things that don't scale ✨

One week, you were planning your summer travels. The next, you were too scared to leave your home. Back then, you danced wildly in a mass of glitter and neon spandex. Now, you haven't seen your friends or family in months. For all of us, the pandemic has dialed the speed and scale of daily life way, way down.



And what have you done with all this newfound time?



You read the news. You hate-read the news. Everything fucking sucks, so you download TikTok. You miss your friends. You attend a "Zoom Happy Hour" to play skribble.io and whiteboard Hangman. Your eyes hurt. You start a journal. You launch a Substack. You reminisce about your mom's cooking. You feel guilty about not knowing what goes into 麻婆豆腐, so you give her a call. You buy too many plants. You rediscover Pinterest and learn to crochet a tiny shirt, but have nowhere to wear it. You wear the shirt to water your plants.



We are all cottagecore now.



Do things that don't scale.



Technology promised us scale and gave it to us. As Marshall McLuhan prophesied in The Medium is the Massage,



In an electric information environment, too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.



Yet COVID-19 also revealed the fragility of this interdependent global system. Amazon began to falter on its two-day promise, and we saw the firsthand impacts of the supply chain redundancies that capitalists never built. As cases climbed, the central government failed over and over to provide a response plan.

Without Amazon, you walk to the corner store. Without national policy, you start listening to your mayor. With the world on fire, you start turning in.



Do things that don't scale.



Contrast McLuhan to a quote from Rachel, 19, a self-described "cottagecore teen" interviewed in Paper Mag:



I define [cottagecore] as an aesthetic as well as a lifestyle. It's like an escape to another time or a fantasy world where things aren't as complicated, and it's just you and the bugs and the breeze and your pretty dress.



I spent the month of July holed up in Camano, Washington, a rural island an hour north of Seattle. Since I hadn't started work yet, I would cook three meals a day and spend lazy afternoons reading on the lawn, accompanied by homemade cold brew and a gorgeous, sparkling view of the Pacific Ocean.



I often took walks on a short trail off the main road around the island. The trail was dotted with wild berry bushes—red huckleberry, trailing blackberry, thimbleberry, salal—which I packed into Tupperwares to take home and make into jam. There were bugs, too, which I was absolutely terrified of until I learned their names: seven-spotted lady beetle, carpenter ant, yellow-faced bumble bee.





Do things that don't scale.



Scale enabled us to march for Black lives and organize online. Scale brought movements around the world into a single scroll: Hong Kong, Lebanon, Belarus. But scale also taught us to get local: to look up our city's bail fund, petition our old high school, talk politics with our parents.



In particular, the mutual aid funds that popped up in response to COVID-19 exemplified the best, most hopeful parts of digital organizing. When Stanford suddenly announced layoffs for its contracted custodial staff, the organization Students for Workers' Rights immediately began to petition the university, hold Zoom concert fundraisers, and set up emergency funds for impacted workers. In an op-ed for The Stanford Daily, student-activist Ethan Chua writes:



For Students for Workers’ Rights, mutual aid is a critique of the present. If we’re living in a dystopia generated by late capitalism, mutual aid is an enactment of an alternative way of life, one where interdependence and collective care are valued over accumulation and commodification.



An endowment is allocated to sustain the university for decades ahead. A Venmo fund is set up to pay for next week's rent.



Do things that don't scale.



Goodreads.com is a horrible website. Every action by someone you follow appears as a block on your homepage, including every new friend or book that a user adds. Book reviews are styled in HTML, requiring you to type bracket-slash-i-bracket to close every italicized phrase. My books get auto-marked 'Finished' before I've read halfway. There's no way to say you abandoned one two chapters in. Among the 150 friends I have on the platform, I'd wager that around 10 percent are active users. Also, the site background is beige.



But I love Goodreads. It makes me happy when someone likes a review I've written, and happy when I find a new favorite off a friend's digital shelf. It's easy to imagine myself and my 15 friends in an tiny old library with ratty carpet and ugly beige wallpaper. Some of us roam the shelves, recommending books across aisles; others sink into armchairs, ensconced in a story.



Even smaller than Goodreads—which I admit is still owned by Amazon, however kitschy the vibes—you get the personal projects that were never meant to scale. I'm reminded of Robin Sloan's blog post, "An app can be a home-cooked meal." The post is an endearing account of BoopSnoop, the messaging app he built just for his family:



This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision, too. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?
Is it simply… the feeling of being home?



Last month, I wrote about communicative friction online. I forgot to mention one thing: the worse the UX, the cozier the community.



Do things that don't scale.



When do you think this will all be over? By December? March? Do you think we'll get a fair election? Do you think we'll get a senior spring?



When I think about the future, it feels vast and overwhelming. I don't have a job lined up post-graduation in 2021; hell, I don't even have a job lined up for this fall (I refuse to attend Zoom classes either way). I want to figure things out, but there are too many unknowns and not enough processing power in my brain. Nothing about long-term planning makes sense anymore.



In therapy, they teach you to prevent spiraling by listing facts in place of opinions or speculations.



I have two giving parents and a oft-reluctant exercise buddy in my sister and friends I can FaceTime and far more books on my Kindle than I can read. I have savings from three summers of internships and part-time teaching Chinese 7-year-olds to say English words like "supermarket" and "grandma." I have a picnic blanket and parks to walk to and blue sky sunshine for probably a month more until drizzling grey clouds creep back into the Seattle sky.



They also teach you to break down big tasks into small, manageable ones.



Vote in the primary. Send two emails with your resume attached. Drink water. Finish reading that book. Don't flake—get on FaceTime with friends. Walk to the grocery store. Buy milk. Help mom make dinner. Do the NYT Crossword Mini. Reply to your unanswered messages. Read the news, but not too much. Drink more water. Don't forget to floss.



Do things that don't scale.

(aug 10, 2020)