Saturday, 7 February 2026

Technology and Acceleration: 4 Friction, Reversibility, and the Ethics of Slowing Down

Acceleration is rarely experienced as a decision.
It is experienced as momentum.

Systems speed up not because anyone commands them to, but because faster paths are easier to sustain than slower ones. Once acceleration becomes structural, deceleration begins to look like failure.

This is the condition in which contemporary ethics must operate.

Acceleration as Structural Bias

Acceleration is often discussed as a cultural preference or a psychological tendency: impatience, distraction, addiction to novelty.

But acceleration is better understood as a structural bias in systems of coordination.

Faster processes:

  • clear queues

  • reduce transaction costs

  • outcompete slower alternatives

  • become embedded as norms

Over time, speed ceases to be optional.
It becomes a condition of participation.

What accelerates is not just activity, but the narrowing of viable tempos.

Friction Is Not Failure

In everyday language, friction is something to be eliminated. It is waste, resistance, inefficiency.

In relational terms, friction plays a very different role.

Friction:

  • slows transitions between states

  • makes consequences visible

  • creates space for re-orientation

  • stabilises meaning across change

Without friction, action outruns understanding.
Without friction, coordination outruns responsibility.

Friction is not the opposite of progress.
It is the condition under which progress remains intelligible.

Reversibility as a Moral Property

Acceleration has a distinctive ethical signature: irreversibility.

When systems move quickly enough, actions cannot be:

  • easily undone

  • meaningfully contested

  • collectively re-negotiated

Reversibility is not about regret or forgiveness.
It is about whether a system allows learning without collapse.

A reversible system:

  • tolerates error

  • supports correction

  • keeps alternatives alive

An irreversible system converts mistakes into destinies.

This is not a psychological problem.
It is an architectural one.

Slowing Down Without Sentiment

Calls to “slow down” are often dismissed as nostalgic or moralistic. And rightly so, when they appeal to:

  • lost authenticity

  • human essence

  • imagined pre-technological harmony

But slowing down, properly understood, is not about returning to a past tempo.

It is about reintroducing structural pauses into systems that otherwise eliminate them.

Slowing down means:

  • inserting deliberative thresholds

  • restoring temporal asymmetry

  • preventing automatic escalation

It is not refusal.
It is re-timing.

Ethics After Intentions

Traditional ethics focuses on intentions, choices, and virtues. These presuppose moments where agents can reflect and decide.

Acceleration erodes those moments.

When actions are:

  • continuous

  • automated

  • coupled to large-scale systems

ethical responsibility can no longer be located primarily in the individual will.

Ethics must therefore migrate:

  • from motives to mechanisms

  • from blame to design

  • from decisions to defaults

This is not a weakening of ethics.
It is its relocation.

Friction as a Political Technology

Seen this way, friction is not merely ethical.
It is political.

Who controls friction controls:

  • how quickly systems change

  • who can intervene

  • which futures can still be altered

The removal of friction is often framed as empowerment. In practice, it frequently:

  • privileges incumbents

  • locks in early advantages

  • suppresses slow-forming alternatives

Speed favours those already aligned with the system.

Friction protects those who are not.

The Right to Hesitate

In accelerated systems, hesitation appears pathological. Delay is punished. Indecision is penalised.

But hesitation is not indecision.
It is orientation in progress.

The ethical question is not whether individuals hesitate, but whether systems:

  • allow hesitation

  • survive hesitation

  • learn from hesitation

A system that cannot tolerate hesitation is a system that has already chosen its future.

Slowing Down and the Becoming of Possibility

Acceleration narrows possibility by outrunning it.
Slowing down re-opens possibility by holding it open long enough to matter.

This is not about stopping change.
It is about preserving the capacity to change direction.

Friction, reversibility, and pause are not obstacles to the future.
They are what keep the future plural.

What Remains

If platforms configure possibility,
and defaults weight futures,
then friction determines whether those futures can still be questioned.

The ethics of slowing down is therefore not a plea for restraint.
It is a demand for responsible temporality.

The next question is unavoidable:

What kinds of systems can sustain openness under acceleration — without collapsing into paralysis?

That is where we turn next.

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