The Myth of Infinite Scalability

# The Myth of Infinite Scalability

There's a point where everything starts to hum. The systems, the ambitions, the little dashboards stacked on top of bigger ones so that the flywheel is moving up and to the left. Growth becomes its own language, and no one remembers what the first word meant.

We built it that way on purpose. Scale was promise; anything good could be multiplied without limit. A clever trick of faith. The same impulse that built cathedrals now builds platforms, both chasing the same illusion: that there’s a structure large enough to contain desire.

But scale is hungry. It eats the small gestures first. The hand-written note, the half roll of developed film in the envelope that you don't remember taking, the slow kind of making that only one person will ever notice. Those things don’t replicate well. They fall apart in transit.

I used to live for efficiency. A cleaner process, a smoother build, a world where nothing stalls. Now it doesn't and I have jet-lag. I slept and time moved faster when I wasn't looking. The friction kept the world honest. When every delay is eliminated, there’s no room for reflection, only throughput.

Somewhere inside every algorithm there’s a ghost of the first human to say, _what if we could do it faster?_ They didn’t mean forever. They just wanted to go home early.

The past is just strange drifts of information we can’t quite navigate. Everything that was once intimate becomes aggregate. That was all content. 

If we make the structure large enough, it’ll eventually hold us. Maybe. But the stars collapse, not because they fail, but because they succeed too completely at being what they are.