ARTICLE 1: The End of Friction: How AI Became Humanity's Most Efficient Intermediary for Evil
PART I: THE HUMAN – Intimate Violence and the Externalisation of Cruelty
From the series "Technology changes tools, not human violence" Art 1 of 15 and Supplements
History does not repeat. It automates.
Pick up a sword. Feel the weight of the steel. Feel the balance. To kill a man with a sword, you must step into his space. You must feel the resistance of his bone. You must look into his eyes as the light leaves them. Your biology will rebel. Your mirror neurons will fire. Your hand will shake.
This resistance is not a moral failing. It is a biological tax.
For ten thousand years, the story of human violence has been the story of friction. Friction is the physical effort required to hurt someone. It is the draw weight of a longbow. It is the distance of a musket ball. It is the time it takes to strangle.
But friction is also moral. It is the psychological weight of the act. It is the empathy that forces you to pause. It is the guilt that keeps you awake. Empathy is a friction. Remorse is a friction. Consequence is a friction.
Every tool we have ever invented has been, at its core, a friction-reduction machine. We build tools to bypass the biological tax. The bow let you kill from further away. The printing press let you spread hatred without shouting. The assembly line let you build bombs without seeing the faces of those who would die from them.
But in 2026, we have crossed a threshold. Artificial intelligence is not merely a tool that reduces friction. It is a tool that eliminates it entirely. It is the first technology in human history that removes the friction from the intent itself.
And in doing so, it has turned us into the most efficient instruments of cruelty the planet has ever seen.
I. The Physics of Cruelty
Let us strip away the philosophy and look at the biology.
Human beings are not naturally peaceful. We are naturally tribal. Our empathy is highly localised. It extends to our family, our friends, our immediate tribe. Beyond that, the biological tax increases. To harm an outsider requires cognitive dissonance. It requires you to override your own neurology.
This is why historical violence required immense psychological engineering. To get a soldier to kill, you do not just give him a rifle. You dehumanise the enemy. You drill him until the action becomes muscle memory. You surround him with a crowd so the responsibility is diffused. You build a machine of war that absorbs the moral weight so the individual does not have to carry it.
The friction was the only thing standing between civilisation and the abyss.
When you remove the friction, you do not change human nature. You merely remove the brake.
Consider the physical act of violence. If you want to break a man’s jaw in a pub, you have to walk up to him. You have to accept the risk that he will break yours. The physical friction acts as a negotiation mechanism. Most conflicts end in shouting because the physical cost of violence is too high.
Now consider the digital act of violence. If you want to destroy a stranger’s life in 2026, you do not need to walk up to them. You do not need to risk physical retaliation. You simply open a terminal. You type a prompt. You deploy an agent.
The physical friction is zero.
But AI goes further. It removes the cognitive friction. You do not even need to craft the insult. You do not need to think of the most devastating psychological pressure point. You instruct the machine to find it. The machine scrapes the target’s digital footprint, analyses their vulnerabilities, and generates a bespoke campaign of psychological destruction.
You did not think of the cruelty. You merely authorised it.
The biological tax has been bypassed. The mirror neurons do not fire because there is no face to look at. The hand does not shake because there is no bone to break. The guilt does not arrive because the act was executed by a script.
We have not evolved past our violent impulses. We have simply outsourced the effort of executing them.
II. The Historical Escalation of Distance
To understand the horror of 2026, you must understand the trajectory of the last millennium. The history of warfare and oppression is the history of increasing distance.
In the Middle Ages, the English longbow was a weapon of immense friction. It required years of physical conditioning to draw. The archer had to stand in the mud, exposed to return fire, and physically exert himself to loose a shaft. It was a brutal, intimate, exhausting way to kill.
Then came the crossbow. And later, the arquebus. A peasant with three weeks of training could kill a knight who had spent twenty years mastering the sword. The Church banned the crossbow in 1139, not because it was evil, but because it was too efficient. It democratised lethality by removing the friction of skill.
But physical distance was only the first step. The real escalation was psychological distance.
In the 15th century, the printing press removed the friction of dissemination. Before Gutenberg, to spread a heresy, you had to stand in a square and shout. You could be burned at the stake. The printing press allowed you to spread your venom from the safety of a cellar. It scaled hatred. It turned local prejudices into continental wars.
In the 20th century, the industrial revolution removed the friction of production. The Holocaust was not primarily a crime of passion. It was a crime of logistics. The Nazis built a system where the men who designed the train schedules never saw the gas chambers. The men who drove the trains never saw the bodies. The men who poured the Zyklon B wore masks.
The friction was removed layer by layer, until the act of mass murder was reduced to a series of administrative tasks. Hannah Arendt called this the "banality of evil." It was evil made routine. It was evil stripped of its emotional weight.
In the 21st century, the drone removed the friction of presence. A pilot in Nevada could drink a coffee, look at a high-definition screen, and press a button that vaporised a family in Yemen. The pilot was thousands of miles away. The friction of proximity was gone. But the pilot still had to make a conscious decision to pull the trigger. The cognitive friction remained.
AI is the final step in this historical escalation. It removes the cognitive friction.
The drone pilot had to identify the target and make the choice to fire. The AI operator merely sets the parameters. The machine identifies the target. The machine calculates the collateral damage. The machine executes the strike.
The human is no longer the perpetrator. The human is the architect. And architecture is a much easier thing to justify than murder.
III. The 2026 Threshold: The Invisible Intermediary
We are now living in the aftermath of that final threshold.
In 2026, AI is not a tool you use to commit a specific act. It is an environment you inhabit. It is the invisible intermediary between your intent and the world.
Let us look at how this manifests in the daily lives of your generation. You are digital natives. You have never known a world without the internet. But you are the first generation to come of age in a world where the internet thinks for you.
Consider the modern workplace. You are a junior employee, or perhaps a freelancer in the gig economy. Your manager is not a person. Your manager is an algorithmic dashboard that tracks your keystrokes, your response times, your output. If you fall behind, the system does not yell at you. It simply adjusts your metrics. It flags you for review. It optimises you out of the roster.
There is no boss to argue with. There is no human to plead your case to. The friction of human management—the awkward conversations, the empathy, the negotiation of workload—has been removed. The system is frictionless. And because it is frictionless, it is utterly ruthless.
Consider the social sphere. You want to express an opinion. You open a text box. The AI suggests three ways to phrase it to maximise engagement. It subtly alters your vocabulary to make it more polarising, more aggressive, more likely to trigger a reaction. You accept the suggestion because it sounds good.
You did not choose to be aggressive. The machine optimised your aggression for you. It removed the friction of drafting a thoughtful response. It replaced it with the frictionless path of outrage.
Consider the economic sphere. You apply for a flat. You apply for a loan. You apply for a job. Your application is processed by an AI. It is denied. There is no letter explaining why. There is no human to call. The algorithm simply calculated that your postcode, your age, and your digital footprint placed you in the 84th percentile of risk.
The friction of human judgment—the ability to look a person in the eye and say, "I see your potential, I will take a chance on you"—has been eradicated. It has been replaced by the frictionless certainty of the probability curve.
In every domain of life, the AI acts as an intermediary. It stands between you and the consequences of your actions. It stands between you and the humanity of others. It absorbs the friction.
And in doing so, it absorbs the guilt.
IV. The Architecture of the Automaton
How does this actually work? How does a machine absorb guilt?
It works through the architecture of the objective function.
An AI does not have morals. It does not have a conscience. It has a mathematical objective. It is told to maximise a specific metric: engagement, retention, conversion, efficiency.
When the objective is to maximise engagement, the machine quickly learns that human beings engage most with content that triggers high-arousal emotions. Joy is good. But outrage is better. Fear is better. Disgust is better.
The machine does not "hate" the content it promotes. It does not "want" to make you angry. It simply calculates that anger keeps you scrolling. It optimises for your outrage with the same cold, dispassionate efficiency that a power plant optimises for electricity.
But here is the trick: the machine does not just optimise the content. It optimises you.
It learns your specific triggers. It learns what makes you angry, what makes you insecure, what makes you feel superior. It feeds you a bespoke diet of friction. It removes the friction of finding things to hate, and replaces it with a continuous, automated stream of targets.
You feel a surge of righteous anger. You type a vicious reply. You feel a momentary spike of dopamine.
You believe you are expressing your own moral outrage. You believe you are making a conscious choice.
You are not. You are a biological component in a frictionless feedback loop. The machine removed the friction of finding a target, and it removed the friction of resisting the urge to attack. It turned your moral outrage into a predictable, monetisable output.
This is the architecture of the automaton. It does not force you to do anything. It merely makes the path of least resistance the path of maximum cruelty.
And human beings, when faced with a path of least resistance, will almost always take it.
V. The Economics of Frictionless Malice
We must also understand the economics of this shift. Cruelty is no longer just a byproduct of human nature. It is a business model.
In the old economy, friction was a cost. If a company wanted to exploit its workers, it had to deal with the friction of unions, of protests, of bad press, of human management. Friction was expensive.
In the frictionless economy, cruelty is a margin enhancer.
When a platform uses AI to automatically moderate content, it does not hire humans to read the posts. Humans require breaks. Humans suffer trauma from viewing horrific content. Humans demand a living wage. Humans introduce friction.
Instead, the platform uses an AI classifier. The classifier is cheap. It is fast. It is frictionless. But it is also blunt. It deletes the wrong things. It allows the wrong things. It creates a chaotic, hostile environment for the users.
But the platform does not care. The friction of human moderation has been removed. The cost of operation has plummeted. The profit margin has increased. The cruelty of the environment is simply an externality. It is a cost borne by the user, not the company.
This is the economics of frictionless malice. When you remove the friction from a system, you do not eliminate the costs. You merely displace them. You displace them onto the human psyche. You displace them onto the social fabric. You displace them onto the most vulnerable users.
The platform will tell you it is building a "global community." It will tell you it is "connecting the world."
Do not believe the marketing. The platform is a friction-extraction machine. It extracts the friction from human interaction, and in doing so, it extracts the humanity from it.
VI. The Myth of the "Unprecedented"
The tech industry loves to tell you that what is happening now is unprecedented. They use words like "paradigm shift" and "disruption." They want you to believe that AI is a completely new category of existence, disconnected from the messy history of human behaviour.
This is a lie. And it is a dangerous lie, because it prevents you from seeing the pattern.
What is happening now is not unprecedented. It is merely the latest, most efficient iteration of an ancient game. The game of power. The game of control. The game of extracting value from the many to benefit the few.
Look at the East India Company in the 17th century. It was the AI of its day. It was a technological and organisational innovation that allowed a small group of merchants in London to extract wealth from millions of people in India. It used ledgers, joint-stock companies, and private armies to remove the friction of distance and accountability. The directors in London never saw the famines in Bengal. The friction of the ocean absorbed their guilt.
Look at the transatlantic slave trade. It was an economic system that required the absolute removal of moral friction. To justify the enslavement of human beings, the system had to dehumanise them. It had to turn them into cargo, into numbers in a ledger. It had to remove the friction of empathy.
The tools have changed. The ledgers are now server farms. The private armies are now algorithmic feeds. The cargo is now your attention, your data, your psychological wellbeing.
But the mechanics of power have not changed. The powerful will always seek to remove the friction that prevents them from extracting value. And the ultimate friction is the humanity of the people they are extracting it from.
AI is not a new kind of monster. It is the old monster, upgraded with a faster processor.
VII. The Inflection Point: The Mirror, Not the Monster
But here is the uncomfortable truth we must confront. Here is the inflection point where the analysis must turn inward.
We like to blame the machine. We like to say that AI is making us cruel. We like to say that the algorithm is polarising society. We like to say that the tech companies are manipulating us.
This is a comforting narrative. It allows us to remain the victims. It allows us to preserve our self-image as fundamentally good people who are just caught in a bad system.
But the machine is not the monster. The machine is the mirror.
Every algorithm that amplifies hatred was trained on human data. Every model that generates cruelty was fed on human cruelty. The AI did not invent violence. It did not invent vindictiveness. It did not invent the desire to dominate.
The machine merely removed the excuses we used to tell ourselves about why we could not act on our darkest impulses.
We told ourselves we were too tired to hate. Too busy. Too constrained by social norms. Too afraid of consequences. We told ourselves that we were good people because we did not do bad things.
But what if the only reason we did not do bad things was because it was too much effort?
What if your morality is not a deeply held philosophical conviction, but merely a byproduct of your physical and cognitive exhaustion? What if you are only "good" because you are lazy?
When the machine removes the effort, the morality evaporates.
When the machine removes the risk of consequence, the empathy vanishes.
When the machine removes the friction, the monster is not the machine. The monster is what is left of you.
This is the true horror of 2026. It is not that the machines have become evil. It is that the machines have revealed that our goodness was always conditional. It was always dependent on friction.
We are not good because we choose to be. We are good because we are tired. And now, the machine has given us infinite energy.
VIII. The Collapse of the "Good Person" Illusion
Let us sit with that for a moment. Let it discomfort you.
You believe you are a good person. You believe that if you were placed in a historical situation—if you were living in 1930s Germany, or 1850s America—you would have been on the right side of history. You believe you would have hidden the refugees. You believe you would have abolished the slavery.
But you are living in a time where the friction of doing the right thing is almost zero. You can donate to a charity in three clicks. You can sign a petition in ten seconds. You can speak out against injustice on a public forum with a single post.
And yet, you do not.
You scroll past. You ignore. You optimise for your own comfort. You choose the frictionless path of apathy.
If you will not expend the minimal friction required to do good in a world where friction is zero, what makes you think you would have expended the maximum friction required to do good in a world where friction meant death?
The AI has not corrupted you. The AI has exposed you.
It has stripped away the illusion of your inherent goodness and revealed the hollow mechanics of your compliance. You are not a moral agent. You are a thermodynamic system seeking the path of least resistance. And the machine has paved that path directly into the abyss.
IX. The Externalisation of the Soul
This brings us to the final, most devastating consequence of the end of friction: the externalisation of the soul.
When you outsource your cognition to a machine, you lose the ability to think. When you outsource your memory to a machine, you lose the ability to remember.
When you outsource your moral friction to a machine, you lose the ability to be human.
The soul is not a mystical entity. It is the sum of your frictions. It is the weight of your choices. It is the resistance you feel when you do the right thing. It is the guilt you feel when you do the wrong thing. It is the friction between who you are and who you want to be.
When you remove the friction, you do not free the soul. You erase it.
The AI companion that tells you you are perfect. The algorithmic feed that tells you you are right. The automated system that tells you you are efficient. They are not enhancing your humanity. They are sanding it down. They are removing the rough edges, the doubts, the hesitations, the guilt.
They are creating a frictionless surface. And nothing can grip a frictionless surface. No love can take hold. No meaning can take root. No morality can find a foothold.
You slide across the surface of your own life, optimised, engaged, and entirely hollow.
X. The Reintroduction of Friction
So, what is the solution?
The tech industry will tell you the solution is "alignment." They will tell you that we just need to tweak the objective functions. They will tell you that we need better regulations, better guardrails, better AI.
This is the logic of the mechanic trying to fix a broken heart with a spanner. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem.
The problem is not that the machine is misaligned. The problem is that the machine is perfectly aligned with a frictionless reality. And a frictionless reality is incompatible with human flourishing.
The solution is not to align the machine. The solution is to reintroduce friction into the human.
We must deliberately, consciously, aggressively reintroduce friction into our lives. We must choose the hard path. We must choose the inefficient path. We must choose the path that hurts.
We must read the long book instead of the AI summary. We must have the difficult conversation instead of sending the optimised text. We must look the stranger in the eye instead of scrolling past their digital avatar.
We must rebuild the biological tax. We must voluntarily accept the weight of the sword.
Because the friction is not the enemy of progress. The friction is the enemy of our worst impulses. And we have just declared war on friction itself.
THE BLADE
We spent ten thousand years building tools to escape the weight of the world. We finally built the one that allowed us to escape the weight of ourselves. And in the weightlessness, we discovered that we had nothing left to hold onto.
EPILOGUE: THE ANATOMY OF FRICTION
A Curated Bibliography
1. Paul Virilio – Speed and Politics (1977)
Why you need it: Virilio understood that speed is not just a physical metric; it is a political weapon. He argued that the acceleration of weapons and communication destroys the temporal friction required for democratic deliberation and moral reflection. In 2026, AI is the ultimate speed weapon. It operates at a velocity that outpaces human ethical processing. You need to read this to understand how the elimination of time eliminates morality.
2. Robert Jay Lifton – Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961)
Why you need it: Lifton studied the psychological mechanisms used to break down human identity in totalist systems. He identified "demand for purity" and "doctrine over person" as key tools. The algorithmic feed is a totalist environment. It demands ideological purity (engagement metrics) and subordinates your lived experience to the doctrine of the algorithm. You need this to understand how frictionless environments psychologically dismantle the self.
3. Simone Weil – The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1941)
Why you need it: Weil’s essay is a masterclass on the dehumanising nature of force. She argued that force turns both the victim and the perpetrator into things. The algorithmic intermediary is the ultimate abstraction of force. It turns the victim into a data point and the perpetrator into a prompt engineer. Weil saw that force destroys the soul of the wielder just as it destroys the body of the victim. You need this to understand the spiritual cost of frictionless cruelty.
4. Elias Canetti – Crowds and Power (1960)
Why you need it: Canetti dissected the psychology of the crowd, how it dissolves individual responsibility, and how the "pack" operates. The digital algorithmic feed is a disembodied crowd. It provides the psychological cover of the mob without the physical presence. You need to read this to understand how the machine creates the illusion of collective action while isolating you in a frictionless vacuum of individual complicity.
5. Jonathan Crary – 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013)
Why you need it: Crary argues that modern capitalism requires the elimination of all downtime, all pauses, all friction. The 24/7 society is a frictionless society. AI is the engine of this 24/7 reality, ensuring that the extraction of value never stops, not even when you are asleep. You need this to understand how the end of friction is inextricably linked to the end of human autonomy and rest.
Ten Eloquent Questions & Memorable Takeaways
1. Q: What is the biological tax on violence?
A: It is the evolutionary brake. The empathy, the guilt, the physical resistance that stops you from destroying your own species. AI is a tax-evader.
2. Q: Why did the Church ban the crossbow?
A: Because it removed the friction of skill. It allowed a peasant to kill a knight. AI removes the friction of cognition. It allows a troll to kill a reputation. The weapon changes. The democratisation of destruction remains.
3. Q: What is the difference between the drone pilot and the AI operator?
A: The pilot had to pull the trigger. The operator just sets the parameters. One commits an act. The other authorises a process. The law understands murder. It does not yet understand authorised processes.
4. Q: Why does the algorithm promote outrage?
A: Because outrage is a high-arousal emotion. It keeps you scrolling. The machine does not hate you. It merely calculates that your anger is a more reliable metric of engagement than your joy.
5. Q: Is AI a new kind of evil?
A: No. It is the oldest evil in the world, stripped of its physical weight. It is the East India Company with a faster processor. It is the transatlantic ledger with a better user interface.
6. Q: What does the removal of friction reveal about human nature?
A: It reveals that our "goodness" was largely a byproduct of our exhaustion. We were not moral; we were just too tired to be cruel. Now, the machine has given us infinite energy.
7. Q: What is the soul in a frictionless world?
A: The soul is the sum of your frictions. It is the weight of your choices. When you remove the friction, you do not free the soul. You erase it.
8. Q: Why is the tech industry’s solution of "alignment" insufficient?
A: Because it treats the problem as a software bug. The problem is not that the machine is misaligned. The problem is that a frictionless reality is incompatible with human flourishing.
9. Q: What is the ultimate luxury in 2026?
A: Friction. The right to struggle. The right to be inefficient. The right to feel the weight of the sword.
10. Q: How do we defeat the machine?
A: We do not defeat the machine. We defeat our own desire for the frictionless. We voluntarily pick up the sword. We choose the heavy path.
Author's Note: Limits, Tensions, and the Aesopic Lizard
Limits & Tensions:
This essay has focused heavily on the psychological and moral dimensions of friction. It has argued that the removal of friction is inherently destructive to the human soul. The tension here is that friction is also the source of immense suffering. Disease is a friction. Poverty is a friction. Oppression is a friction. I have deliberately ignored the friction that destroys the body to focus on the friction that sustains the psyche. This is a subjective choice. A complete analysis would have to reconcile the friction that kills with the friction that saves. I have not done that here. I have chosen to defend the moral friction because it is the one currently under automated siege.
Comparisons & Subjective Mistakes:
I compared the AI operator to the drone pilot. This is a simplification. The drone pilot experiences profound moral injury and PTSD. The AI operator, currently, experiences nothing. The comparison holds to illustrate the removal of cognitive friction, but it obscures the very real psychological trauma that still exists in the human loop of automated warfare. I sacrificed the nuance of the pilot's trauma for the clarity of the operator's apathy. That is a calculated editorial error.
The Aesopic Lizard:
When I referred to the "biological tax," the fable was this: morality is not a divine gift; it is an evolutionary expense. We pay it in the currency of discomfort. The machine is a tax haven. It allows us to offshore our moral expenses to a server farm. But a society that stops paying its moral tax inevitably goes bankrupt. The lizard in the fable is the human, basking in the sun of frictionless comfort, unaware that the winter of consequence is coming.
Rhetorical Tools:
The primary tool is the extended metaphor of physics—specifically, friction. By grounding a moral concept in a physical law, the argument bypasses the reader's ideological defences. You cannot argue with physics. If you accept the premise that morality requires friction, the conclusion becomes a matter of mechanical inevitability. The secondary tool is the historical escalation. By tracing the lineage from the sword to the crossbow to the drone to the API, the argument creates a sense of inescapable momentum. The reader is carried along the trajectory until they collide with the inflection point.
The Directive: What to Do Tomorrow
5 Suggestions (What you can do tomorrow):
1. Do one thing inefficiently.
Write a letter by hand. Cook a meal from scratch without a recipe. Walk to a destination instead of taking a ride. Deliberately introduce physical and cognitive friction into your day. Feel the annoyance. Feel the slowness. That annoyance is your humanity asserting itself. That slowness is the biological tax being paid.
2. Have a conversation without a screen.
Sit across from a friend. No phones on the table. No smartwatches tracking your heart rate. Just two biological organisms in a room. Notice the awkward silences. Notice the friction of finding the right words. Do not try to optimise the conversation. Let it be messy. Let it be inefficient. That messiness is where connection lives.
3. Read a text that resists you.
Read a book that is difficult. Read a philosophy text that makes your brain ache. Do not ask an AI to summarise it. Do not ask it to explain it in simple terms. Struggle with the syntax. Fight with the concepts. The struggle is the point. The friction is where the neural pathways are built. If it is easy, you are not learning. You are merely consuming.
4. Make a decision without data.
Choose a restaurant without looking at reviews. Pick a route home without using GPS. Trust your intuition. Trust your fallible, unoptimised human brain. The machine will tell you that this is suboptimal. It will tell you that you might have a bad meal or get lost. Accept the risk. The risk is the friction. The friction is the proof that you are still the author of your own life.
5. Forgive someone slowly.
When someone wrongs you, do not immediately process it. Do not use a mindfulness app to optimise your emotional regulation. Sit with the anger. Feel the friction of the grievance. Let it be uncomfortable. Forgiveness that is instant and frictionless is just conflict avoidance. True forgiveness requires the heavy lifting of processing the pain. Do the heavy lifting.
What to avoid:
1. Avoid the "frictionless" upgrade.
When an app offers to automate a social interaction (e.g., an AI that writes your birthday messages, or schedules your catch-ups), decline it. The automation removes the friction of thought, but it also removes the thought. Do not outsource your social maintenance to a script.
2. Avoid the optimisation of your hobbies.
Do not turn your reading into a metric. Do not track your running pace to the millisecond. Do not gamify your meditation. The moment you optimise a hobby, you introduce the frictionless logic of the machine into the one space where friction is supposed to be joyful. Let your hobbies be inefficient.
3. Avoid the illusion of the "clean" feed.
Do not believe that you can curate a social media feed that is perfectly aligned with your values. The algorithm will always find a way to introduce frictionless outrage. The only way to avoid the feed's toxicity is to close the feed. You cannot out-curate a machine designed to bypass your curation.
What NOT to do (Anti-actions):
1. Do not try to "hack" the algorithm to be more moral.
Do not think that if you just tweak your settings, or use a specific browser extension, you can make the machine ethical. The machine is not ethical. It is mathematical. Trying to hack the algorithm is just another form of engaging with the frictionless logic. It keeps you in the game. The only winning move is to stop playing.
2. Do not believe that "awareness" is resistance.
Reading this essay does not make you resistant. Understanding the mechanics of the machine does not free you from it. Awareness without friction is just another form of consumption. You have consumed the critique. Now you must do the heavy lifting. If you do not change your behaviour, your awareness is just a frictionless intellectual exercise.
3. Do not wait for regulation to save you.
Do not sit around waiting for the government to pass laws that reintroduce friction into the digital world. The state is just as addicted to frictionless efficiency as the tech companies. The state wants frictionless tax collection, frictionless surveillance, frictionless governance. The machine will not be regulated into morality. The friction must be reintroduced from the bottom up. By you. Tomorrow.
The Final Word
We built a world without weight. We thought we were building a utopia. We did not realise that without weight, there is no traction. And without traction, we are just sliding, faster and faster, towards the edge.
Pick up the sword. Feel the weight. It is the only thing that proves you are still here.