Metis, Capitalism, AI and the Human Experience
28 November 2025
Seeing Like a State 1 is a fantastic book. It is hard to put it in a genre but I read it in a public policy and a systems theory context. I remember two things; One, Le Corbusier’s architecture method and that Chandigarh was designed by him, Two, the concepts of metis and techne. A good summary from James Plunkett 2 -
Techne is technical, scientific, and formal knowledge. It describes methods, procedures, and rules that can be systematically learned and applied. It tends to be codified, explicit, formal, standardised, top-down, abstracted, generalised, and universally applicable.
Metis is practical, experiential, tacit knowledge. It’s the accumulated wisdom or knowhow that comes from practice or lived experience. It entails adaptability and the ability to respond intuitively in context. It tends to be local, situational, informal, decentralized.
I remember some vague examples about recipes and cooking, and I’ll attempt another. Cooking yields great examples into this framework because there are always well detailed recipes and yet most of us have the experience of failing at them.
For soft boiled eggs, boil for 6-8 minutes. This is techne. This has always worked for me. I suggested this to my mother and her eggs turned out raw. Because she does not wait for the water to boil before putting the eggs in and starting the timer. This is metis.
In my professional life, I am a technology worker. Put more bluntly, most of my job is writing code. Over the last couple of years, there’s been increasing interaction with AI and AI generated code. Even when we have a strong prior that AI would not be performant for a usecase, we like to spend time trying out the latest model. It is akin to the joy of watching a child grow and progressively become more intelligent. AI has been both useful and annoying depending on the complexity of the problem. But the human engineers that I work with have always produced better solutions. And whenever someone has pressed me on what I find better about the human’s solution, my instinctive response is to say that it has more metis. It is not a random human software engineer that is producing better output than AI. It is an engineer who is on my team, has much more context about the problem, and most importantly shares the long term vision and purpose of what we are doing. When I cook for myself, the goal is not to process food based on instructions. The goal is to eat, to go through the necessary experience of diet.
From Dave Guarino 3 -
The reliability of knowledge, it turns out, is endogenous to the reward system behind such knowledge generation.
Knowledge itself is an incomplete definition without a goal attached to it. There are facts, contexts and goals. After years of boiling eggs, my mother has not developed the metis to soft-boil eggs because she doesn’t want soft boiled eggs. She has not had them much. It is not an experience she actively seeks. Thus, it seems natural to me that knowledge imparted by actors who do not share the same goals as me will be less valuable to me.
AI generated code is techne, and prima facie there is nothing harmful about it. There is simply the depression of homogenity about it. AI can create a website or an app for your business, and they all look and function the same. That is almost the point too. Most people have similar requirements from technology. It is a repititive task, so you can get a machine to do it. This is a good thing. What is the fascination with creating something new? Isn’t the objective to just “solve problems”?
I hate these questions. Our cultural dialogue has a reductive view of the human experience where the purpose seems to be to keep the mind and body well functioning for the longest period possible. What does it mean for the mind to function well? Not going clinically insane? Being productive? What are we producing? For whom?
There is plenty of human activity which are not problems to be solved but rather experiences to be lived. When I cook for you or take you to my favourite restaurant, I want to share my experience of eating that food with you. I imagine that the passionate chef who opened the restaurant would want to share their experience with others. Art is an expression and an invitation for intimacy of thoughts. Perhaps this is why consumerism is evil. Because it invented marketing. The invitation is now a lie. Everyone just wants my money. And we are desperate for experience because experiences are now homogenous with solutions so if we don’t get to experience something, we now have a problem.
Plunkett’s blog has a footnote
** I’ve always thought Scott is responsible for one of the most throwaway lines of all time when he writes in Seeing Like a State: “Large scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogeneisation, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is”, before quickly getting back to his book-length critique of the state as an agent of homogeneisation. Surely yes, that point about capitalism is very right and deserves more unpacking.
I agree with this. Consumerism is the method but capitalism is the ideology that leads to a justification of uniformity and simplification as a public good. But I don’t feel the rhythm of an ideological battle here. What private capital does today, the state did two centuries ago financed by private capital. The desire to wage war against chaos seems to be a defining attribute of our species. Rather, it seems a defining attribute of life.
All such phenomena and ideologies are analysed as incidents, or events but they are very much a continuum of order and chaos. The boundaries of an event, to study it, to analyse it, are constructed to frame knowledge that will help us achieve a goal. This is my interpreation of Scott claiming that there is no such thing as metis. The act of defining metis within a framework transforms it into techne. But it is possible to conceive that it exists, as the difference between actions, achieved goals and techne.
While I feel irritated by the imposition of technocratic statecraft upon my life, I am vaguely optimistic about discovering resistance against it. There shall be new science and new technologies ahead of their grips, there shall be new art more attractive than the leading brand insignia. I hope to find myself on the more interesting side of the human experience.