Everything is Everything Ep 115: Seeing Like a State
Sep 6, 2025
Explore the intriguing ideas from James C. Scott's 'Seeing Like a State' as the hosts connect his insights to contemporary thinking. They delve into state legibility and the dangers of high modernism, highlighting how bureaucracies can misinterpret societal complexities. The pitfalls of reductionist approaches in governance and forestry are also critiqued, advocating for localized knowledge and humility in policymaking. Personal anecdotes and historical examples bring these concepts to life, encouraging listeners to rethink the relationship between citizens and the state.
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Make The State Legible To Citizens
- Make government transparent to citizens rather than making citizens fully transparent to the state.
- Default to rapid deletion of state-collected data and require authorization to retain it longer.
Make Data Deletion The Default
- Default to immediate deletion of transactional state data and require explicit approval to retain it.
- Treat every non-deletion of data as an act that must be authorized by the people.
Value Of Local Tacit Knowledge (Metis)
- Metis is local, tacit, experiential knowledge that resists translation into manuals.
- Societies rely on metis for resilience, so top-down science often misses critical tacit details.
