Scott's book is about how bottom-up complex systems are destroyed and reconstructed as top-down centrally planned organized systems in order to become more "legible" for the destroyer (the state). The general theme is the state can't understand how certain traits of the system are actually adaptive because it views from the outside. These traits are seen as irrational, so the state destroys the system and rebuilds it in order to make it rational, and thus understandable and legible in order to optimize for extracting a resource of some sort. Legibility in this context is used almost pejoratively to say most beneficial elements have been destroyed to optimize for one parameter, often ineffectively in the long term. Scott Alexander has a pretty good review if you want a deeper dive into the book's examples of this process. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...