Things tend to get worse as they scale. As startups turn to large corporations, they empty of meaning. The tight social bonds of a village fail in the big city. What goes wrong?

Common theories are about coordination failure, trust breaking down, lack of reputation enforcement, etc.

Here, I'll explain these dystopian aspects of scale in a new way. I believe we systematically measure the wrong things at large scales, and we get what we measure.

The systems that need to scale up can be broken into parts—parts I'll call funnels, tubes, and spaces. As systems scale, we fail to monitor the health of one part: the spaces. This leads to space decay.

The dystopian aspects of scale are well-explained by space decay. This means, by measuring space health, we could make big things less dystopian. That's the good news.

I'll discuss how to measure space health. I'll also look into why we don't measure it now. The upshot is that we don't realize how important spaces are. We measure what we respect, and we don't respect spaces enough. Luckily, there's a great deal to be gained, even in our personal lives, by respecting spaces more, and become more articulate about their success.

Almost anything can be classified as space, funnel, or tube—personal relationships, products, social activities, or even physical places like offices and living rooms.

Spaces are great. It'd be a damn shame, if something bad happened to them.

Here's some (admittedly indirect) evidence that something bad has happened to spaces.

If we imagine a society without spaces, only tubes and funnels, such a society would have problems. Are these problems familiar? Are our spaces are disappearing?

Ambitious goals—like curing all diseases or mapping the brain—require exploratory spaces. So, a society without spaces would be incapable of ambition.

More broadly, institutions like science and democracy would break down. Their funnels (for winning political campaigns, riling up voters, ramping citation counts, etc) would hypertrophy, taking up a ton of our attention, while the relevant spaces (where scientists and citizens explore values like civic responsibility, epistemic humility, and the passionate pursuit of the truth) would atrophy. We'd have degenerate, funnel-only versions of democracy and science. These would be terrible places: without values to keep them in check, perverse incentives would compound.

Social connections would unravel without spaces. Funnels and tubes tend towards relationships that are transactional, rather than deep or exploratory, because people want to achieve their goals quickly and without risk. Transactions (short-lived, predictable, and simple) are the most minimal kind of relationship, where both parties stay atomized, and there's no possibility of surprise. [fnTransaction]

Those limited, transactional relationships aren't enough. So a society without spaces would have less trust, less social cohesion. There would be spikes in drug addiction, suicide, etc.

There's another consequence of people's desire to achieve goals quickly and without risk: the elimination of surprise. Funnels and tubes emphasize efficacy and predictability, and these take precedence over other values like creativity, boldness, vulnerability, embodiment, etc.

We use a blanket word for these values: meaning. In a good space, we explore what's meaningful to us—not what's efficacious. Spaces are where you can live expressively, and treat yourself as a source of surprise.

So, without spaces, there'd be a "meaning crisis". People would grab at sources of promised meaning, like radical politics and get rich quick schemes, and they'd try to fill the holes, but that wouldn't work out.

Finally, a life without spaces would be exhausting. Every encounter would be about getting something done and moving on to the next thing to get done. Sometimes it's your own goals; sometimes, other people's. Completing one checkbox just brings you to the next, never to a space for relaxation or open-ended exploration.

People would race around, looking for spaces, but not finding them. This would make them exploitable: funnels would dangle the vague promise of a space in front of them: "buy this beer and be loved by friends", "take this online course, get rich, then you'll be able to relax and explore". But these would never deliver, because even the drunk, rich people would lack spaces. It'd all be a tremendous waste.

In the rest of this post, I'll claim that space decay is happening, and that it's mostly due to measurement error, and I'll show a way to address it.

I'll begin by looking at a space I was in recently, and show why might it decay.

In that story, the market's a tube, because it routes visitors to different stalls based on their goals^2. The conversation's a space where we explored our mutual interests in culinary mycology and nearby forests; and the purchase is a funnel.

Now,

Your trouble with measuring the success of your markets has big consequences:

If you're a thoughtful administrator, you might notice this problem and try to measure the space aspects of your markets. Let's consider some ways to do that:

Uh oh. Now the vendors have an additional goal: to drive smiles by any means necessary. They develop all sorts of tricks, to get people to smile.

This would be a mistake because of Goodhart's Law. In general, putting a behavioral metric (like measuring smiles) on a space turns it into a funnel.

What else could you try?

Surprise! This doesn't lead to spaces either!

Again, we have Goodhart's Law. Reputation pressure (like on Uber) tends not to drive, spontaneity and deep relationality: when someone's reputation is on the line, they play it safe, and behave according to scripts and norms as much as possible. So, satisfaction scores drive polite, servile, harmless interactions—the interactions which are unlikely to get a negative score. The space turns into a funnel about getting through with an ok score.

Perhaps I've convinced you that measuring the success of spaces is hard. But I haven't really got to the heart of the matter.

To do so, I must introduce another distinction—between articulate and inarticulate signals of success.

To measure space-success well, I believe you need articulate signals. I'll give an example of the kind of signal I mean, then say why I think articulate signals are key.

So, put yourself back in the shoes of the market administrator.

I think these cards are promising. But we can go further.

I see three reasons why articulate signals do better on Goodhart's Law.

First, articulacy gets you closer to what matters. Any measurement involves an inferential distance, between what's recorded and what it's supposed to mean. Articulate signals get closer to what matters, and that leaves less room for divergence between the proxy measure and the meaning. We see this in the example above: since the card text is strongly suggests a space, and the particular type of space the local wants, they would be unlikely to misidentify a funnel or tube as a good place for the cards.

Secondly, articulate signals create polycultures, not monocultures. Think what food would be like, if customers could never express articulate signals about food? Let's imagine if cooking used an inarticulate measure like smiles or satisfaction scores:

Monocultures always feature inarticulate signals. Articulacy is what separates indie film from Hollywood blockbusters (where success is measured by box office gross), and what separates gastronomy from fast food ("meals served").

The reason is because, with articulate measures, there are many ways to succeed. Polycultures emerge where different suppliers specialize in different things, rather than collapsing success into a battle for one rating, which takes place in the crudest vocabulary.

In the values cards example above, different vendors could specialize in different values. This removes a conformist pressure we see with inarticulate measures, and creates a polyculture.

Finally, articulacy protects against social performance. Social norms can be engineered to get people to do all sorts of things—for instance, to smile forcedly in a customer interaction, or to leave a positive review in an app. An articulate measure is not proof against this: a discussion about mushroom recipes can be driven by social norms, and we can easily imagine a vendor feeling pressured to have a "Land-to-Table Living" discussion with each customer.

But articulacy does provide some protection. First, it's harder to fake a review if you must describe advantages in detail, and relate them to your own life and values. More importantly, articulate measures can get us from the realm of social actions (which can always be forced) to more private assessments (which are harder to fake). In the "hard steps" example above, I suggest asking locals where it's easiest to "discover people with shared interests" or "build relationships". It's hard to imagine social pressure leading customers to get these assessments wrong.

The main thing that's required in all this is articulacy about spaces—about the different things people get out of them, and about what makes them work well. This makes me think what's necessary isn't just new measurement techniques, but a community—a community that talks about spaces like chefs talk about food, or like funnel-making entrepreneurs talk about funnels.

People in such a community would want to gather articulate signals and study them. They'd want to allocate funds and publicity based on those signals.

Such a community would be of interest to farmer's market administrators, of course, and to people making all sorts of exploratory spaces: research labs, art collaborations, games, "tools for thought", etc.

And—at the risk of sounding hokey—I think that community would also be of interest to another group. Lovers. Many problems in relationships (bad bosses, bad dates, bad lovers, and bad friends) come from treating time together as a funnel (towards sex, towards marriage) or tube ("I care for the kids; you make the money we need"), rather than a space.

So let's form a community of space-makers—for everyone who wants to sit with friends, find something that's meaningful to them, and make space to explore it together. And then make spaces at larger scales.

This book is dedicated to all space-makers.

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