Scale and its Discontents
I’m sitting here in my writing group not sure about what to write today. I feel like I have several ideas, but none of them have quite progressed to the point where I’m ready to start putting words to them. As strongly as I believe in the idea that writing is thinking, I also possess a finely tuned sense of when that process is ready to begin. Usually it involves two or three stray thoughts (my own or others’) overlapping to the point where something new is ready to emerge. So I read a lot, and not always aimfully, alert to the potential overlaps. There are times where this will jump start my writing after a few minutes; sometimes it takes a few days.
And that’s part of why I’ve always been hesitant to plan my writing times as rigidly as a writing group requires. My writing tends to ebb and flow with the inspiration that I’m able to generate, and it’s difficult to plan that out reliably.
I was struck by something that I came across today (h/t Alan Jacobs) that I haven’t had time to plug into my inspiration machine: “Marc Andreessen is right—love doesn’t scale” by Mark Hurst. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll recognize scale as one of the keywords for my thoughts here. Hurst is responding to the “manifesto” that Andreessen published a few months ago—many people had many thoughts about it, so I won’t rehash them here.
The idea that “love doesn’t scale” is a throwaway line in Andreessen’s piece, functioning partly as an excuse for why the billionaires among us (and the parasites they host) shouldn’t care about the world around them, when there’s more money to be made. Hurst picks up this line and pursues its implications:
If Silicon Valley succeeds, many of us will soon experience life filtered through Zuck’s growth-at-any-cost psychosis, his ocular projectors beaming deceptions and manipulations into our retinas, spreading a thick layer of Zuck between us and everyone around us. Anything that scales will be left in. Anything that doesn’t scale will be left out. And love doesn’t scale.
There are a couple of different directions I want to go with this, neither of which involves digging deeper into the grim eventualities that Hurst (accurately, imo) identifies.
First, reading Hurst called to mind Robin Sloan’s old tap essay Fish, which is about liking and loving things on the internet. Back in 2012, Sloan wrote about how the infrastructure of the internet both encouraged and amplified the “like” in a way that echoes Byung-Chui Han’s discussion of the relentless “seriality” of being online:
While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention.
Feeds, timelines, scrolls—the net encourages us to move to the next thing (and to forget the last). Liking is the engine by which we find that next thing—it’s the lowest common denominator of engagement, one that feeds that seriality (and shallowness). In 2012, Sloan wrote that “love” might be symbolized by our willingness to return to something; Han describes this as “lingering,” but “the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible.”
I’ve noted the date on Sloan’s essay a couple of times, because in fact, the original app that he published was eventually obsoleted by the constant grind of system updates on the iPhone. He had to reconstruct the app (and the essay) based on the contributions of readers who had saved their copies. And one of the things that he writes in the updated version is that, some years later, we might argue that love isn’t just about returning to the things we feel strongly about, but about saving a copy.
There’s a sneaky profundity to this, although it may just be in my head. I think about how much of the culture industry has been shifted away from the material world in the past decade: books, magazines, newspapers, movies, music, television, and how even physical events are awash in people raising their phones to record them. It’s not just that our engagement with culture is so heavily mediated by a handful of tech companies—it’s that they have been working this from all sides. The shops and stores that were the primary mode of discovery for my generation have all but vanished (although Barnes and Noble’s comeback may be instructive), replaced by an algorithmic Filterworld1 that tells us what to read, watch, listen to next, and can provide it for a “low” monthly fee. Most importantly, though, most of these services don’t allow us to save a copy to which we might return, much less to linger with them in a fashion that doesn’t continue to feed the beast. Love may not scale, but the like sure does.
To engage with the world intensely (whether or not we describe it as love) takes time, and it’s no accident that Han contrasts the seriality of smartphones with the rituals that he sees disappearing2. The idea of appointment television has been replaced by DVRs and streaming, and even “public” networks have gotten into the enshittification business. Our reading time is far more often spent doomscrolling rather than page-turning. Even the massive, global popularity of Taylor Swift concerts feels more like the exception than the rule (do I need to mention the fact that the concert film was released before the tour itself even ended?). We still have music, tv, movies, books, but we’ve gradually lost the rituals that accompanied our culture, even those we construct personally. Once upon a time, I might have scanned my collection of DVDs to choose something to watch on a weekend afternoon; nowadays, I’m more likely to browse one of the multiple streaming apps on my iPad. My point isn’t that I can’t do the former (although, tbh, I don’t have anywhere to play a DVD right now in my house), but that our cultural infrastructure encourages us elsewhere. I’ll have more to say about this once I’ve read Chayka’s book, but if his recent appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast is anything to go by, our culture industries are specifically geared now to provide us with things to like rather than love.
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So that’s one direction. I also want to spend some time thinking about scale itself, but this has gotten long enough. So there’s probably a part 2 on its way. Stay tuned.
The term is Kyle Chayka’s, based on a book that’s just come out and is waiting here beside me to be read.
The quotes above come from Han’s book The Disappearance of Rituals.