Lately I’ve been thinking about “scale” and I have some questions.
- Can tech scale without VC backing?
- Is scale inherently problematic? Does it diffuse connection and lead us to behave in ways that are unnatural and possibly polarizing?
- Is scale mainly held as a good thing because it is a reverse wealth distribution scheme (taking money or labour from regular people and turning it into wealth for a few)?
- Can we build technologies that scale but actually encourage people not to? (Supporting clustering and “the splinternet” in service of building spaces where trust is possible)
- How is scale different if it’s open source and not owned by a corporation or a government?
- How can we scale things without applying a layer of dominance in some form or another?
- What has been the result of scale when the scale is not extractive (and do Wikipedia, Mozilla, Signal, or perhaps even services like Libby or Kanopy qualify as non-extractive)? Could these be models to emulate?
- Why isn’t there a definition of “scale” in Merriam-Webster that reflects this notion of expansion? Is scale just nonsense techspeak?
Some of the people I have talked to about trying to raise money to support a prosocial technology face the problem of wanting to build something that likely won’t scale, but also isn’t expensive to build and maintain- perhaps community support and platforms like Open Collective will make that kind of technology more feasible.
My goal is to build something that does scale, at least in the sense that I can’t imagine any reason why every adult or maybe even young person wouldn’t benefit from being part of a community oriented around connection, sensemaking, support, and transformation. Not just benefit from, but desperately need, though it’s also true that our current scaled tech mostly serves as a distraction from the feelings not having that need met provoke.
It’s an interesting conundrum, can we create the containers for community with enough scaffolding to support self-responsibility, prosocial interaction, but open enough for lots of different kinds of communities and lots of different sets of norms and values?
The Silicon Valley version of scale is “blitzscaling” – a term that inherently reflects violence. The purpose of this scale isn’t to be of service to more people, it’s to eliminate the possibility of competition. Where once you might think of a platform as being a welcome place for people to contribute and collaborate, it’s now more of a word to imply ever-expanding reach, “organizing the world’s information” and the like.
What does organic scaling in tech look like? Growth that isn’t juiced by dark patterns, unconcerned with privacy, and driven by unsustainable spending? Is there such a thing in a platform world? It seems like a lot of the things that are being touted as the future are just the wolf in ethically-sourced shearling. Fundamentally, the kind of scale I hope for comes from a kind of emergence, not a strategy.