tbyfield on Sun, 30 Dec 2018 19:31:08 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement


'Scaling' is a strange idea. It can be used to describe mom-and-pop efforts to grow some product line or whatever, but it has a more important usage that's much more ideological — as in VC efforts to identify potential unicorns. In that sense, it's invoked as though its meaning is self-evident and its force is inevitable, like a sort of abstract manifest destiny — which, of course, is exactly what it is. It doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, FWIW, just a disambiguation page that points to a bunch of detailed uses. When you unpack it a bit, it amounts to something a bit less sexy-sounding, like: 'deliberately designed to maximally exploit arbitrary resources as quickly as possible without regard for the consequences.' So, on a certain level, it's kissing cousins with the idea of conspiracy, mostly distinguished from that by its technocratic garb and avoidance of morality. I think that's worth noting, because instead of casting scaling as an intrinsic quality of some *thing*, the capacity to scale, it shifts our attention to the environment in which that scaling is said to take place. So, basically, it's the capacity to monopolize.

It's more complicated than that, of course. I've pieced together parts of a history of the idea, and it's pretty interesting. If the idea sounds heroic and inevitable, that's mostly compensation: it arose from conflict and it aims to stave off chaos. It's a very Apollonian idea, you could say. That's why it's so bad at beginnings ('deliberately designed to') and ends ('without regard for the consequences').

Cheers,
Ted

On 30 Dec 2018, at 12:09, Morlock Elloi wrote:

The problem is that this doesn't scale. Or at least the scaling model has not been discovered. At the same time, the opposition scales pretty well.

For this scaling to involve machines (computers, programs, networks and such, and I cannot imagine competitive scaling not involving machines - anyone?) another problem has to be solved, as the current crop of the available computing machinery is heavily biased towards individualistic outcomes. The redesign would be a major effort, as it definitely does not consist of another 'app'. It involves interventions at the infrastructure level, and there are $ trillions already invested in the current one, so it's hard.

How do you motivate open door crappers to lay own fiber, grow own silicon and use only P2P protocols with source routing? It's hard to even imagine this.
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