me of the nascent Internet, where the “hits” of the web (random cat videos on youtube? Limewire?) remained somewhat mysterious to their creators, too.
In this new era of illegibility, I think the most important role is the “legibility translator.” James C. Scott admits that legibility did bring the end of cholera, wide streets that allow traffic to flow, and the Green Revolution’s food abundance. However, the mistaken assumption is that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible. You need both legibility and illegibility. Legibility is surprisingly useful at attracting attention, resources, and specific outcomes. Increasing the legibility of a system makes it much easier to share or grow its benefits. When you have a new idea, it’s hard to stay forever illegible and still achieve success. Even nascent and illegible Christianity had to establish the Council of Nicea to bring some centralization and legibility to its belief. The Catholic Church wouldn’t be rich today without it! Legibility translators help figure out the right time and the right way to take the illegible into the legible — not too early, not too late.
Special thanks to Alex Komoroske, Maran Nelson, Molly Mielke, my Artist’s Way Group, and Ankit Ranjan.
Your train of thought here with regards to illegible vs eligible is very similar to the effectual vs causal thinking as an explanation for entrepreneurship.
Linking the version that was annotated by Vinod Khosla if you want to take a look:
https://effectuation.org/hubfs/Public%20Documents%20For%20Site/What_makes_entrepreneurs_entrepreneurial%20annotated%20by%20Khosla.pdf
Excellent essay, Tara - thank you for the inspiration!