If the plans for villagization were so rational and scientific, why did they bring about such general ruin? The answer, I believe, is that such plans were not scientific or rational in any meaningful sense of those terms. What these planners carried in their mind's eye was a certain aesthetic, what one might call a visual codification of modern rural production and community life. Like a religious faith, this visual codification was almost impervious to criticism or disconfirming evidence. The belief in large farms, monocropping, "proper" villages, tractor-plowed fields, and collective or communal farming was an aesthetic conviction undergirded by a conviction that this was the way in which the world was headed-a teleology.

— Seeing Like a State - James Scott

• top-down planning of cities or whole countries never seems to work
  • reference: "A City is not a Tree" - Christopher Alexander
• the rigid tree-like structure of organisation, though it seems scientific, sometimes is just an aesthetic choice

• most designers of transclusions seem to be thinking about the aesthetic of the technology
  • "everything is a graph!"
  • "you can link to anything, at any level!"

    Arbitrary prose paragraphs aren't effectively usable in multiple places: good prose depends on arc, narrative, context. Text transclusion is almost always disjointed. I fear that most of the system designers who have been excited about this approach are in love with an idea about technology, rather than an idea about writing or communication.

    — Andy Matuschak - https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z7DvEiUpF6dYkFGbpZZTBKQVM9jjNnx8D8Xzu