Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt

The issue with scale

This essay makes for a few steps toward a minor tech. We begin with a clarification of our understanding of what is and is not the issue with issues of scale.

We may understand scalability as referring to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense[2]. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘kinship’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’ and the very coordinates of its quiddity.

So did the transposition of football to New Guinea change the spirit of the game[3] and the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scramble its big-datafied sense-making[4]. So incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar potential[5]. The explosive misery secreted by cities can disgorge sprawling patchworks[6], blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[7], the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[8]. So monologic composure runs off into the worlds of its parts[9]. From this perspective, the so-called problem of so-called alternative organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’[10] rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure utopically[11] so much as in the institutionalised insensitivity to their becomings–as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’[12].

What scale-ability can and often must do, however–or so the story goes–is work hard to circumscribe awareness of and care for the effects of its own unravelling replication; what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ (ibid. 507) and inevitable incompleteness (ibid. 515) of scalar expansion. We may then grasp scale-ability as an operative fiction that ‘works through friction’ (Tsing 2005) via the often-ungrateful task of making a particular image–that of changeless change–operational in spite of itself. That would be the image of diffusionist modernity and techno-capital spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the world ‘like an oil slick’ (Geertz 2000). What such an image suppresses is not only the realities of colonial revolt–but the very blossoming into inconstancy and self-inconsistency of those passionate solidarities and identities that drove it (ibid.). Again,

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[1] Tsing 2012: 505

[2] These three things being not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider here Alfred Gell’s search for a definition of technology in the ‘pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever means’ (1988: 6)–allowing for incantation and manipulation through but also beyond what is afforded in technical objects and procedures themselves. A minor technology in this sense is also a disenchanted one.

[3] Read in Lévi-Strauss 1962 31

[4] Miller 2011

[5] Knox 2021

[6] Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 481-2

[7] El Baroni 2022

[8] Bennett 2010 96

[9] cf. Bakhtin 1984

[10] Gümüsay and Reinecke 2022 238

[11] Young-Hyman, Magne, & Kruse 2022

[12] Morton 2016: 5

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