About Metaviews

Metaviews is an open-source intelligence agency: research, analysis, and public programming grounded in rural agricultural operations.

Founded and led by Jesse Hirsh, Metaviews connects long-range sensemaking to practical work.

We work across media production, intelligence briefing, agroecology, and public programming to help organizations, communities, and leaders see the bigger picture—and understand their place within it. Rather than treating these activities as separate lines of work, Metaviews operates as an integrated system where research, practice, and storytelling continuously inform one another.

The name Metaviews reflects our core method: stepping back far enough to see patterns, power dynamics, and second-order effects that are often missed in narrow or siloed analysis. Our work connects technology to politics, culture to infrastructure, food systems to media systems—because in practice, these domains are inseparable.

Metaviews emerged from early literacy work in Toronto focused on critical media understanding, and has evolved into a long-running body of analysis, publishing, and public dialogue. Today, that work extends into agroecology through the Academy of the Impossible, where farming functions as a living research environment, and into intelligence production that supports strategic foresight, risk awareness, and institutional learning.

Underlying everything we do is a shared assumption: environments teach. Media is not just content—it is the set of conditions that shape perception, agency, and possibility. Our role is to make those conditions visible, legible, and open to intervention.

Metaviews exists to help people see the present clearly enough to act within it—before it hardens into history.