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Can a company that wants to make the best-quality outdoor clothing in the world be the size of Nike? Can a ten-table, three-star French restaurant retain its third star when it adds fifty tables? Can you have it all? The question haunted me throughout the 1980s as Patagonia evolved.

But McLuhan would say, try not to only think about the fact that we make the tools. Think about how much the tools make us as well.

Scale is quite valuable, but the costs are usually hidden. Consolidation leads to monoculture, it reduces the stock of unique ferments. Culture, taste, and invention are often bottom-up phenomena. They require the opposite of scale. They require distance, and working alone.

Aside from all these decision-making conversations, you have hundreds of organizational changes happening that quietly shape the feed, but that are never documented anywhere.