Capitalist Brain

Whilst I was reading "The Future is Degrowth" I thought a lot about the urge so many people in the "tech world" have to "scale" everything - by which they mean to grow as fast as possible, ideally exponentially. There's a lot of this talk on Mastodon lately: as recently as this morning I saw someone pontificating that "the fediverse" should be "brought to all of humanity". Apart from the comical hubrus of such a statement, I don't see it as desirable in the slightest. The problem that sites like Twitter and Facebook have with what is referred to as "moderation" or "maintaining community standards" is that it is simply impossible to maintain any kind of "commmunity" of millions - let alone billions - of people. As Ian Bogost noted recently, "people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much."

The Age of Social Media is Ending

A really common example of why "scaling" is the wrong goal can be observed in many open source software projects. I've seen it happen in front of my eyes with Bookwyrm. Prior to November last year and the Twitpocalypse, Bookwyrm development was proceeding slowly but steadily, and bookwyrm.social was more or less stable. In the last four to five months, the code repo has exploded with a combination of feature requests, bug reports, and complaints specific to bookwyrm.social and it's degraded state. "Scaling" in this case has led to the (unpaid) lead developer being incredibly stressed, a bunmch of people having a bad experience with the software, and noticeable change in the tone within reported issues and how people lodge PRs.

The idea that every project, initiative or group should have a goal of infinite expansion is simply "in the air" in a capitalist society. It's bugged me for a while but I couldn't quite put my finger on exactly why so many of us seem to default to this behaviour. Certainly Emperors and Kings have always seemed to want to expand their borders and power endlessly, but the average person presumably didn't necessarily in pre-capitalist times. Then again, maybe it's more complicated than that. Capitalism itself came out of something, after all.

Anyway, yet again there's no real point to this note, except as a note of what I've been thinking about 😀