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In the tech world, scale is everything. Our obsession with scalability isn’t inherently wrong – it’s given us remarkable tools – but this mindset can blind us to a deeper truth: some things can’t and shouldn’t be scaled. Human care is a great example, because the very act of scaling inevitably diminishes the essence of what makes care meaningful.
This resistance to scale presents a particular challenge to the tech mindset and Steven Scrawls explores this tension beautifully in his short essay.
“Unscalability is anathema to the engineering mind. It’s weirdly terrifying to consider that you could be the CEO of a company devoted to feeding the world, spend your life developing the Food-o-Matic which can feed everyone on the planet, but if you neglect to care for your kids, then your kids just have to live with your neglect.”
The seduction of scale can make individual-level work seem inadequate. As Scrawls admits:
“It can be tempting to view individualized work as something paltry or unimportant. It doesn’t help that people whose work can scale get access to fame, wealth, and power that will rarely be available to people operating at an individual level. And yeah, sometimes small-scale work is just wasted effort, the result of being too proud to see that the same result could be achieved with less work.”
“But sometimes things can’t scale without changing. Care doesn’t really scale without becoming something else. Thinking about this has helped me reframe how I feel about things like parents looking after their children, things like my friends taking time to chat with me.”
We see this truth play out in countless settings – overcrowded classrooms where individual attention becomes impossible, hospitals where care quality diminishes with each additional patient per nurse, aged care facilities where ‘efficiency’ metrics eclipse human connection.
Yes, an AI can be trained to say exactly the right words, to respond with perfect empathy, but its response stems from pattern matching and automation, not from that ineffable space where two humans meet, with all their imperfections and genuine desire to understand each other.
Perhaps there’s wisdom in acknowledging that care, in its purest form, will always resist industrialisation. And maybe that’s exactly what makes it so precious. Amidst our dreams of unlimited scale and frictionless efficiency, the most meaningful connections still happen one human at a time.
– Kai
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Apps & Sites
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Email, hosting, calendar for small biz
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I think this is smart bundling of services: Neo appeals to small businesses that need 1) a simple website, 2) email and 3) a calendar with appointment bookings. You can also send marketing emails straight from your inbox.
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SideNotes (macOS & iOS) creates a handy side panel for your notes, tasks, images and documents. Think of it as sticky notes, but with more sophistication and better integration into your workflow. It syncs via iCloud, integrates with Shortcuts and Alfred, and offers customisable themes.
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Store your gift cards, passport, credit cards, travel documents and other important docs in a dedicated app that automatically extracts text for easy copying. You can get alerts when cards expire and easily share items with friends/family.
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A fun mobile app with a perfect name: Flush “is the quickest, simplest way of finding a public bathroom or restroom. Simply open the app and it will display the nearest toilets to you. You can even search for restrooms without an internet connection!” The app lists over 200,000 public loos from around the world. This might be the one app that I wish had a comment section!
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Worthy Five: Adam Oskwarek
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Five recommendations by founder of Zopeful Climate and hopeful human, Adam Oskwarek.
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A concept worth understanding:
The human brain’s capacity is huge, estimated to be about 2.5 million gigabytes (equivalent to 3 million hours of TV). It has 86 billion neurons interconnecting to make each of us. Making learning a habit is a superpower. It’s always cumulative, additive (and addictive in a positive way). Being infinitely curious compounds in surprising ways.
A podcast worth listening to:
It’s easy to feel the world is changing in ways that can seem irrational and scary. We can’t hope to understand where we are now, or where we are heading, unless we see how we got here. The Empire podcast is an incredible exploration of history that often uncovers things we’d be unlikely to have been taught through traditional Western education.
A newsletter worth subscribing to:
The world is speeding up, driven by technological advancement. In The Exponential View, Azeem Azhar explores the technologies driving the change, puts them into context and shows how they interrelate to create ever more powerful forces.
A video worth watching:
To get into meditation and mindfulness, you don’t need to read extensive books or buy apps; just find a few mins per day somewhere quiet, and, as a little introduction, watch the Netflix series Guide to Meditation.
A piece of advice worth passing on:
I often think of the words by Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett: “I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” The resilience we all require to move beyond the unexpected shocks that most of us will experience during our lifetimes must be learnt over time. We can, and will, overcome. Resilience is a feature of humanity, in all of us, to be tapped into.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Adam Oskwarek in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Navigating uncertainty with grace
Pema Chödrön offers profound insights into how we can transform suffering by learning to sit with discomfort, let go of our attachments, and approach life’s difficulties with courage, compassion, and an open heart. “Drawing from traditional Buddhist wisdom, she offers life-changing tools for transforming suffering and negative patterns into habitual ease and boundless joy.”
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A guide to building a rest ethic
Business coach John Fitch and AI researcher Max Frenzel show how leaders, thinkers and creatives throughout history have managed to balance work and rest, challenging the notion that constant hustle leads to success. The book makes the case for taking time off – not just as a short break. It provides practical strategies for building a ‘rest ethic’ to help unlock greater creativity and self-discovery.
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Overheard on Threads
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Hey, remember when car and oil companies successfully lobbied governments to create car dependent cities and suburbs, and once we became almost completely car dependent, WE became the loudest, angriest champions of unhindered road space for cars, unnaturally cheap gas, and subsidized free parking?
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Food for Thought
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The tech mindset struggles with recognising the worthiness of unscalable projects/work. The truth is, however, that genuine individual attention can’t scale beyond a certain point without losing its essence. “For care, though, it doesn’t get bigger and better. If your goal is to educate the world, you can look for ways to educate thousands or millions. If you want to inspire the world, the billions await. But if your goal is to care for the world, and in a given moment you’re deeply caring for one person, you’re doing the best it’s possible to do.”
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Kirsten Powers shares her experience of moving to Italy, where local culture values daily rest and connection over relentless productivity. In Italy, long lunches and midday breaks, known as riposo, allow for relaxation and socialising, contrasting sharply with the busy, guilt-ridden lifestyle many Americans face. “What Americans – and increasingly Brits, Canadians, and Aussies – often call rest is actually recovery. We will spend the weekend entombed in weighted blankets while binging Netflix and generally trying to gain strength to start the whole grind again on Monday. If we nap, we will tell ourselves that we ‘earned’ it but still feel guilty. Even when we are lonely and desperate to see our friends, it can often feel like too much exertion to go out when energy needs to be conserved for the week ahead.” (via)
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I’ve listened to several interviews with Ed Yong before and his immense thoughtfulness and his ethical approach to work is truly inspiring. This deeply reflective talk chronicles his journey as a journalist during the COVID pandemic, where his evidence-based, comprehensive coverage earned him a Pulitzer Prize while extracting a huge personal toll. Through his experience of burnout and eventual resignation from The Atlantic, Yong points to broader systemic issues in journalism in his typical, considerate way.
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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From afar, Gerardo Pontiérr’s LEGO portraits appear as pixel-perfect mosaics, but step to the side and they transform into sculptural landscapes – each piece hiding fun, clever details.
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Sid Pattni is an Australian artist of Indian descent who unpacks the intricacies of identity, culture and belonging within a post-colonial framework – using oil on canvas punctured by cotton threads.
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Oleg Dron’s paintings are inspired by the Ukrainian landscape. He uses a combination of brushes and syringes to create art rich in detail and texture.
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Calvino Grande balances sixteenth-century garalde precision with calligraphic fluidity. A comprehensive range of weights and a display variant that together form a complete typographic toolkit for modern editorial needs.
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Notable Numbers
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According to Statcounter, which measures the market share of different web browsers, the share of Google’s Chrome has reached 66.68% in October this year, a new record high.
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Danish lawmakers last week agreed on a deal to plant 1 billion trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest and natural habitats over the next two decades in an effort to reduce fertiliser usage.
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A study analysing private aviation emissions showed that almost half of all private flights (47.4%) are shorter than 500 km. Private aviation is concentrated in the US, where 68.7% of the aircraft are registered. Emissions increased by 46% between 2019–2023, with industry expectations of continued strong growth. Regulation is needed to address the sector’s growing climate impact.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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