Against Scale: Provocations and Resistances to Scale Thinking

tags

Scale

Notes

Scalability refers to the ability of a system to expand without having to change itself in substantive ways or rethinking its constitutive elements

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hand-in-hand with other macro-level processes of making modernity legible

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Whether people are aware of it or not, scale thinking is all-encompassing. It is not just an attribute of one’s product, service, or company, but frames how one thinks about the world (what constitutes it and how it can be observed and measured), its problems (what is a problem worth solving versus not), and the possible technological fixes for those problems.

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"A barbershop doesn’t scale,"

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the logics that drive scale thinking are antithetical to constructing solutions which can produce systemic, equity-driven social change

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If modern software companies are supposed to be "flat," then the work teams within them operate as standardized containers that take as input design and requirement documents, and output code, processes, and product. These organizations scale with the addition of more containerized work teams.

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Scalability is achieved when a system is able to expand without rethinking basic elements

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Scale thinking requires a sameness of user, or a user which falls within a tightly bound constraint of imagination

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Datafication, then, becomes the endpoint of scale thinking.

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data points only matter insofar as they accumulate and move through the world as a new form of capital

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building tools that are about organizing people to interact with neighbors

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Mutual aid networks, by their nature, are not intended to “scale”.

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Dean Spade defines mutual aid as: a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in gov- ernment but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.

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using technology to augment the relationships formed between volunteers and recipients.

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focused on easing and strengthening social connections between the people involved in doing the mutual aid: the volunteers, the donors, and the recipients.

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presume that the people and their relationships with one another will change, including their roles within the mutual aid network.

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expectation that the users of the mutual aid system are different and have different needs.

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technology that could help them identify differences between users, such as those who are elderly, immuno-compromised, living with children, or in need of immediate assistance.

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how to organize collaborative work in technological systems. Spade proposes four questions in assessing reforms and tactics which we use as our jump-off point: Does [the reform or tactic] provide material relief? Does it leave out an especially marginalized part of the affected group (e.g., people with criminal records, people without immigration status)? Does it legit- imize or expand a system we are trying to dismantle? Does it mobilize people, especially those most directly impacted, for ongoing struggle?

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Does the technological system centralize power (either through coordination, data extraction, or authority) or dis- tribute it between developers and users? Does the technological system treat the contributions and experiences of individuals as interchangeable or as uniquely essential? Lastly, does it open up avenues for participation, and are those avenues of participation mobilizing or demobilizing?

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