Modernism and the Metic Apocalypse
And how social media may help save us
Metis, as defined by James Scott in Seeing Like a State, is the “kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.” Samo Burja would term it tacit knowledge, a form of intellectual dark matter. To complete the Rumsfeld-ian formulation, metis makes up the “unknown knowns,” the holistic synthesis of internalized knowledge from a constrained or localized domain that allows for intuitive problem solving. When you see a gnarled old carpenter cutting precise joints without measuring, a cook glancing at a pizza in a wood-fired oven and knowing it’s finished, or a farmer knowing what day to begin planting their crop thanks to local animal and insect activity, that is metis.
It is this form of knowledge that dominates many of what we would term the trades, or traditionally artisanal forms of production. Things that exist in the physical world, and which cannot be easily abstracted. Many forms of craftsmanship can only be understood and replicated by the act of doing. No number of technical manuals could teach you Incan stonemasonry even if we had them, nor could you ever learn a martial art from description. Tragically, much of this tradition of knowledge has already been lost over the last few centuries, and the last hundred years in particular.
The privileging of techne, technical, legible knowledge that can be conferred by written word has been the case since the Gutenberg press. Modernism prizes straight lines, grid squares, and bureaucratic predictability. The consolidation of states, expansion of trade networks, public education, industrialization, and finally globalization have been an implacable force eroding the preservation and transferral of ambiguous metic knowledge in favor of legible, standardized, reproducible forms. Metis does not scale.
Not even those forms of knowledge always escape destruction in recent years. Quite famously, the American military forgot how to make a critical component to hydrogen bombs, and with the loss of the personnel who had done it in the first place they were forced to re-discover it. How many master carpenters, stonemasons, blacksmiths, weavers, calligraphers, leatherworkers, watch makers, glass blowers, book binders, hunters, ship builders, instrument makers, tailors and tanners and any number of other crafts have had their numbers collapse and their knowledge forever lost since industrialization? Some of these traditions had been reproduced unbroken since the birth of settled agriculture, only for many or most to go up in smoke in a single lifetime.
With the advent of globalization, we are in a race against time. While many metic traditions died an ignominious death in the west, they were preserved in other parts of the world that didn’t industrialize till much later. Globalism has exacted a bloody toll on traditional production processes, but we are luckily still within living memory of its adoption by much of the world. At a certain level of wealth, we begin to privilege the “inefficient,” artisanal, traditional forms of production. The conspicuous consumption of artisanal goods has been insufficient for many of them thus far in the west, but global scale and some new technologies may make up the difference.
Can we become rich enough, fast enough, for the preservation of metic traditions?
Have you watched anyone forge a knife on TikTok? Repair old electronics on youtube? Build a wood ash cement and fired brick hut, weave rugs, dye fabrics in indigo vats, the list goes on and on. The internet and social media in particular have become an avenue for the preservation and transferral of techniques that have been dying out with shocking rapidity. The ubiquity of high quality video and the monetization of social media platforms have provided mechanisms for the preservation of traditional techniques. People with nascent interests in these forms of production are not only able to be exposed to them without lucking into it by birth or apprenticeship, but there is a clear path to monetization which would otherwise dissuade people from pursuing otherwise niche interests. It’s much easier to justify your obscure, expensive hobby if you get half a million views on TikTok for each step of the process and get to sell it to enthusiastic viewers at the end.
It is too much to hope for the preservation of this body of knowledge by familial descent. Industrial capitalism has done its best to kill a thousand crafts, but the wealth it has conferred has perhaps given us our best chance to save them. Bespoke, artisanal goods, enthusiastically documented on social media, may be our last, best hope at saving humanity’s metic inheritance.