The same economy that generates unprecedented digital wealth struggles to maintain bridges, water systems, and yes, air traffic control equipment.

Money is always the lubricant for life

I think what we're witnessing isn't just an extension of the attention economy but something new - the simulation economy. It's not just about keeping you glued to the screen anymore. It's about convincing you that any sort of real-world effort is unnecessary, that friction itself is obsolete3. The simulation doesn't just occupy your attention, right, instead it replaces the very notion that engagement should require effort. Which is… wild.

Beauty is not a thing, or a property of objects, but a measure of the emotional experience of awe, wonder, pleasure, or mere surprise that those objects may unleash.

I am astonished at how much use Go has gotten over the years. Go has reached the status of being just another programming language, one that any programmer can choose when appropriate. That is far beyond what any of us expected in the early days, when our best hope was that Go might serve as an example for useful ideas that other languages and programming environments could adopt.

None of this is a critique. It’s a function. These neighborhoods are running a different kind of system - one where you can still feel like the world works, because someone else is dealing with the parts that don’t.

This is the economic story: friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.

What's interesting is how our digital systems actually depend on this decaying physical infrastructure, yet provide no visibility into it. Elements of the same airport radar system that failed in Newark powers the operation of travel booking apps and flight trackers. When the physical backbone collapses, the digital outlet layers instantly evaporates, revealing how thin that tiny veneer of frictionlessness really is. It's a system held together by exhaustion and analog wiring.

This is the economy now. Not a distribution of opportunity. A redistribution of friction.

The boutiques are selling the appearance of effort without its substance. Hand-crafted aesthetics at mass-production prices. Rustic cafés with lighting fast WiFi. This illusion of locality with the convenience of globalization

This isn’t traditional cheating. It’s ambient, platform-approved, investor-funded cognitive offloading.

Tanner Greer has a beautiful breakdown of American loneliness, drawing from Tocqueville and Wang Huning. “The American,” he writes, “was an individual first, nothing second.” The result is a culture of deep, systemic isolation. Not just emotional, but economic. Americans work alone, consume alone, get rewarded alone. Even our policies, as Tocqueville feared, are structured around that loneliness.

“When you analyze many government policies [in America] it is not difficult to see that their fundamental motivation [is in fact] the complex and persistent role played by widespread loneliness.”

When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.

Beauty makes it easier for us to look deeper, to wander around the content, to gather knowledge while already being satisfied.

This is what a frictionless world looks like. Everything accelerates, until you forget what it means to try. Apps load faster. Papers write themselves. Job interviews are browser tricks. 60-hour raves, just in your VR Goggles. Speech patterns converge. Aesthetics flatten. Even identity becomes an efficiency layer.

I started on Go by adding a Go frontend to the GCC compiler. The Go project already had a compiler, of course, based on the Inferno C compiler. Having two compilers helped ensure that the language was clearly defined. When the two compilers differed, we knew that we had to clarify the spec and figure out what the right behavior should be.

The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future. The resulting prosperity has been very real, but it's been built on the proverbial kicking the can down the road.

This is the friction economy in microcosm. A system that everyone knows is inefficient and unsustainable, but persists because the friction of changing it despite many, many people trying - the actual work of building consensus and implementing new structures seems insurmountable.