A feminist server… * Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself to be part of an ecology of practices * Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist * Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it * Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns * Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible * Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps * Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice * Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies * Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can * Treats network technology as part of a social reality * Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible * Does not confuse safety with security * Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity * Tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available

Scalability is not an ordinary feature of nature. Making projects scalable takes a lot of work. Even after that work, there will still be interactions between scalable and nonscalable project elements. Yet, despite the contributions of thinkers like Braudel and Bohr, the connection between scaling up and the advancement of humanity has been so strong that scalable elements receive the lion’s share of attention. The nonscalable becomes an impediment. It’s time to turn attention to the nonscalable, not only as objects for description but also as incitements to theory. A theory of nonscalability might begin in the work it takes to create scalability—and the messes it makes. One vantage point might be that early and influential icon for this work: the European colonial plantation. In their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sugarcane plantations in Brazil, for example, Portuguese planters stumbled on a formula for smooth expansion. They crafted self-contained, interchangeable project elements, as follows: exterminate local people and plants; prepare now-empty, unclaimed land; and bring in exotic and isolated labor and crops for production. This landscape model of scalability became an inspiration for later industrialization and modernization.

Here then are the offcial assumptions with regard to the question of scale and the public good: BIG (capitalization of finance or audience) = PUBLIC. SMALL (capitalization of finance or audience) = ELITIST. But in fact this equation inverts the actual situation. It is the “public” (too big to fail) that disproportionately benefits elites, whereas it is the “elitist” (too small to survive) that serves communities in ways that other, larger organizations cannot. Might this ideological inversion be just as insidious and frightening as it sounds? Is it possible that artists in New York City are not only supposed to decorate the salons of hedge fund managers—and thus be implicated in financial elitism—while also taking the rap for intellectual elitism through their lively participation in specialized art discourse? The term critique is tossed around as though it were a grenade with its needle pulled. But where does “critique” inhere? In my view, it is generally ineffectual in individual works of art, whose transgression can be easily neutralized in the halls of BIG. No, our political challenge is to maintain alternate forms of public space for exhibition and debate. To do so, we must exit the ethos of “Too big to fail.”