Zack KanterVerified account

I would say scale is the root of all civilization, and mistreating it as nonexistent, evil or fixed rather than fluid and evolving is the problem

“fluid and evolving” is quite the euphemism. call it a sorceror’s apprentice problem. coordination at scale is a powerful magic, and many good things can in principal result from it. but owing to that “fluidity”, we often don’t know how to manage systems at scale 1/

virtuously, while we are pretty good (though still imperfect!) at addressing equity and fairness concerns and limiting bad externalities when we coordinate on smaller scales. one response is to disclaim scale entirely then, because virtue is more important than whatever magics 2/

That’s basically the neoreactionary view

The neoreactionary view is to disclaim scale? How so? Are you focusing on the "ten thousand competing and independent dictatorial city-states" aspect?

Yes that is what I was referring to

yet one of the core virtues of small scale is that we are better at doing meaningfully participatory, substantively nondictatorial organizations at small scale than at large. so i don’t think the comparison very apt.

Interesting! I've always thought of dictatorial orgs as something that works better at small scales than large. Maybe the right conclusion is that basically any form of governance is hard to scale without losing its soul in some way.