Human scale
"Big government, big business, big everything - how the crises that imperil modern America are the inevitable result of giantism grown out of control - and what can be done about it. Kirkpatrick Sale examines a nation in the grips of growthmania and presents the ways to shape a more efficient and livable society built to the human scale."--Cover.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2019–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A really good book around the same subject is Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale. The book was written 40 years ago and talked about how society was getting too far out of scale for humans to control.
- Back in 1980, Kirkpatrick Sale wrote a great book called "Human Scale" about how things (government, business, infrastructure) in society are built beyond what humans can comprehend and manage. He pointed to studies that found that if we were to start over and build small 50,000 people towns 15-20 miles apart, each of these towns would have enough people and trades to support those towns. Scholars such as Plato and thinkers like da Vinci also believed that smaller towns of that size contributed to the overall well-being of citizens.
- > Reddit and Facebook are on the decline because both are full of slop. The problem is undermoderation, not overmoderation.
I don't think that's really the problem. I think it's just because Reddit and Facebook are too large to work, period - sort of what Kirkpatrick Sale was trying to get at in his book "Human Scale". Global systems of humans connected and interacting are probably doomed to this regardless of what mechanisms are instituted, unless those mechanisms limit in some way the local size of the interaction.
