How is Don Santo going to reverse the power of the Colonizers? How is it that the C.P. software converts the colonizers file in favor of the colonized? Or as Krista A. Thompson would ask, how are the objects that once denied the colonized its history be used now to produce its own history?[1] This is the question that Don Santo and I try to respond to with the use of copies of copies of incomplete copies. However, we recognize the irony behind our claims. This process of copying also operates under the same umbrella like the colonizers, because we borrow all our information and knowledge from the colonizers. The question is then, if we borrow everything from the colonizers, why are we so different? The answer is because we drain our energy to respond from a different source, the metis. For James C. Scott, the metis is a Greek term that comprehends all these sets of skills such as, intuition, common sense, folk wisdom, etc. [2] which pejoratively are labeled as informal knowledge by Bigger Software. The rejection of this informal knowledge is what Scott sees as the biggest problem of today. Any formalization or institutionalization of knowledge lacks the ability to solve the problems at a local level, because those local places where this informal knowledge governs are too complex and undecipherable for the formal or global knowledge to comprehend. “Metis resists simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply.”[3] Don Santo and the C.P. software fall into this category. They are part of the informal or local knowledge. In fact, they are the product of local knowledge, they rely on intuition to collect their sources from folk culture. They produce their work using local items as well. Everything is fabricated at a local level. Any element that is alien to them is absorbed and reconstructed according to their local terms. There is simply no jurisdiction from the global theory to there.
[2] Scott,
James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the
human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. 313.
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