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 small 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 components and how they fit together (Tsing 2012: 505). Following from Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense[1]. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nation’ or ‘kinship’ or ‘office layout’ or ‘species’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. So the imbrications of digital media with native cosmologies scramble big-datafied sense-making (Miller 2011), the explosive misery secreted by cities can be made to disgorge sprawling patchworks (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 481-2), the world of earthworms and small agents subtend the grand recits of history (Bennett 2010 96) and the composition of monologic existence unravels in the worlds of its parts (cf. Bakhtin 1984). 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. From this perspective we may 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[2]. 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.).

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[1] 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.

[2] Or: an impervious unknowing of the riddling loop that is Morton’s ecological awareness in its ‘becoming accustomed to a strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’ (2016: 5). Scalability involves a good deal of numbness.