Reflections 1st June

On the nature of growth

Banksy’s latest - there is something I find very powerful around the shadows in this.

On the first day of meteorological summer, we find ourselves at a peculiar juncture in human organisation. Whilst politicans and boardrooms who we have little connection to fixate on narrowly defined economic growth metrics and scaling strategies, something more fundamental is breaking down at the edges where actual people do actual work. The mathematics of technological progress—Moore's Law doubling computing power, Metcalfe's Law squaring network value, Swanson's Law halving solar costs with each capacity doubling—paint a picture of relentless exponential expansion. Yet beneath this triumphant narrative of scale lies a more troubling reality: human moral capacity doesn't scale at all.

When Google's founders scribbled "Don't Be Evil" on a Stanford whiteboard, they weren't being naïve. They were articulating something that made perfect sense at human scale—a shared understanding amongst people who kne…