Misalignment is often treated as a problem of scope. Small-scale interactions are expected to align easily; large-scale systems are thought to introduce friction. Where misalignment appears, it is attributed to complexity, distance, or loss of control. The implicit assumption is that misalignment increases with scale.
This assumption obscures more than it reveals. Misalignment does not arise because systems become large. It arises because construals relate. Scale changes how misalignment is experienced and managed, but not what it is.
Structural Invariance
At every scale, misalignment consists in the same basic condition: locally coherent construals that do not compose. This condition does not depend on the number of agents involved, the size of an institution, or the breadth of a system. What varies is the visibility of misalignment and the mechanisms available for containing it.
At small scales, misalignment may appear as interpersonal friction or conversational breakdown. At larger scales, it may appear as bureaucratic inertia, policy failure, or systemic drift. These are not different phenomena, but different manifestations of the same structural relation.
Individual and Collective Construal
At the level of individuals, misalignment is often psychologised. Differences are attributed to belief, intention, or temperament. While such descriptions may be pragmatically useful, they mislocate the phenomenon. The relevant unit is not the individual as such, but the construals through which meaning is enacted.
Collectives are not simply aggregates of individual meanings. They sustain construal regimes that no single participant fully inhabits. Misalignment can therefore occur not only between individuals, but between individuals and the collective construals they help sustain.
This helps explain a familiar experience: recognising that one is competently participating in a system whose meaning one does not fully share.
Interfaces and Translation Layers
As systems scale, misalignment is increasingly mediated rather than resolved. Interfaces, protocols, and translation layers are introduced to enable coordination without requiring shared construal. These mechanisms allow systems to function across incompatible meaning regimes.
Such mediation often gives the impression that misalignment has been overcome. In fact, it has been displaced. The work of non-composition is concentrated at boundaries, where it can be managed and monitored. Failures at these points are experienced as sudden and disproportionate, because they expose misalignments that were never eliminated.
Scale and Phenomenology
Although misalignment is structurally invariant, its phenomenology is not. At small scales, misalignment is felt directly: as frustration, confusion, or impasse. At larger scales, it is abstracted: as inefficiency, opacity, or loss of trust. The lived experience changes, but the underlying relation does not.
This difference in phenomenology often leads to category errors. Large-scale misalignment is treated as a technical problem, small-scale misalignment as a personal one. Both treatments miss the structural continuity between them.
Why Scale Misleads
Focusing on scale encourages a search for level-specific solutions: training for individuals, reform for institutions, redesign for systems. While such interventions may be necessary, they do not address misalignment as such. They rearrange construals without guaranteeing composability.
More importantly, the emphasis on scale sustains the hope that misalignment could be eliminated at the right level. That hope is misplaced. There is no scale at which alignment becomes automatic.
What Carries Across
What carries across scales is not agreement, but constraint. Which construals can coexist, which can be buffered, and which cannot be jointly sustained varies with scale, but the underlying problem remains the same. Misalignment is not a failure of size, but a condition of relation.
In the next post, we will confront a question that has so far been deferred: how to speak of pathology and breakdown without appealing to norms of correctness or success, and what it means for misalignment to become untenable.
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