Beautiful, and true. Appreciate your knack for distilling the uneasy (and also the hopeful) ideas that are floating just outside the consciousness of the culture and giving them life. It’s good work to be doing!
For years I’ve felt deeply the need for a more local and human life and I think we are beginning to find a way there as people. I agree with your point that this doesn’t mean Luddite refusal to adapt to the world…I believe you can be Local and Human online as well as in your town! The key is committing yourself, as my pastor often reminds us, to caring deeply about “the real people that are right here around us. Not the people we’re told about Out There. The ones we know.”
I think that the decentralizing forces of the new wave of web3 make it more feasible every moment for human-scale enterprises, art, and concerns to prevail. Maybe the Internet wasn’t really for us to speak to the whole world. Maybe it was so that we could find Our People, speak to and support them, and then one by one invite new people into the circle.
"The absurd arises from this confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world" - Camus
Man has always been afraid of what was way bigger than Him; the Church used it to build collossal buidings to instill fear and awe into the hearts of men; the vastness of the universe inspired Lovecraft to create his body of work; scale is not human. People feel happier in traditional cities (human-sized) and neutotic in sprawled-out vertical mega-cities; traditional architecture makes your soul resonate; contemporary architecture makes you feel nothing, except uneasiness.
We see it with art just the same: try appealing to everybody, you'll end up talking to no one. Every mass-cultural product must appeal to the lowest common denominator to be profitable, so you end up with a bland piece of content instead of art. A schizophrenic offspring with multiple personalities with no soul, incapable of choosing what it wants to be and what it wants to tell.
We are not conspiracy theorists here, but a case could be made about the will of our overlords to always "scale" everything and stretch everything the further they can; if community, localism and a sense of belonging are the keys to happiness, then taking us out of there and making sure we are - ourselves - as streched out as possible (from both a cultural and human perspective) is the key to making us feel alone, vulnerable and prone to buy whatever elixir they're selling to the very disease they themselves created. Like Camus said, it is only by making us feel more and more the vastness of the void that they can make us feel the need to consume and surrender.
I had a genuine laugh as you described the typical characteristics of the Silicon Valley/business exec elite.
There's something about your post that I had felt was missing and after some thought, I think what was bugging me comes down to the fact that 'Scale within humans can be natural.'
From your post, I got the impression (and I could be wrong here) that you were saying that scale is unnatural. I think this bugged me because scale often occurs naturally within human beings. If we look at characteristics that aren't normally distributed, such as creativity, we find that much like how the 9 richest people in the world hold the equivalent GDP of India, several people create all of the artwork that society consumes.
Now, this isn't a commentary on whether this is a good or a bad thing but rather that this is a natural thing, and I think that's something that I didn't really see in your post.
I think that the silicon valley ethos of scalability IS unnatural, but that it's also the scaled-up version of the natural scaling that occurs in human societies.
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.
Thank you for sharing yourself with others, and stirring my curiosities and contemplations. Your style and perspective strum cords that few reach within me. So often I find myself agreeing with your prose in a ways that acknowledge your gift putting words to hard-to-describe senses within my soul. The simple and yet profound assertion that "scale is inhuman" resonates. Keep going.
I think that current world events have brought a retreat to those local, homey things that bring comfort. My wife has been a cook and canner for years, but this year, canning supplies are near impossible to find. People are canning goods, doing crafts, focused on home because maybe they have to but then finding out there is comfort in smaller scale, more intensely focused life on what immediately surrounds us. Our worlds grew exponentially with the internet, but lately, the cycle seems to be seeking a return to smaller scale, as you put it. Those that feed power from a 'New World Order' will fight it, but the average person is already on a retreat back to the slower, smaller scale of a sustainable life. Excellent article as always, SIr.
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, and true. Appreciate your knack for distilling the uneasy (and also the hopeful) ideas that are floating just outside the consciousness of the culture and giving them life. It’s good work to be doing!
For years I’ve felt deeply the need for a more local and human life and I think we are beginning to find a way there as people. I agree with your point that this doesn’t mean Luddite refusal to adapt to the world…I believe you can be Local and Human online as well as in your town! The key is committing yourself, as my pastor often reminds us, to caring deeply about “the real people that are right here around us. Not the people we’re told about Out There. The ones we know.”
I think that the decentralizing forces of the new wave of web3 make it more feasible every moment for human-scale enterprises, art, and concerns to prevail. Maybe the Internet wasn’t really for us to speak to the whole world. Maybe it was so that we could find Our People, speak to and support them, and then one by one invite new people into the circle.
Ah, scale...
"The absurd arises from this confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world" - Camus
Man has always been afraid of what was way bigger than Him; the Church used it to build collossal buidings to instill fear and awe into the hearts of men; the vastness of the universe inspired Lovecraft to create his body of work; scale is not human. People feel happier in traditional cities (human-sized) and neutotic in sprawled-out vertical mega-cities; traditional architecture makes your soul resonate; contemporary architecture makes you feel nothing, except uneasiness.
We see it with art just the same: try appealing to everybody, you'll end up talking to no one. Every mass-cultural product must appeal to the lowest common denominator to be profitable, so you end up with a bland piece of content instead of art. A schizophrenic offspring with multiple personalities with no soul, incapable of choosing what it wants to be and what it wants to tell.
We are not conspiracy theorists here, but a case could be made about the will of our overlords to always "scale" everything and stretch everything the further they can; if community, localism and a sense of belonging are the keys to happiness, then taking us out of there and making sure we are - ourselves - as streched out as possible (from both a cultural and human perspective) is the key to making us feel alone, vulnerable and prone to buy whatever elixir they're selling to the very disease they themselves created. Like Camus said, it is only by making us feel more and more the vastness of the void that they can make us feel the need to consume and surrender.
But maybe I'm just ranting....
Hey Thomas, I loved this post.
I had a genuine laugh as you described the typical characteristics of the Silicon Valley/business exec elite.
There's something about your post that I had felt was missing and after some thought, I think what was bugging me comes down to the fact that 'Scale within humans can be natural.'
From your post, I got the impression (and I could be wrong here) that you were saying that scale is unnatural. I think this bugged me because scale often occurs naturally within human beings. If we look at characteristics that aren't normally distributed, such as creativity, we find that much like how the 9 richest people in the world hold the equivalent GDP of India, several people create all of the artwork that society consumes.
Now, this isn't a commentary on whether this is a good or a bad thing but rather that this is a natural thing, and I think that's something that I didn't really see in your post.
I think that the silicon valley ethos of scalability IS unnatural, but that it's also the scaled-up version of the natural scaling that occurs in human societies.
Thank you for the intriguing essay, regards.
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
Thank you for sharing yourself with others, and stirring my curiosities and contemplations. Your style and perspective strum cords that few reach within me. So often I find myself agreeing with your prose in a ways that acknowledge your gift putting words to hard-to-describe senses within my soul. The simple and yet profound assertion that "scale is inhuman" resonates. Keep going.
I think that current world events have brought a retreat to those local, homey things that bring comfort. My wife has been a cook and canner for years, but this year, canning supplies are near impossible to find. People are canning goods, doing crafts, focused on home because maybe they have to but then finding out there is comfort in smaller scale, more intensely focused life on what immediately surrounds us. Our worlds grew exponentially with the internet, but lately, the cycle seems to be seeking a return to smaller scale, as you put it. Those that feed power from a 'New World Order' will fight it, but the average person is already on a retreat back to the slower, smaller scale of a sustainable life. Excellent article as always, SIr.
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.