Common Knowledge· 2012Q3
On Nonscalability
- 711citations
- Q3SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Scalability projects, which assume knowledge and things can expand without distortion, often rely on historical contingencies like extermination and coerced labor, leaving behind 'ruins' that challenge their own promises.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Scalability assumes knowledge and things can expand without distortion, but this is a constructed framework, not a natural state.
- Historical scalability projects, like plantations, succeeded by discounting human and ecological costs (extermination, slavery).
- These 'indeterminate encounters' formed models for later scalability projects.
- Nonscalability theory focuses on the 'ruins' and unintended consequences left by scalability.
- The world's diversity and dynamism persist because scalability never fully achieves its goals.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Because computers zoom across magnifications, it is easy to conclude that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales. The technical term is “scalable,” the ability to expand without distorting the framework. But it takes hard work to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European New World plantations, the natives were wiped out; coerced and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability. This essay explores scalability projects from the perspective of an emergent “nonscalability theory” that pays attention to the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind. The article concludes that, if the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Common Knowledge, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: Anthropology
AnthropologySocial Sciences