When I described the geometry of personal transformation—the collapse → boundary → emergence arc—I was drawing on individual psychology. But somewhere along the way I began noticing that the same geometry applies to societies. Cultures, like people, drift, stabilize, crack, and reorganize. They too have boundaries and threshold states. And increasingly, ours feels like it is approaching one.
Technology is the most obvious accelerant, but acceleration itself is not the main issue. The deeper problem is the loss of friction—a thinning of the very resistance that once shaped character, institutions, and meaning. Friction is what forces systems to adapt. Friction creates delay, reflection, feedback, and structure. Remove too much friction and systems lose their coherence.
A wheel that cannot grip the road does not speed forward; it spins in place. AI is removing friction, and you can feel the loss of meaning it causes.
For most of human history, friction was everywhere. Scarcity, slowness, difficulty, limits. Geography imposed boundaries. Information was scarce. Travel was slow. Communities were anchored in physical space. Even moral life was grounded in the friction of proximity—neighbors you could not mute, disagreements you had to live with, time you had to inhabit. Friction forced commitment.
But today nearly every form of friction has been engineered away. Information arrives instantly. Relationships can be exited with a swipe. Belief systems can be curated algorithmically. Tasks that once required communal effort now require none at all. Even thinking has softened; AI can autocomplete not just our sentences but our judgments and our curiosity.
At first this feels liberating. Then it becomes anesthetizing.
In physics, systems without friction become chaotic. In psychology, people without friction become disoriented. In moral life, communities without friction become unaccountable. The loss of friction weakens the structures that hold a society’s vectors together. In its place arises a strange blend of hyper-stimulation and meaninglessness—motion without direction, abundance without orientation.
This is why our era feels increasingly like a lavender threshold, a civilization-scale liminal state. Not quite collapse, not yet emergence. A suspended moment in which the old constraints have dissolved but the new coherence hasn’t arrived. We are living at the ultraviolet edge of collective perception: the last visible frequencies before the world becomes invisible to its own inhabitants.
The danger is not technological takeover or totalitarianism or ecological crisis—those are symptoms. The deeper danger is smoothness: a world so frictionless that the structures needed for agency, community, and meaning lose their shape. People drift toward the black-hole apex (collapse, domination, purity, fear) not because they are evil but because gravitational pull is stronger where friction is weaker. In a frictionless world, reaction is easier than reflection, outrage is easier than nuance, collapse is easier than emergence.
And yet the same loss of friction contains the possibility of renaissance. When a system thins to this degree, small corrections—small sources of coherence—have disproportionate power. A single institution with integrity, a single community with shared purpose, a single technology that enhances human agency rather than replacing it, can anchor entire regions of the moral field. Friction, applied deliberately, becomes generative.
We are approaching a singularity of meaning not because meaning is disappearing, but because the world has become smooth enough that meaning can no longer rely on inherited structures. It must be chosen, embodied, created. We are returning to Ground—forced again to ask what holds anything together when the usual constraints have dissolved.
The question is not whether society will reorganize. It will. The question is which apex we will fall toward when the last of the friction burns away. And it may turn upon just how strongly coupled together we are.
In the next post, I’ll turn to the unifying thread behind all of these ideas: agency itself, and why I believe it has a geometric structure that bridges physics, morality, consciousness, and the search for meaning.
