This week’s guest my friend Joshua DiCaglio, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and author of the fabulous Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry.
It’s a book bout how contemplating scale can transform us — how it’s one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through our maps and another thing entirely to really sit with the mystery of how all of this is happening at once. We can conceptually differentiate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos, but scale makes it clear that at no point do we ever truly stand outside it all.
And this has enormous implications: contemplating scale is not merely an idle curiosity but an existential necessity. In an age of exponential AI, our future hinges on whether we can learn to overcome the tendency to colonize other scales with our abstractions and cultivate the capacity to recognize interdependency with the unthinkably small and large. How does truly understanding this change the way we live? Bewilderment is a rich place to start. Let’s simmer in it for a while…
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Chapters
0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:12 - Intro Essay: Scale & AI Safety0:13:25 - You Can’t Paint Fractals0:21:29 - We Can Only Act on The Scale at Which We Exist0:23:10 - The Story of Scale Theory0:27:49 - Discovering Scale through Computer Science & Nanotech0:38:37 - Being One & Feeling Many0:44:29 - The Embodiment of Mind & Information0:59:55 - The Scalar Synecdoche: Are Organizations Really Organisms?1:18:32 - Why Does It Matter Where We Draw The Lines Around Individuals?1:33:49 - Responsibility in A World Out of Control1:53:51 - Closing
Announcements
Check out my new single and music video “The Big Machine” — along with an essay on songwriting as evolution and a list of my favorite sci-fi ballads. Switch it up from this week’s news by diving in for a trip into the scalar reconfigurations of selfhood:
Starting next week I’m hosting a members-only reading and discussion of Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with a live call on Sat May 3rd:
Josh’s Links
Joshua DiCaglio’s Website + Google Scholar + X + LinkedInScale Theory Part 1 PDF (almost half the book!)Microbes as Machines: Life, Control, and the Problem of Scale in the Emergence of NanotechnologyLanguage and the Logic of Subjectivity: Whitehead and Burke in Crisis (unfortunately not open-access)
Project Links
Contact me if you have questions or want to work togetherHumans On The Loop’s living pitch & planning documentJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord serverFull episode and essay archives
Podcasts
Humans On The Loop 01 – Richard DoyleHumans On The Loop 06 –
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