I think we should understand the meme version of Seeing Like a State et. al as a directional corrective. High modernism that totally ignores metis was bad in some ways and we backed off from it because of its excesses (e.g. scientific management is mostly dead), but ignoring the value of modernism would also give up the higher crop yields we now enjoy. The full version should be that it’s not either/or, but both/and, but it’s easy to see how that gets lost when a person just first realizes that we sometimes ignore metis too much.
I think we should understand the meme version of Seeing Like a State et. al as a directional corrective. High modernism that totally ignores metis was bad in some ways and we backed off from it because of its excesses (e.g. scientific management is mostly dead), but ignoring the value of modernism would also give up the higher crop yields we now enjoy. The full version should be that it’s not either/or, but both/and, but it’s easy to see how that gets lost when a person just first realizes that we sometimes ignore metis too much.