On the Smoothness of Glass
There was a moment when friction became the enemy. Not the useful kind. The kind that tells you something is happening. The resistance of a key in a lock. The weight of a book’s pages turning. The sound of a dial connecting to a server that you could hear through the phone line, a sound that meant distance being crossed.
All of it was replaced with glass. Smooth, capacitive, fingerprint-smearing glass that pretends every interaction is the same interaction. Scroll, tap, swipe. The vocabulary of physical movement has been reduced to three verbs. Watch people navigate a bureaucracy through an app that updates in real-time, and notice that they have never experienced the liminal space of waiting for a form to arrive in the mail. They have never had the time to decide whether they actually wanted the thing they were requesting. The glass doesn’t allow for second thoughts. The glass assumes you know what you want when you touch it.
This is sold as efficiency. It is actually a narrowing of the decision window. The system has decided that hesitation is a bug, not a feature. That uncertainty is latency to be optimized out.
Server rooms used to announce themselves. The heat was the point. You could hear the work being done. Fans spinning, drives seeking, the whole architecture present, labor made audible. Now the product of that labor lives in pockets and no one is allowed to feel its weight. The cloud is weightless by design. The cloud is a way of not having to think about who is sweating in which building so that photos sync across devices.
Nostalgia isn’t the point. Suspicion is. Smoothness is how power hides.