BIGGER & WORSER
Multum In Parvo redux
…so, I was remembering how often, when I was founding or designing things, people would ask: How will this scale?
Scale! Make it bigger!
It was as though an idea was not truly valid until it spread virally, until it became the lingua franca nationally or globally. And yet small ideas, with small footprints, can matter enormously. Sometimes their consequences are slower, quieter, and longer lasting than those of ideas that scale rapidly and then disappear just as quickly.
The seduction of scale is powerful. Bigger is assumed to be better: more striking, more influential, more consequential. But sometimes a small or “quiet” idea is more affecting precisely because it requires attention. It asks more of us. Perhaps even more thought. I wrote about some of the same ideas a year ago, and I am still puzzling over size and how it affects our thinking and feeling.
A year or so ago, I saw an exhibition of Giuseppe Penone’s work at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Though considered part of the Arte Povera movement, his immense bronze-cast trees hardly seemed “poor” at all. They were impressive, certainly, but it felt curious that an artistic movement once rooted in humble and discarded materials should culminate in monumental bronze sculptures cast in Tuscan foundries.
His ambitions had expanded beyond the spirit of the original philosophy.
Interestingly, Alexander Calder created exquisite small maquettes of his monumental works and sometimes wondered whether the miniature versions might themselves be just as monumental as the larger pieces. Yet even Calder was drawn toward grandeur, like so many artists, technologists, institutions, and nations before him.
That often happens. We experience the thrill of greater reach, greater consequence, greater visibility — and we want more. We want bigger.
Nowhere is this truer than in Silicon Valley and in the ambitions of contemporary technologists: another hundred million users, another platform, another rocket launched toward Mars, another accumulation of almost incomprehensible wealth. Meanwhile, smaller and less glamorous problems — education, loneliness, housing, the degradation of the natural world — remain unresolved as we blithely doomscroll.
Even the smallest human gestures — expressing gratitude, helping someone in difficulty, listening carefully, asking a better question — probably do more to improve the world than persuading another person to join a social network. But small acts are difficult to monetize. They do not scale cleanly. They do not flash seductively on a screen.
One of the deeper problems with our obsession with scale is that the systems we build often consume nearly as much human and natural value as they create. The energy required to sustain them can equal or exceed their positive effects. We saw this with hydrocarbons, with tobacco, and we are now seeing this with AI.
The race to build ever-larger data centers to sustain massive language models increasingly resembles an arms race of computation: enormous infrastructures humming away to answer mundane questions, generate credible propaganda, or create cute kung-fu animal videos.
And yet it was interesting to see the praise surrounding DeepSeek for creating a more efficient and comparatively restrained AI model. It raises a worthwhile question: rather than building increasingly encyclopedic systems, why not build sparer systems that help humans become wiser, more thoughtful, and more capable themselves?
As the Ministry of Education in Estonia has reportedly suggested, perhaps AI should help students ask better questions rather than simply providing easier answers to increasingly passive learners. A better AI might not think for us so much as help us think more carefully ourselves.
Of course, one could argue that large language models will eventually bear extraordinary fruit. But we were told similar things about plastics, oil, and global trade — that once these systems reached sufficient scale the world would become healthier, wealthier, and more connected. Some benefits did emerge, certainly. But many of the greatest rewards accrued less to humankind than to balance sheets.
There are also positive examples of smallness such as the success of Ukranian drones against the larger missiles of Russia. If one thinks creatively, small and cheap can win out agains big and expensive.
So I wonder whether we might be better served by further recovering a cultural model that prized smallness. What if we stopped endlessly seeking amplification and became more content with enough and figured out how enough could be more effective and more sustainable?
In a world measured more in tens than in billions, we might discover that smaller scales are actually better suited to the cultivation of values, ethics, and attention. The outcomes may be less dramatic, but so too are the risks. The outcomes may also be more humanistic in the end.
We might actually find greater satisfaction in a simple family meal than in a Michelin-starred performance among strangers we are trying to impress.
We might discover that the miniature is itself monumental.
A quick glance of love.
A glancing touch of the hand.
A small drink quietly offered.
A covert wink of congratulations.
These gestures remain among the most powerful things human beings do for one another.
But they require participation from all of us — small acts, repeated collectively — rather than waiting for a tiny elite to dangle the next glittering viral object before our dazzled eyes. And if we could all collectively make such efforts, there would be no actually need for scale: Small would suffice.
Keep well, and keep it small…