Living at Human Scale
Commonplace Newsletter #016
Writing begets writing, which is a part of the beauty of the practice. Every idea brings further ideas, every insight opens up further insights. The more you give the more you get.
A case in point- last week, while ostensibly discussing the limitations of pessimism (pessimism’s paradox is that it never works out for you like you hope it will) we touched upon the idea of circles of influence.
Later while reflecting upon this and answering comments, I realised that many of the themes that crop up in these weekly essays are concerned with questions of scale. The circles of influence idea is about keeping your orientation of the world at a human scale. I believe the human spirit craves this and that most cognitive dissonance and confusion comes from going against this principle. Yet so much of business and culture is oriented towards a quite different paradigm.
The Problem of Scale
As a rule I try to avoid those bestselling Silicon Valley championed non-fiction books that you find in the business/ self improvement section of the library. The ones with excitable endorsement from Wired magazine and the inevitable highly polished promotional podcast appearances whose content ends up being an anodyne yet strangely compelling melange of name-dropping, cod-Eastern philosophy, fad-diets, stone cold boardroom brinkmanship and the tacit approval of psychedelic drug use.
But their ideas are still such a part of the culture that they filter down to you regardless, no matter how fastidiously pristine and hermetically-sealed you try to keep your range of inputs.
And the main business ideology coming out of those Silicon Valley business books- beside the fairly sinister concept of ‘disruption’, which we may well tackle at a later date- is scale.
In short, the name of the game in computer world is to do everything to get in to a position where your app or business can scale up, where it can grow exponentially and gain significant market share. And to do this as quickly as possible. Facebook, Instagram and the like all moved from zero users to billions of users in a breathtakingly quick span of time because they are both scalable in nature and they were optimised for that goal rather than anything else.
See, It all comes back to the tyranny of numbers again. When you chase metrics and the uptick of a graph is all you care about then the other, less tangible and quantifiable aspects of life and the human experience inevitably fall by the wayside.
Beauty, ethics and relationships between service and customer all fall by the wayside when the name of the game is scale, scale, scale. They may be present to some degree but that is incidental rather than intentional. If aesthetics, decency or anything else are an impediment to further growth then they will be nixed without question and without regret. Make no mistake about it.
Now it doesn’t take a genius to see the potential pitfalls of this scale philosophy, if philosophy is quite the word I am searching for. The pitfalls are obvious because we are living through them as I type this sentence.
Scale is inhuman. I mean that in the most literal, objective and unhysterical reading of that word. What defines humanity exists at human scale. Ipso facto.
Beauty is aesthetics at human scale. Lunch hour conversations are discourse at human scale. Ethics are codes of conduct and ways of being that most effectively mitigate discord and bloodshed at the scale of the small tribes that we evolved from.
The fundamental things in life do not change size. Bedrooms have been the same size since the invention of the roof and the wall. Doors have been the same size, more of less, since the invention of the hinge.
The Golden Ratio of the Vetruvian Man and all such heuristics of proportion and size repeat naturally unless they are willingly and knowingly foregone in the name of an ultimately ideological abstraction like scale.
The Scale of The Problem
You will notice in the above section that we shifted fairly seamlessly from talking about scale as applied to technology and business to ideas of proportion as laid out in classical aesthetics. This is no accident.
The good things in life, with or without a capital G, are all artful. Truth is beauty and beauty truth as Keats once told us. If you are in doubt about the ultimate viability, veracity and endurance of a given thing it is not a bad rule of thumb to first assess its aesthetic elegance.
Do this and you will find that either small is beautiful or more specifically that there is a point that, from the beholder of beauties perspective, a further increase in size will only bring diminishing returns.
This is perhaps the process in play when people turn on their once-favourite band for selling out. Objectively, the music didn’t change all that much. But the scale of the bands reach did. Such complaints hold an undercurrent of hurt for good reason.
They are a reaction to a felt betrayal that the band have scaled up to the point that that one individual fan has now been rendered a mere drop in the ocean, a mere pedestrian viewed from the perspective of a Learjet near the top of its ascent.
The fan feels as if they no longer matter. And in truth they don’t. Scale doesn’t care for any one individual.
Scale is imbalanced. It is asymmetrical. If you are the beneficiary or scale- i.e. if you are the app-maker or the social media platform founder- the rewards are huge. You are a billionaire many times over. But if you are the victim of scale, so to speak, you life has become ever so slightly worse via the mildly alienating and disquieting experience of using that scaled up service that cares nothing for you.
(A more hyperbolic essayist than my self would point out that the 9 richest tech founders have more money that the poorest 25% of humanity, some nearly 2 billion souls, and cite the fact that their collective GDP makes them comparable to the country of India. This is both true and emblematic but it is somewhat to the side of the point I am trying to make)
That mild alienation becomes a more gnawing despair when everything you use is scaled up and impersonal and global in its reach and orientation. You end up living in a grey nowhereland, both temporally and spiritually indistinguishable from anywhere else. To recontextualise Gertrude Stein, there is no there there.
There is, you sometimes suspect, no there anywhere.
A Fractal Future
Talk of technology inextricably leads to talk of future predictions. The two phenomena go together like Benson and Hedges, at least if past issues of this newsletter are anything to go by.
So I’ll wrap this up with a bit of light prognosticating.
Scale, at least in its current manifestation, will be rebelled against. A craving for the aesthetic life will lead to a good fraction of the population abandoning the default of the global for things that are more local.
Fractal Localism is the term people use for this and it ties in to previous discussions we have had about analogue media in the digital age.
People who inadvertently scale up online by having a social media post go viral invariably lose their minds and soon drown in notification dopamine. The individual consciousness cannot personally handle scale. Show me a sane celebrity and I will show you someone who has been a recluse for a good long while.
People who intentionally scale up by ruthlessly pursuing fame and/or riches invariably lose a piece of their soul unless they take countermeasures by maintaining human scale relationships (close, equal, equitable relationships with people from before the success) and living with human scale possessions (keeping a low profile and not drowning in lavish materialism).
We know this. The events of 2020 make some aspects of scale- whistle-stop jet travel, huge music festivals, mass sporting events- seem strange indeed. Unnatural even. Which perhaps they always were.
From my vantage point I see that many things are reducing in scale. You might say they are splintering and eroding if you are a pessimist or that they are becoming decentralised and more localist if you are of a more optimistic disposition. I believe this trend will continue for a good while yet.
I would also not rule out the possibility that the big tech companies will be broken up on the grounds that they are unfair monopolies.
So this year has been one of reassessment. And I believe that the conclusions brought about by more time at home and less time among the rat race is that many people just want a comfortable place to live, good food, loved ones near by and some pleasant surrounding places to go for a walk.
In short, the things we used to have before scale ran amok.
The clock cannot be turned back. But I believe that the gifts of scale- namely the technology that is allowing you and I to talk to communicate here from all ends of the globe- can be harness towards more smaller scale and thus human ends.
And not only do I believe this can be done, but that it will be done.
Look beyond the scaled up mainstream culture and it is already being done.
You and I, in this very moment, are proof of that.
New subscriber, first time commenter - hi!
A very human thing to do is to assume a deep, intimate connection with a creator who puts into the world something that speaks to our soul. That connection doesn't automatically exist, though, and in fact the creator may have an entirely different engagement with that something. All artists know that once you put something into the world, you cease to control its meaning definitively; other people will bring their own interpretations and experiences to it, and make their own connections. Scaling up doesn't change this, it just brings it into sharper relief by changing our interpretation of the creator or the work. That disappointment or sense of loss the fan of the selling-out band isn't the fault of scaling up, though; it just makes it more likely. Keeping things human scale can make it more likely to have a more mature (for lack of better label) engagement with the piece and the creator, but it isn't a guard against it.
That said, I don't want you to think I disagree with you or your main point. I completely agree with it! I think the harm done is a human thing that will happen regardless of scale; scaled up harm has a multiplier effect, is all.
Beautiful post Tom, as always I find myself re-reading paragraphs purely because of how wonderfully you’ve strung the words together.
I was late to reading your last post, but thought it to be one of your best and most honest, and I have still kept up my streak of commenting on every post. Not for the sake of completion, but because I believe that every well thought out post deserves an equally careful response, and it forces me to engage with the post on a deeper level, and really try to grasp what’s being communicated.
With the amount of information we process on a day-to-day basis (my own occupation requiring hours at a screen poring through data and looking through reams of nonsense to find the gold), I believe we’ve all become skimmers.
An interesting point someone smarter than me made was about one of the rare upsides of our new technological addictions and diminished attention spans - we’ve become excellent at sifting through vast swathes of information.
Who would’ve thought there was an upside to all of the mindless scrolling?
Anyway, perhaps this is an unusual observation, but there’s something rather uniquely British about your writing style that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it stood out to me quite clearly in this post.
Maybe it’s all of the Wodehouse I’ve been reading but the inner monologue had an unmistakably foreign accent throughout.
“Beauty, ethics and relationships between service and customer all fall by the wayside when the name of the game is scale, scale, scale.”
Thankfully, as you’ve pointed out previously, this is changing. Business is personal.
“Scale is inhuman. I mean that in the most literal, objective and unhysterical reading of that word. What defines humanity exists at human scale. Ipso facto.“
“Beauty is aesthetics at human scale.” Highlighted without a comment to add, besides beautifully put.
“The good things in life, with or without a capital G, are all artful. Truth is beauty and beauty truth as Keats once told us. If you are in doubt about the ultimate viability, veracity and endurance of a given thing it is not a bad rule of thumb to first assess its aesthetic elegance.”
Agreed. I recently re-read Scruton on Beauty, may he rest in peace, and it’s been at the forefront of my mind since. Cultivating as much exposure to the beautiful and the aesthetic in day-to-day life, whether that be through nature, your home, and the ones you surround yourself with seems as worthwhile a goal as any. If anything, it can serve as a justification for buying the hardcover instead.
Brought to mind an old Wilde quote “The desire for beauty is merely a heightened form of the desire for life”.
"Do this and you will find that either small is beautiful or more specifically that there is a point that, from the beholder of beauties perspective, a further increase in size will only bring diminishing returns.”
Perhaps this speaks to the rising popularity of traditional architecture (WrathOfGnon on Twitter is a good example of this). The pendulum is swinging back in favour of small towns, and smaller, more human-centric roads and buildings. No cars allowed.
The next decade or so will prove interesting in that respect, as the trend of remote workers moving out of the major cities in America and toward smaller towns and cities, in more natural environments (Jackson Hole being a good example).
All of the unrest and violence has only accelerated that trend, and I don’t know if anyone truly believes that we’re all just going to go back to the office after all of this hasn’t been paying attention.
Now the pessimists believe that this will lead to mass outsourcing to cheaper talent in Eastern Europe and Asia, but having worked with a lot of that talent recently, I don’t see this being the case - people prefer to work with people who are similar to themselves. It’s not a question of race, but more a question of cultural differences, it just doesn’t work very well in practice.
It strikes me more as a query of shitting on ‘normies’, the battered middle class who just want to work a job, live somewhere pleasant and enjoy their life - why this arouses such hatred among some people is beyond me.
Fractal Localism may well be the term I had been searching for, thank you for showing it to me.
“Scale, at least in its current manifestation, will be rebelled against. A craving for the aesthetic life will lead to a good fraction of the population abandoning the default of the global for things that are more local. “ Agreed, as above.
“The clock cannot be turned back. But I believe that the gifts of scale- namely the technology that is allowing you and I to talk to communicate here from all ends of the globe- can be harness towards more smaller scale and thus human ends.
And not only do I believe this can be done, but that it will be done.
Look beyond the scaled up mainstream culture and it is already being done.
You and I, in this very moment, are proof of that.”
This is the message right here.
This is what I believe the future of technology will be - what it always should have been.
Adding to life, taking us to the next level, facilitating global conversation, exchanging of ideas, collaborations on great endeavours, solving important problems.
Call me an idealist if you like, but I’m extremely bullish on what's coming next.
Apologies for the mammoth comment here, credit goes to the quality of your writing.
Looking forward to the next one,
- Conor