A Dystopia of Weaponized Friction

Years ago I wrote a post titled "Filtering the Zombie Army".

Most people do nothing. If they sign on, they won't show. If they pledge money, they won't pay. If you hire them, they'll sit in their cubicle and sip coffee. You know how most soldiers never actually shoot at people? How as few as 30% perform all the kills? I've decided that this isn't a saving grace of humanistic morality. It's just another example of how most people do nothing.

It wasn't the freshest of insights, but not one often spotted clearly (my specialty!). People don't take action. Not when they've promised to, not when it's easy (how many decline to hit the "like" button on a YouTube video that can make the difference between success and failure for creators whose work they'd presumably want to continue?). Not even when it's in their own interest.

At the end end of that essay, I offered an aikido move to turn this predicament to one's advantage:

I've developed a technique to cope with this. I call it the Zombie Filter. Whenever I find myself poised to sink hope and trust in a person, I assign them a trivial task, knowing non-doers will reveal themselves by not doing.

If I need to hire someone, I'll pay scant heed to their resume - the list of accomplishments every zombie is able to produce. But I'll offer them a solid page of vitally important reading material, and I will embed an instruction, à la "Send me an email with the phrase 'Rice Chex' in the body". A very low percentage will notice the direction and actually do it.

If you don't filter the zombies, you will curse yourself to endless recurring frustration. The zombie army will wear you down. They will annihilate you and they will absorb you, turning you into a black hole for everyone else's hopes and trust.

Years later, I'm seeing this move everywhere. And it's wearing me down to a stub.

The most common use is by tech support. Write in with a question and you'll likely be asked some random question to continue the conversation. They'll ask you if you're on a Mac or a PC, even if you just told them. They'll ask you how much RAM you have on your system, though it's completely irrelevant. They'll ask for a screenshot when your problem is easily visualized. You'll be put through this rigamarole even if you know they've received the same complaint a thousand times this week alone.

We used to account for this familiar pattern as blunt officiousness. But at this point, it's become common enough—and flagrant enough—to reveal a deliberate process of attrition. We are being eagerly trimmed at with busily snipping scissors by lazy shitheads hoping to reduce their workload.

And there are more chilling examples, as morally neutral tools metastasize to nefarious usage. This move is being applied by cold-hearted bureaucrats to evil effect. Here's a chilling example:

For whatever reason, Portugal has been unable for a year now to renew residence visas. Tens of thousands of legal residents carry expired residency cards, making travel outside the country perilous and raising stress all around. The agency is so crippled by this queue that apparently not a single applicant has been renewed. The process is well and truly stuck.

And many of us are receiving curiously random requests. We're asked to upload documents previously uploaded, or to answer questions already answered. The requests are vague and officiously stated, and they come with ticking clocks. Your renewal will be null and void if you don't reply in x days. What a shame if it means you're forced to vacate that Lisbon apartment you've sunk your life savings into.

A conniving bureaucracy has figured out my aikido move and is using it to torture multitudes in the hope that confusion, spam filtering, and errantly deceased applicants might trim its queue by an order of magnitude.

As this move continues spreading, be aware. Learn to hop nimbly over a profusion of boulders deliberately rolled in your path to reduce the workload of unseen strangers—even if you're no zombie. Consider this notice of a stiff raise of ambient friction tax—at least until AI (which can be reasoned with) starts handling all this stuff.


One might fret that AI's "handling all this stuff" carries the unhappy downside of human irrelevancy, but I'd argue that we've already done that to ourselves.