Resisting the Flattening of Everything

On scale, character, and the erosion of soul in the things we love

There’s a certain sadness that creeps in when something you love gets big.

A place. A product. A brand. A community. What once felt intimate, special—even human—starts to feel like everything else. Optimized. Polished. Edges sanded down. It all starts to sound the same. Look the same. Feel the same.

Welcome to the flattening.

I don’t know exactly when I started noticing it. But now I see it everywhere. And as someone trying to build something that matters, this inevitable slide toward sameness feels like it’s looming over me.

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When Cool Becomes Corporate

Remember when Starbucks was cool?

The coffee was better. The baristas remembered your name. They had playlists of emerging artists with free iTunes downloads. It felt like a third place.

Now? It’s a drive-thru menu of 10,000 sugar flavors. Airport lounge interiors. The texture is gone.

Same with Airbnb. I couchsurfed across Europe in college. Airbnb made that thrill safer, more accessible. It felt like magic.

Now? Cleaning fees, chore checklists, and beige rentals managed by property firms. The individuality has vanished.

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Why Does Scale Erase Character?

I think it comes down to two forces.

First: scale demands replication.
To grow, you need systems—reliable, repeatable processes. But systems favor what can be controlled. What can be made uniform.
And character is the opposite of uniform. It’s quirks, care, personality. It’s someone’s fingerprints on the thing they made.
The best coffee shops aren’t efficient—they’re expressive. Try replicating that 10,000 times without ending up with a bland, lifeless version. It’s f***ing hard.

Second: the goalposts move.
What once felt fresh becomes familiar. Not because the product changed, but because we did.
Before Starbucks, most of us were drinking Folgers. Starbucks helped redefine coffee for a generation. It educated the masses. Raised the bar. And we learned. We evolved. We started to expect more.

But while the world keeps changing, scale often doesn’t. Real evolution requires creative risk and self-interrogation. Scale usually favors the safer path: standardization.

As one former Starbucks employee put it:

“The change has been incremental... a multitude of small sacrifices to appeal to a growing customer base… Eventually, the goalposts moved.”

This is the pattern. You start with soul. Then you scale. And if you’re not intentional, you end up with something efficient—but empty.

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Is It Inevitable?

I don’t want to believe it is. And I’ve been studying companies that seem to have resisted the flattening. They don’t all look the same, but they tend to fall into two camps:

1. Stay Small, Stay Weird

Companies like Basecamp and Gumroad choose constraint. Small teams. Transparent choices. Values before growth. Their strength isn’t just in what they build—but in what they refuse to become.

2. Scale Differently—with Structural Integrity

Other companies scale, but embed their values through governance, architecture, and ownership. They don’t just make promises—they build systems that protect their soul.

A few examples that have shaped my thinking:

• Patagonia put ownership into a trust to align its growth with environmental purpose.
  Lesson: Ownership design protects mission.

• Reddit gave moderators real power to shape community culture. The result? Messy, dynamic, enduring.
  Lesson: Decentralized control fosters evolution.

• Bluesky built on open protocols to resist platform capture.
  Lesson: Architecture can encode integrity.

• Blackbird is baking fairness into its loyalty model by building it on-chain.
  Lesson: Commitments embedded in code > marketing promises.

Patagonia

Not all stories are clean. WordPress, for all its open-source idealism, is under fire for the founder’s overlapping roles at its nonprofit and for-profit arms. BrewDog scaled “punk” with employee equity and bold policies—then faced serious allegations of workplace toxicity.

But that’s the point. These aren’t fairy tales. They’re complex. Messy. Human. They prove that values aren’t one-time declarations. They’re practices.
And when a company loses its soul, it’s usually because it didn’t build structures to protect it.

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What This Means for CO:CREATE

This topic matters to me—deeply. Because if we’re going to succeed at CO:CREATE in building the home for tattoo artists & their clients, scale isn’t optional. It’s necessary.

We’re not just building software. We’re shaping the future of an art form that’s always been profoundly human—intimate, expressive, and inherently unscalable by nature.

So the question isn’t just how do we grow?
It’s: how do we grow in a way that amplifies one of the most human things we can do?

That requires different choices:

• Designing for trust, not just efficiency

• Letting artists lead, not just participate

• Encoding values into structure, not just marketing

• Building tools that serve the people behind the work—not just the metrics

We have to pursue a kind of scale that doesn’t flatten—but amplifies what made the thing powerful to begin with.

Tattoos have always been a tool for transformation. For reclaiming the body. For writing your own story in your own skin.

CO:CREATE exists to honor that. To make space for it.
To help more people find it, trust it, and experience it—without sanding it down.

We’re not here to mass-produce meaning.
We’re here to build the infrastructure that lets meaning and connection thrive.

If we do it right, growth won’t mean dilution.
It will mean more people finding their way to something that finally feels like theirs—
And artists being able to focus on their art, rather than everything that tries to crowd it out.