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No. 67 • 4/29/2022
Essay read time: ? min

The Fallacy of a Value Based on Scalability

You see and hear it all the time. "You're not leftist enough if you don't apply your activism in every scenario and at every level of your life." "If every time you go to have sex, you and your partner(s) don't acknowledge the stolen land upon which you're about to do the dirty, then you haven't decolonized the bedroom." (By the way, it's Lenape land AKA "The People's Land"). You know it when you see it, and it's lame.

But, it ain't just the SJWs who've made such a mess of online discourse. This "if it doesn't function everywhere, it doesn't function anywhere" mentality shows up in any situation where a particular idea, political viewpoint, artistic technique, method of handling information, or workflow is valued based on its potential scalability. And, that's just not cool. 

Scalability refers to how well something can grow, how well it can be applied in multiple contexts. In economics, scalability typically refers to whether or not a business can grow when provided with added resources. If you take in more money and use that money to expand your network and access to the materials needed to make your products, can you actually meet the challenge and sell more? Not every business can. And, those businesses that can't are considered to be non-scalable.

The problem I see in "scalability" is when it shows up in social situations. As scenes as diverse as spirituality, knowledge work, and art become more mainstream and accessible—and as more capitalist-forward business grads take ayahuasca—we're seeing, not a shift in business, but a shift in what businesses are coopting. This shows up in the normalization of spiritual materialism ("What can spirituality do for me?"), productivity talking heads infiltrating knowledge work ("Turn your notes into dollar bills!"), and in NFTs, the capitalist "Scale it!" mindset parading as an art movement raging on fifty hits of Yellow Jacket trucker speed.

Needles to say, I've been thinking a lot about scalability this week. So, that's what we're looking at.

📦

Eufriction and You

Last week I talked about "friction"—pain points felt when a digital platform requires too many clicks to complete a task, or when two or more apps don't speak to one another. Of course, there is nothing inherently bad about friction. Inconveniences can disrupt our flow or slow us down just enough to feel something worth feeling. The latter I call "eufriction." Friction that is good for the soul.

This week, I got a response from a reader not involved in the pkm/productivity scene, but who gets the positives of having just the right amount of friction in one's life. The beauty in actively not scaling:

"Loved this read! It's nice to have friction in my vocabulary, now. I think I've just called it inconvenience and I like to collect inconveniences to create a barrier between myself and the temptations of the online world. For example, the inconvenience of T9 means I'm not sucked into texting. And the fact that I don't have the internet in my pocket means there's a barrier between me and getting online whenever I want. That I don't have GPS means I have become really acquainted with every part of my town and I can find my way around Austin by memory. Also, having to pull over at a gas station to ask for directions reminds me that I am not self-sufficient and I need others. All these things feel like eufriction... am I using that right?" (emphasis mine)

I love how The High Pony brings together readers from so many different backgrounds and interests who can find commonality in the themes of what's discussed here. Yes, dear reader. That is exactly what eufriction is. It's the wisdom and intimacy that comes with not having a fully automated existence. 

Feelings I Have About My Flirtation with Twitter

This week I decided to try out Twitter. I'm of many minds. Here's some of them:
  1. I'm tired of making decisions based on the whims billionaires. This week was a perfect example of that. Elon in. Elon out. Elon maybe. Elon has something to say about Coca-Cola. I'm done with it. Where I put myself online isn't the problem. I'm a good person. I treat people fairly. Where billionaires put themselves. That's the problem.
  2. I need a place to get things up and out of my body-mind, and the people I want to be in conversation with are on Twitter.
  3. Once again I'm noticing how social media platforms pull me into the habit of scaling myself based on the descaling others. Contrarianism. It's annoying. 
  4. I keep reminding myself to balance "no-content" with "yes-content." "No-content" is content rooted in being against something. It's saying "no" without providing a "yes." A rant on social media that does not offer a way out is no-content. I'm trying to temper all my no's with a healthy amount of yes's and social media, the very design and nature of the platforms, make that counterintutitive.
  5. In the past, I've tried to get down with Mastadon, a decentralized, open source take on Twitter. But, it always ends up feeling like a non-starter due to its inability to connect users who are, by design, siloed on separate servers. Though, I'm hopeful and will keep trying. Apparently, after news got out of Elon buying Twitter (where did we land on that?) Mastadon got an influx of 30K new users.... 
Also, if you're like, WTF is decentralization in the context of social media, here's a short animated vid on the "Fediverse," which uses email to show how to exist in online social spaces without centralized corporations running the show:

Selling Your Sawdust

"Selling Your Sawdust" is the idea that the things you create can be repurposed for multiple use cases. Twitter threads can be turned into blog posts, which can be used as scripts for podcasts, which can be chopped up into soundbites for your social media account. For creatives working the hustle, realizing this can be a major aha moment. But, it's also an idea that, in typical "productivity" fashion, gets all cringy when framed in terms of scalability.

"The same idea of selling your sawdust can be applied to knowledge. My favorite example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk. At one point he had The # AskGaryVee Show where he would do 20-minute Q&As answering questions that came through social media using the # askgaryvee hashtag. Here’s how he used the idea of selling your sawdust: The full video was recorded to be posted on YouTube. It was also streamed live on several social platforms. A ghostwriter worked on an article in real-time. His team chopped up each 20-minute episode into several video clips (sorted by question) and then posted each clip across Gary’s social media channels. The best of Gary’s answers went into the # AskGaryVee book. The best quotes were turned into quote visuals and posted on social media. A developer made all of the questions and answers searchable on the GaryVee search engine. Ultimately, # AskGaryVee shows how someone could take something that was just 20 minutes of their time and turn it into one hundred pieces of content."

First, who the eff is Gary Vee? Second, no offense, but that book sounds awful and hecka forgettable. We don't need more content faster. We need better content slower. 

One, non-icky way to think about selling your sawdust is to see it as a way to get less precious about your work. Be willing to touch, retouch, and let others touch your finished products. 

https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/the-brutal-truth-about-reading-if-you-dont-take-notes-right-you-ll-forget-nearly-everything-8058fd9143df?utm_source=pocket_mylist

WHAT I'M LOVING

CLOGing. Not the shoes, but the act of "cataloging" or "creativity logging" my writing sessions. A lil sumpin sumpin I came up with for myself after taking Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking course.

What it is: After every writing sprint, I log (in a CLOG) what I just did, what's working, what I need to work on next, and any other thoughts I have on the project

What it's good for: CLOGing helps me move writing projects along, because I never have to retrace steps. I'm always presented with a roadmap whenever I get back to a piece. This is incredibly important when you're working on half a dozen pieces at once.

What it looks like:
If scalability in an economic sense is the ability to grow when you have the opportunity to do so, this is what CLOGs do for me. They allow me to make use of the work I've done.

WHY I'M VEXING

Wrestling with scalability in my own life. AKA: The impulse to have recognition. The impulse to "be someone," despite knowing that it's so much better to be no one (in the Ram Dass spiritual sense). Honestly, this impulse isn't what vexes me. I'm empathic toward we humans and our post-Eden-induced, "fallen" need to "be more."

What vexes me is my recurring distrust of the alternative spaces I've created for myself. The less corporate Discord channels, the "Fake Twitter" feeds I start on my website, the long-form essay spaces. I vex when I doubt these and instead scramble for scalable corporate spaces like Twitter et al. This bums me out a bit.

WHAT I'M PRACTICING

Resonance over scale. Be like Rastafarians. Numerically small. Enormous in cultural influence.

WITH WHOM I'M CONNECTING

A handful of people in the pkm world who would like to collaborate on projects. That's always a good vibe. Stuff is in the twerks.

WHAT I'M READING

This fan-frickin-tasmi-gorific interview with "erratic Marxist" and tech-dubious social critic, Yanis Varoufakis.

"[A]ny digital service, currency, or good that is built within the present system will simply reproduce the present system’s legitimacy."

Yes. 1000% agree.

Regarding DAO's (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) potential to redesign how businesses organize themselves:

"[A] digital anarcho-syndicalist future society will use many of these DAO-like tools. But, and this is a gigantic but, DAO-like tools will not bring about this new society in which DAO-like tools are useful. (Nb. We can already see how DAOs are being usurped by regressives and real estate moguls in the United States.) Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman."

There is a major difference between decentralized platforms functioning in decentralized spaces vs and how they function in centralized ones. The Spectacle is a master of co-opting its opposition. That's capitalism's superpower. The crypto community willfully ignores this, I believe, cuz they don't actually want transformation. They just want a new, more scalable way to make money.

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/23/discussing-crypto-the-left-technofeudalism-with-evgeny-morozov-crypto-syllabus-long-interview/

Speaking of hot takes on all things power analysis:
Zero likes. Non-scalable hot takes. 

WHAT I'M HEARING

The Japanese ambient, environmental, and new age sounds of Satoshi Ashikawa. Also, seeing: the images of brutalist architecture shown in the video.
I recently came out as a closeted brutalist. For many people, these spaces come off as cold and even uninhabitable. To me, a monolithic box tucked away in the woods epitomizes the inherent rift and longing of the human for its natural, Edenic roots. I love how much these structures speak to our longing to return to the Beloved.

WHAT I'M WATCHING

Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol

And, that's that! See ya next week.

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