Scaling is easy. Just throw more hardware at it, more bodies, more capital, more hype. Pump it up, stack it high, run the numbers until they glow. A startup becomes a unicorn, a unicorn becomes a monopoly, and suddenly the market’s a game of Monopoly where one guy owns all the hotels and everyone else is just paying rent.
But downscaling? Downscaling is a wicked problem. Because once the beast is big, it doesn’t shrink—it calcifies. It lurches, it sprawls, it fights for its own survival. The bureaucracy metastasizes. The codebase bloats into Lovecraftian horror. The supply chains become Gordian knots. The boardroom starts talking about “unlocking efficiencies,” which is code for mass layoffs and desperate cost-cutting.
And here’s the kicker: things that scale well don’t downscale well. Tech empires don’t gracefully retreat; they collapse. They rot in place, cranking out worse versions of the same product while sucking more from the ecosystem. Facebook pivoting to the Metaverse was a downscaling problem. Twitter turning into X is a downscaling problem. Google search slowly drowning in ads is a downscaling problem.
The only real way out? Radical subtraction. Not efficiency theater, not just-in-time logistics, but actually unmaking the monoliths, rewiring the incentives, dismantling the enclosure. Easier said than done. Because the people in charge don’t just fear failure—they fear irrelevance. And they’ll take the whole system down with them before they let it shrink.