A while back, I read an amazing book called Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton, an English professor and advocate for object-oriented-ontology philosophical thought. He presents a challenge to think at “Earth’s Magnitude,” a planetary scale, that blew my mind wide open. The core premise of Morton’s book is to pursue a logic of future coexistence as the human impact on the planet is as massive as entire ecosystems on Earth. This pursuit of understanding the planetary scale of human effect is a golden thread throughout my research and sense-making journey to navigate our techno-sapien condition and one of the primary influences on my shift from being an architect to a product owner.

In that spirit, I found it curious that humanity, now at a planetary scale, can only operate at that size by technology functioning at the same global scale. Globalization has advanced our economies, geopolitics, and social networks, but all for humans with paleo-lithic brains not psychologically ready to operate at that scale. So how can we ensure the future implications of technology enhance rather than harm us? The first step is understanding technology at a human scale, which is to grasp what it means for products to be scaled to us and how we might categorize “humanness” in digital products.

You can also learn more in my recent Dialexa circuit talk, Technology at Human Scale: AI, Empathy, and Technosapiens.

Let’s start with the basics. In design, the concept of human scale ensures that our physical spaces cater to our natural dimensions and capabilities.

We use typical dimensions like those in The Measure of Man and Woman by Henry Dreyfuss, which catalogs some of the typical measurements we’ve classified and used repeatedly. Human Scale guides the physical size, shape, and orientation of a tool, building, or product that aligns its features to an individual’s body and optimizes their capabilities.

Next time you’re in IKEA, review the options in the chair section. They have slight variations, but they are all relative within a range. You can find the one that fits your body type 9 times out of 10. Ergonomics is the practice of doing this very thing, and it helps ensure the individual can leverage what we design.

But, in the digital realm, we have very few physical dimensions to leverage for the user. They’re not typically designed to care for these human features because our digital parameters are now more cognitive. In fact, we’ve focused so much energy on a limited number of interface strategies around our eyes and fingertips that we’re now masters at exploiting human attention rather than providing benefits. The UX might be gorgeous and function well, but the cognitive effects are typically unknown.

With content barreling at us non-stop 24/7, our tools for accessing this content are focused mostly on removing the barriers so you connect more seamlessly and for longer periods of time. You might be thinking, “Well, yes. What’s the problem?”

Well, many of us now find ourselves overwhelmed, constantly distracted, often struggling to differentiate the urgent from the important, the essential from the trivial, the opinion from the fact. Experts like Jonathan Haidt and Scott Galloway present overwhelming evidence about teens and young people. Something closer to home is that little tweet that pops up while you’re working and pulls your attention away to see the headline hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day. This disconnect from sizing products to the human dimension of operation leads to a loss of scale between you and the world you’re engaging in — it’s a distortion in our perception of activity, proximity, and engagement. It’s shifting how we think and what we value, which is foundational to our techno-sapien condition.

If we don’t have human-scale guidelines for digital products, then what is technology at a human scale? It’s not a simple answer, but we need to zoom out a bit more to see from the individual self to the collective of other humans. The most consistent way I’ve found so far to understand this is through these three elements of existence: Activity, Proximity, and Engagement. We can use these terms to categorize and measure human presence in our digital products and craft humane characteristics throughout our digital experience.

Let’s spend a little bit of time here.

Let’s take short-form video, for example. It’s a feature within platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and others where people can express themselves through short videos that others can view. So, is this activity bad? Is this why more people are feeling more overwhelmed?

Maybe not on its own. It's not a bad thing at all; this extension of capability has benefited our social expression and online connection in many ways. Issues don’t arise until you scale up the usage to a billion people and remove all barriers to accessing this behavioral activity of post-and-consume. The har

m isn’t in the technology but in the scale at which we can no longer control ourselves when we’re around it.

Wait, what about the comments? What about the Engagement? People posting their opinions about content online, like short-form videos, is an activity on its own, but it is also engaging with intention on something they did not create. How we engage is the behaviors that guide where we go and how much time we spend there.

Are we intentional or apathetic? Do we share wisdom or salacious claims regardless of their validity? It’s become a collection of instant reactions resulting from unfettered overreactions. Engagement drives the incentives of these tools, and we must be aware of them to enjoy and interact with them reasonably. We are not great at disciplining ourselves to manage our behavior for the better, especially when consequence is removed from the act, and the “comments” demonstrate that perfectly. 

Okay, we hear all about Activity and Engagement, which are important for crafting quality human experiences, but Proximity to content is a bit more sinister. It operates in the background, like the internet's subconscious infrastructure.

The proximity of information has shrunk so rapidly that you may not even consider it a problem but a benefit. This type of proximity collapse greatly magnifies the impact of our digital tools and allows the exploitation of our weaknesses at an even greater magnitude. More simply, because it’s so easy to get stuff in front of you, we can do it a million times over, find the one that works best, and keep repeating that process. That’s dangerous because it makes us feel way more often than it makes us think.

The proximity of digital information to you is like a wormhole, described as space-time folded onto itself, removing distance from when/where content is posted and when/where you consume it. It makes things that once were very far away, traditionally not likely to affect us at all, is now delivered directly into our cerebellum. 

Meaning, we have no time to prepare but are forced only to react. Our homo-sapien brain evolved over thousands of years to survive by recognizing threats on the horizon before they arrive. We still rely on this. But, we can no longer recognize threats on the horizon because there is no horizon in the digital world. It puts the burden of a stronger cognitive vigilance squarely on the consumer, for the architect of your reality, you, to build your defenses for yourself.

Think about that for a moment. Our entire survival has evolved based on this way of thinking, and now we’re in a territory where that doesn’t work anymore. We live with a distortion of reality delivered directly into our brains by a product incentivized to feel rather than think and no horizon to decipher friend from foe before they engage with us. 

Now, couple this effect on the individual and multiply it by 5.7 billion people online across the planet, and that is technology at a human scale. The human scale of technology also refers to the planetary size in which we exist, in which digital tools like social media permeate across traditional physical borders like cities or countries.

This means the behavioral impacts it has on you or me also greatly impact our collective behaviors throughout humanity. We should not take this lightly, as Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology and others point out in the documentary The Social Dilemma. They make a compelling argument about how the technology that connects us also distracts, divides, manipulates, monetizes, and ultimately controls us.

I know that’s a lot. Our modern digital network has found a way to fully commoditize all of the human experience, especially attention, emotion, and dopamine addiction. We are starting to discover the effects of our always-on culture and its impact on how we think, act, and perceive the world around the people and us in it. Here are a few takeaways to guide you through gaining a better perspective of humanness in our digital era:

Without classifications and design guides like the Measure of Man or even a finite range of common boundaries to work within, we are optimizing our digital products to extract from ourselves rather than improve ourselves. I hope we can start to understand the activities, proximity, and engagement of our digital experience that together construct the spheres of human existence. Working together, we can see the SHAPE of our reality more clearly, with more context, and gain a better perspective. 

It can be tough to wrap your head around, but, to be frank with you, social media is only one part of our technosapien condition. I’m more interested in looking at the macro effects of our relationship with advanced technology to see if we can predict the impact it might have with any amount of accuracy. This means we have to broaden our view a little further in my next article on How to Predict the Impact of AI.