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So this post wasn't prompted by any one thing but rather that, in general, I've been thinking about all the ways that I don't have good intuition for how solutions scale in the long-term.
What I mean is that, I think, there's a lot about the problems of global capitalism that are fundamentally about how relatively minor problems can become huge and world changing when scaled up to the level of entire nations or a global economy.
A small number of people owning cars isn't that big of a deal but when most of the industrialized world has built itself around car ownership, suddenly it's this huge system that is self-perpetuating. Cities sprawl around roads. Neighborhoods become unwalkable. Efficient trains take a back seat to personal transit or only slightly better busses. You need a car because the world assumes cars so more people buy cars. That's the kind of weird scaling I've been thinking about.
Or like the ways that one of my favorite punching bags, the Chromebook, is driving educational technology. School chromebooks don't let you install software so everything needs to be a website. But once every service is a website the pressure is for every future service to be a website and just like that learning how to use a computer outside the browser is gone from the school experience for tens of millions of children in less than five years. We're creating a generation who has a much more shallow kind of interaction with computers without anyone ever intending it directly, it just happened because of the problems that only happen with scaling.
Another negative example is plastic. Plastic was once a miracle material, a new kind of convenience for industry and home use. And while a single person throwing away a water bottle doesn't sound so bad but you scale that up and you have a mass of plastic waste in the ocean larger than any nation in western Europe.
Putting our econ hats on you can argue a lot of these examples come down to different kinds of negative externalities, hidden costs of goods and services that aren't accounted for in the prices we interact with.
But I guess the thing I get stuck on is that negative externalities don't feel like enough of an explanation. It's negative externalities *plus* massive scale that leads to such an awful mess.
And I think scaling is just an inherent part of having a large global economy of capitalist states where companies and organizations can act as paragovernmental forces. Decisions that Facebook or Apple make have a massive impact across the entire world. Intel or AMD or SoftBank could practically bring the whole world to its knees if they actually wanted.
And this is where I'm going to go on what sounds like a tangent, but I swear it isn't: let's talk about farming. Monocultures of crops are bad. Not just ecologically, though they generally are, but because they're unstable. A single disease wiped out one of the world's major varietals of banana, after all. A monoculture is a fertile ground for parasites, pests, and diseases because once they get a foothold they have everything they need for exponential growth. There's no limiting factor to hold them back. It also tends to destroy the resources in the soil itself because you have too many plants needing the exact same thing at once, spiking the consumption, and also because defending soil from erosion requires a variety of root structures interlocking and not a single pattern.
The parallel I'm drawing is probably obvious at this point: scaling in capitalism, like scaling in farming, is *efficient* in only very narrow ways but exaggerates all the negatives so that it can never be sustainable.
It's always going to be prone to exploitation by bad actors and drain resources dry.
My rather unhappy conclusion is that I don't think we can ever have an efficient global economy of cheap goods *and* a world free of problems like garbage patches larger than nations.
We need the manufacturing equivalent of biodiversity, in other words, but I don't know how we get there without causing an unacceptable level of destruction on the way. The hope I'm holding out for is that a distributed maker movement, focused on helping communities meet their own needs, might provide us a path to a gentle detangling and a more sustainable future.
Thoughts? Disagreements?