Optimization erases resistance to make action smoother. That sounds benign. Even humane. But resistance is where moral reality is measured.
Friction is where values are tested, where costs are revealed, where responsibility becomes legible. Remove it, and action may become easier—but meaning becomes thinner. Choices feel effortless. Outcomes feel abstract. Power no longer feels like power; it feels like weather.
This is not liberation. It is moral weightlessness.
This is why optimization is never neutral. It encodes values—speed, predictability, convenience—while quietly devaluing others: patience, accountability, restraint, reverence. What cannot be optimized begins to look irrational. What resists acceleration begins to look expendable.
My project isn’t reacting to convenience culture or chasing a trend. It’s asking a prior question: What happens to moral systems when resistance is systematically removed? What kinds of selves can exist in a world where deliberation is replaced by automation, where frictionless choice trains us to confuse desire with justification?
When Jesus says “count the cost,” he’s not issuing a metaphor. He’s naming a structural requirement: if you cannot trace an outcome back to a burden-bearer, the system is lying. Someone is carrying it—or being consumed by it.
The danger isn’t that optimization makes us cruel. It’s that it makes cruelty unreadable.
Friction is not a flaw. It is the instrumentation of ethics. Remove it, and the moral field doesn’t vanish—it goes dark. And as you can tell by this blog title, I think the solution is more light.
