Alt Binaries

First, a site announcement. Starting Monday, updates will move to a once a week schedule. On, you guessed it, Mondays.

There is a particular kind of intellectual death that happens when a thinker becomes useful. James C Scott, who died in the summer of 2024, spent about fifty years writing books that were essentially impossible to use, and then in his final decade he was discovered by basically every faction in the Anglosphere with an axe to grind, and everyone agreed he had said exactly what they already believed. The libertarians read Seeing Like A State and concluded that the lesson was: get rid of the state. The anarchists read it and concluded: I told you so. The conservatives read it and concluded that high modernism was a left-wing project. The leftists read it and concluded that high modernism was a capitalist project. Tech people on the West Coast read it and decided that legibility was about user interfaces. A surprising number of people in startup-adjacent industries used the word ‘legibility’ as a verb. The phrase ‘illegible to the state’ began to appear in pieces about everything from cryptocurrency to homeschooling to seed-oils to the Amish. And meanwhile Scott himself was pottering around in Connecticut on a small farm with some sheep, which, as far as I can tell, he genuinely loved.

I don’t think any of these readings are entirely wrong. I think Scott would have hated all of them. Possibly except the Amish because they had sheep.

The thing about Scott’s books is that they are incredibly seductive in a way that has very little to do with their actual arguments, and which is often mistaken for the arguments. He had a particular trick, which was to take some appalling bureaucratic atrocity—say, the forced villagisation programme in Tanzania, or the High Modernist disasters of Soviet collectivisation, or the planning of Brasilia—and to describe it as stupid in a very specific and identifiable way, rather than evil exactly. The state, he said, has to be able to see things to govern them. So it imposes grids and categories and standardised measures and hereditary surnames and cadastral maps, and in doing so it flattens the vast, lumpy, particular, organic knowledge that people on the ground actually have about how to live in a place. He called this kind of knowledge mētis, after the Greek word for cunning or practical wisdom, and he opposed it to techne, the abstract, schematised, rule-bound knowledge of the planner.

When you put it like that, of course, everyone is on the side of mētis. Nobody wants to be on the side of techne. Nobody reads Seeing Like A State and identifies with the planners. This is part of what makes the book so weirdly satisfying: it has villains, and the villains are identifiable, and they are recognisable, and—crucially—they are not you. The high modernists are bald, mid-century men in suits with terrible glasses, gesturing at scale models of cities that nobody will ever want to live in. They are Robert Moses, Le Corbusier, Lenin, Nyerere. You, the reader, are sitting at home with a cup of tea, perfectly aware that real life is messier and more textured than any plan can capture, perfectly aware that local knowledge matters, perfectly aware that things should be allowed to grow in their own crooked ways. Of course you are. Everyone is.

This is a mood, a very congenial mood, and almost everybody alive in 2026, regardless of politics, is having this mood pretty much constantly.

The other thing about Scott’s books, which is the part that almost nobody talks about, is that they read less as critiques of state power and more as critiques of a very specific historical moment in state power, namely the period roughly from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, when European states had acquired sufficient bureaucratic capacity to attempt the wholesale rationalisation of their populations, but had not yet figured out that this didn’t actually work. Scott was writing about the era of the great planned cities, the great agricultural collectivisations, the great forestry projects, the great everything. He was writing about a state that thought it could see, and could thereby rule. The thing he was diagnosing was, basically, a hangover from the Enlightenment.

That state has largely been replaced. We live with a different one now.

Walk into any modern bureaucratic encounter—a benefits office, a hospital admissions desk, a corporate HR portal, the website for renewing your car tax—and you will not find a state that is trying to see you. You will find a state that has given up on seeing you in any meaningful sense, and has instead built a series of forms, dropdowns, validation rules, and required fields that you must contort yourself to fit into. The form does not want to know who you are. The form wants to know whether you tick its boxes. If you do not tick its boxes, the form is not interested in finding out why; the form simply rejects you, and you are told to start again. Mētis still exists. People who work in these systems develop incredibly elaborate practical knowledge about how to game them. But the state itself has stopped pretending to be a planner. It is now just a sort of obstacle course.

I should say at this point that I have spent a slightly humiliating amount of time, in the last few years, trying to navigate the British DWP and HMRC websites on behalf of various relatives. There is no high modernism here. There is no plan. There is just a website that doesn’t work, and a phone line that puts you on hold for two hours, and at the end of it a person who is reading from a script that has been written by someone who has never met a citizen and who was probably also reading from a script. The whole thing isn’t even Kafkaesque, which is far too dignified a word for it. It is more like one of those office-park pranks where they fill someone’s cubicle with packing peanuts. It is nasty in a small, busy, distractible way. Nobody is in charge. Nobody could be in charge. That is the point.

This is not what Scott was warning us about, exactly. But you can see, if you squint, why people started reading him as if he were. Because the fundamental shape of the experience is the same: you, the lumpy and particular and irreducible person, are being processed by a machine that does not understand you. The difference is that Scott’s machine thought it understood you, and ours has stopped trying. Scott’s machine had ambitions; ours has metrics. Scott’s machine was scary; ours is annoying. The atrocity has been replaced by the inconvenience. From the perspective of the person being flattened, this might not feel like progress, but it really is, in the same sense that being mugged is progress over being murdered.

Now here is the thing that I think is actually important about Scott, which I almost never see anyone say. The mētis he loved—the thick, irreducible, practical, place-based knowledge—was never just nice. It was not just charming peasants doing charming peasant things. Mētis was, among other things, the practical knowledge required to perpetrate caste violence in rural India, conduct lynchings in the American South, run a Sicilian protection racket, hide the corpse, sell the daughter, beat the wife, exclude the foreigner, and pass the boundary stone down to your eldest son so that the second son inherits nothing. Mētis is brilliant. Mētis is also, very often, what we mean when we say something darker. It is what people know how to do without writing it down, which is not always something we want them to keep knowing.

Scott understood this perfectly well. There are passages in his books, especially the later ones, where you can see him circling the point and not quite landing. The Art of Not Being Governed, for example, is a marvellous book about the highland peoples of Southeast Asia and the strategies they developed to remain illegible to the lowland states that wanted to tax them. It is also, if you read it slightly against the grain, a book about how a great deal of those strategies involved slavery, raiding, and the extraction of wealth from even more marginal peoples than themselves. Scott does mention this. He does not really know what to do with it.

What he wanted, I think—and this is a guess, but I think it is a guess that fits the shape of his writing—was for the world to be more local. He wanted decisions to be made by the people who would have to live with them, in places small enough that the person making the decision and the person living with it would, at minimum, sometimes pass each other on the street. He had a name for this; he called it ‘anarchism,’ and he wrote a book about it, in which he very politely declined to actually argue for any of the political positions usually associated with that word. He just liked the vibe.

You can see why this is appealing. You can also see why it is not really an answer to anything. The person who has to share a small place with the person making the decisions is also the person whose abusive uncle is the village elder, and who can’t move because she has no money, and who is therefore stuck with her uncle’s idea of justice for the rest of her life. The state has flattened her, yes. The state has also, in some places and at some times, been her only escape from people who knew her too well.

The trouble with state legibility is that it cuts in both directions. The same census that lets the state conscript you also lets the state count you when you are missing. The same surname that pins you in place also gives you something to put on a passport when you flee. The same map that lets the planner see your village also lets you find a doctor in the next town who has never met your family. Mētis is what you fall back on when the state has failed you; it is also what you escape from when the state finally arrives. The mistake is to imagine that there is a clean answer to the question of which one is good and which is bad. The answer depends, in a quite specific way, on whether you are the one being seen, or the one doing the seeing, and whether the people who know you intimately would help you or hurt you if you needed help.

Scott’s actual contribution, I think, is the angle of vision rather than the argument. The argument is bad, in the sense that it does not really survive contact with concrete cases. The angle of vision is something you can keep using long after you have stopped agreeing with him. He taught a couple of generations of people to look at any given administrative arrangement and ask: what is the shape of the simplification? What was thrown out? What had to be ignored, in order for this scheme to work? Whose knowledge does not appear in the file?

Those are excellent questions. They are excellent questions even when, as is often the case, the honest answer is something like: ‘the knowledge that does not appear in the file is the local elder’s knowledge of which families are owed which historical favours, and which young women are available for which transactional uses, and which boy can be safely beaten this week without consequences.’ That knowledge is real. It is mētis. It is also exactly the thing the state was supposed to be replacing. Sometimes the state is bad at this and produces Brasilia. Sometimes the state is good at this and produces, oh, public schools, or the eradication of polio, or the welfare reforms of the 1940s.

When I read Scott now I feel very fondly toward him, and very irritated with the people who use him. The fondness is because he was, by all accounts, a deeply kind person who loved his sheep and his students and the actual living villages he had lived in, and who was suspicious in his bones of any abstract scheme that would tidy these things away. The irritation is because the people who have made him their guru have almost universally taken his suspicion of grand schemes and used it to license their own grand scheme, which is usually some variation on: we should have less of whatever I dislike, and more of whatever I like, and the reason is that my preferences are local and yours are top-down.

Everyone thinks they are mētis. Everyone thinks the other guy is techne. The libertarian thinks markets are mētis and the welfare state is techne; the welfare-statist thinks neighbourhoods are mētis and the market is techne; the village patriarch thinks his patriarchy is mētis and the woman trying to leave him is being seduced by the abstract feminism of distant elites; the woman trying to leave thinks her flight is mētis and her uncle’s authority is the imposed schema of an oppressive system. None of them are wrong, exactly. They are just all making the same move, and the move is the move Scott taught them to make, and the move does not actually decide between any of them.

I think this is why his books read so well. They give you a stance, when you came for an answer. The stance is: I, the reader, am on the side of life, complexity, particularity, and the human; the bad people, whoever they are, are on the side of grids, plans, abstractions, and the inhuman. This is a stance that is available to everybody, and which costs nothing, and which can be deployed against anyone you happen to dislike. It is the perfect mood for a century in which most people no longer believe in any specific political programme, but very much still want to feel that they are on the right side of history.

Scott’s funeral was held, I’m told, on his farm in Durham, Connecticut. The sheep were —

∴

Stop.

The above is wrong. Not in the sentence-by-sentence sense — most of the sentences are fine, some of them are even useful — but wrong the way a portrait is wrong when you sketch it with the nose where the eyes should be. The proportions are off. You can keep adding detail and the face will keep being wrong, because you started from the wrong armature. So we throw away the hand and start again, from two circles.

Circle one. There is a thing called the state, and a thing called the people, and the state tries to see the people, and fails, and the failure produces atrocities or inconveniences depending on which century it is.

Circle two. Both of those words — state and people — are containers that turn into other containers when you look inside them, and the relationship between any one container and the next one out is exactly the relationship Scott described between the state and the village. That relationship happens at every scale. There is no point on the line between the individual human being and the US Constitution[1] where the relationship stops repeating. The argument above treats Scott’s diagnosis as if it picks out a particular pair of objects — bad planner up there, lumpy human down here — when in fact what it picks out is a position, and the position is occupied, simultaneously and at every level, by everyone.

This is the thing that makes the existing readings of him shallow more than wrong. They take Scott’s frame and apply it once: bad planner, lumpy human, end of analysis. They miss that the same frame applies again as soon as you focus the lens, and again, and again, and that the lumpy human at one focal length is the planner at the next.

Take a city. A mid-sized American one will do — pick whichever one you like, the argument doesn’t depend on the choice. The mayor of that city, when she talks to her state government and her federal government, sounds exactly like one of Scott’s villagers. The federal tax code does not understand our housing market. The state’s school-funding formula does not understand our demographics. The transit authority’s standardised cost-per-rider model does not understand our geography, our weather, our actual riders. We have local knowledge. We have textures. We have a hundred and fifty years of specific arrangements that look stupid on a spreadsheet and work in real life. Stop trying to standardise us. Stop applying your one-size-fits-all schemes. We are mētis; you are techne; please go away.

All of which is true. And then the same mayor turns around, faces inward, and looks at her own city, and the city is now made up of neighbourhoods, and the neighbourhoods are objects to be zoned and policed and re-zoned and re-policed, and the standardised parking-minimum formula she applies to all of them does not understand any of them, and the housing inspector’s checklist that the building must pass does not understand the building, and the police precinct boundaries cut across the actual social geography in ways that everyone who lives there could explain in five minutes. From the federal perspective the city was a village. From the city’s own perspective the neighbourhood is a village. The mayor is mētis to one party and techne to another, simultaneously, in the same morning’s meetings.

And it does not stop there. The neighbourhood does it to the household. The household does it to its members. There is no level of zoom at which one role replaces the other. The roles are produced by the relation; the object has nothing to do with it.

This is what is missing from the standard reading. The standard reading gives you a hero — the particular, the local, the irreducible — and a villain — the planner, the abstracter, the reducer.[2] But there is no level at which the hero is not also the villain of the level below, and the villain not also the hero of the level above. The relation is fractal. Mētis and techne are two names for the same thing seen from above and from below.

You can make this concrete. Take the most charitable possible version of the local: a five-person elementary school class with a teacher who actually likes children. Surely here, if anywhere, we are at the bottom; surely here we are out of the planning game and into the irreducible human. The class is small enough that the teacher knows each child’s name, parents, allergies, reading level, and home situation. The teacher does not impose a standardised curriculum; she adapts. She is mētis personified.

She also has, whether she will admit it or not, a pattern. A picture in her head of what an attentive child looks like, what a bright child looks like, what a struggling child looks like, what a difficult child looks like. The picture was assembled out of the previous fifteen years of her teaching, and out of her own childhood, and out of what her training college told her, and out of a hundred small comparisons she has made between this child and others she has taught. The picture is not a state-issued schema, but it is a schema. And the child who does not fit the picture — the child whose attentiveness does not look like attentiveness, whose brightness does not look like brightness — is not seen, because what the teacher is seeing is the picture all the way down. The teacher is doing exactly the thing Scott accused the colonial cadastral surveyor of doing. She is doing it with infinitely more love and infinitely less paperwork. She is still doing it. The unrecognised child is the unfiled village.

And the parents, when the teacher tells them that something is wrong, often agree, because their picture of their own child has the same gap in the same place. Or they disagree, because their picture is different, and the disagreement is a clash between two schemas, neither of which is the child. The child is, at most, the friction the schemas produce against each other. There is no one in the room who is not planning. There is no one in the room who is not flattening. The flattening is gentler than the cadastral survey, because the n is five and not five hundred thousand, but the operation is the same operation. The operation repeats all the way down. There is no floor.

This is the part Scott did not want to say, although he came close. He came close in his treatment of mētis-as-also-darkness — the village that knows perfectly well how to be cruel to its own — but he framed it as a regrettable downside of an otherwise good thing. The fractal framing makes it harder. There is no good thing. There is only a structural relation that repeats, and which produces, at every scale, the same conjunction of warmth and exclusion, of accommodation and erasure. The state planner who does not see the village is the village elder who does not see the heretic is the family that does not see the autistic son is the self that does not see the part of itself that is sad on a Wednesday afternoon for no reason it can name.

A coherent politics does not come out of this. There is no programme that you can get out of “the relation repeats.” Anyone who tries to derive one is sneaking in a stopping rule — a level at which they say, and here we draw the line, here is where the planning becomes legitimate, here is where the seen become the seers — and the stopping rule is doing all the actual work. Scott’s readers all sneak in their stopping rules at different levels. The libertarian draws the line at the household; the welfare-statist draws it at the nation; the anarchist draws it at the affinity group; the village patriarch draws it at the village. They are all answering the same question, which is “at what scale does the relation become acceptable to me,” and they are all pretending that the answer is descriptive rather than normative.

What does come out of it is something smaller and harder. Every time you find yourself complaining that you have been flattened by a system that does not see you, you should ask, in the same breath, who you are flattening. The answer will always be someone, at least one person and usually several. They will be people whose mētis you are treating as friction in your own techne, whose particularity is the cost you are paying, slightly absent-mindedly, for whatever schema you currently inhabit. This is the position you occupy. You cannot get out of it by moving down a level, because the position is the same on every level. You can only know that you are in it. Knowing that you are in it does not absolve you. It just makes it slightly less likely that you will write the kind of essay in which you, the reader, are nodding along with Scott against the planners, while at home there is someone in your life who has stopped trying to explain something to you because they have noticed, over years, that the explanation never makes it into your file.

[1] For what is our Constitution, but a techne above our government?

[2] And there are times the techne from level n+2 is meant to prevent level n+1 from preventing the metis at level n, like a state banning mandatory parking minimums from the zoning level.