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Against scale: Provocations and resistances to scale thinking

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  1. skybrian
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    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    By centering scalability in the design and development process, scale thinking revolves around three key tenets: (1) Scalability is a morally good quality of a system; (2) Quantification is a necessary part of designing scalable systems; and (3) Scalability is achieved by identifying and manipulating quantifiable, core elements or attributes of a system.

    [...]

    While scale thinking permeates the organization of the produc-
    tion side of tech development, it sharply determines its consumptive
    side as well. Scale thinking requires a sameness of user, or a user
    which falls within a tightly bound constraint of imagination. In
    a containerized world, interchangeability is critical to the operation working, and users operate in a standardized manner. The desire of the startup is to ensure that users fall within the bounds of the universal. Heterogeneity becomes antithetical to scalability, because the same product/service can no longer be duplicated to sufficiently serve a suffuse audience. A varied user base means that many different solutions are needed, rather than a scalable solution. Despite Graham’s cry to "do things that don’t scale," [9], a startup’s outputs need to be constrained insofar as they do just that.