D.L. White

A recurring theme in my work—across financial compliance, bankruptcy, and criminal justice—is that governance depends on legibility: the ability to classify, measure, and act.

Legibility sounds benign. It can be. But it isn’t neutral.

To make something administrable, you first have to make it countable. You have to sort messy reality into categories that can be recorded, compared, and processed. And because reality is messy, those categories always distort. They leave residue. They incentivize gaming. They generate “edge cases” that become entire industries.

This is why so many modern regimes expand even when their effectiveness is contested. The system doesn’t persist only because it works. It persists because it produces outputs that are legible to institutions: reports, flags, metrics, compliance artifacts, risk scores, audit trails. Those outputs become the basis for more policy, more enforcement, more funding, more staffing, more rules. The machine learns to justify itself in its own language.

In that sense, legibility is a kind of ratchet: each improvement in classification creates new frictions, new evasions, new error, new demands for refinement. The system grows by responding to problems it partly generates.

That dynamic—legibility as infrastructure, and as a driver of institutional persistence—shows up in money too. When monetary order scales, it does so through the same machinery: categories, accounts, enforcement, and the political struggle over what counts.