An obsession with “scaling up” has captured contemporary innovation discourses and, with it, political and economic life. Perhaps most visible in the rise of big tech, big data, and venture capitalism, scalability thinking has also permeated public policy in the search for transformative solutions to “grand societal challenges,” calls for “entrepreneurial statehood”, or scalable experimental interventions in “living labs” and “evidence-based policy-making.”

This panel aims to interrogate scalability as a paradigm and ordering logic in the era of big tech. We seek to explore how actors mobilize, stabilize, and exploit notions of scalability in discourses, instruments, and practices. The panel invites empirical and conceptual contributions exploring how the current preoccupation with scalability reconfigures political and economic power, e.g. by invading problem diagnoses as well as normative understandings of how society functions and who authorizes social change, and what kind of frictions it begets. We also welcome critical perspectives on how STS’s engaged program can come to terms with the “politics of scaling” as a powerful corollary of the “politics of technology” that might require new tools and interventions. The panel hopes to stimulate cross-conversations between STS, anthropology, geography, political economy and other fields concerned with a critical analysis of scalability thinking.