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

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

'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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