Technological tools and platforms are often talked about in terms of scalability – the ability to expand or contract in a smooth, seamless manner. Scalability insists that the world and all of the diversity of life within it is knowable and, by extension, controllable. But as the technologies of scalability are adjusted, advanced, or otherwise altered, they leave behind ruins – abandoned yet rife for other kinds of living with, in places otherwise circumscribed as futureless or valueless by political and economic regimes.

Turning their attention to how things hold and fray at multiple scales, Amer Kanngieser, Brett Story, Cassandra Troyan, Vienne Chan, and Zoé Samudzi join in conversation with Mindy Seu to discuss unscalability through makeshift practices, abolition, and commitment, asking what might emerge from technological ruins that refuse to scale.