Scale (part 1?)
a more-than-six-paragraph blog post
I don’t expect to be posting daily for very long, but I do feel like I should drop some content quickly, so that visitors can see something of what I’m about. If you’re one of the kind few who’s subscribed early, and are wondering whether or not you want to see me in your inbox so often, don’t worry. My plan is to slow down to 1-2 posts a week at the most. For right now, though…
George Saunders and I are neighbors of a sort, albeit a very limited sort. I’ve never actually met him but he and I have technically been colleagues at Syracuse for years now, and we each teach writing in buildings that are right next to one another, so yeah, “neighbors.” It’s been enlightening to read Story Club, because I also think we share a lot of the same attitudes regarding writing. I was thinking about a line from a recent newsletter of his, which echoed something that he said on a recent interview with Ezra Klein:
“We go to a story to feel something, as we react to what is essentially a scale-model of the world.”
For me, this is a really nice, compact explanation of what a story does, and it captures something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time (and only recently begun to start articulating). My antennae are especially alert these days to mentions of scale. For all that I’m seeing a lot more people talking about it, scale hasn’t yet gotten the attention that it deserves.
It’s something that I wish I had been more attuned to when I wrote my book, all those years ago. One of the things that I did write about was how we tend to think of books (and media generally) as things, when I think it’s instructive to see them instead as interfaces. There are people who are willing to ask of a book or a story what it does, but I think that question feels a lot more comfortable when we begin from the premise that they are interfaces.
And one of the things that interfaces can do is to give us access to and train us to think at different scales. Lots of people have talked about what it does to our thought to be able to compose only in units of 280 characters, for example. For me, scale is one way to describe that effect; Twitter scales our language to a certain speed and space that makes some types of discourse difficult and incentivizes others. But that’s true of every interface, from haikus to superhero movies to
When I read Saunders’ comment, the first thing that popped into my head was Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious interview from a few months ago, where he explained
I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f*cked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
I remember a lot of folks clutching their pearls over this, but that wasn’t really my reaction, nor do I think it has anything to do with his subsequent downfall. Instead, I think that it’s a compelling window into an attitude that’s just so different (from mine). At its heart, it’s a statement about scale, and about how there are only certain scales worth thinking and acting at. As someone who’s about to drop into the 7th paragraph of this “blog post,” I find it both fascinating and sociopathic.
Without getting too deep into causality, the interfaces that have been ushered into our lives via the Internet have tampered with our ability to think across scales. Separating those scales isn’t always a good thing, but collapsing them entirely is proving to be pretty disastrous as well. Getting to the point where a body can say with a straight face that thinking at broader scales isn’t worth it? For me, that hints at a deep problem whose symptoms we’ve been encountering in recent years. (And that problem is something that I’m hoping to get at in my current project.)
I have a lot more to say, but there are other days. This won’t be the last time I talk about scale, I’m sure.