THERE IS A QUIET VIOLENCE in efficiency.
It doesn’t announce itself with fanfare or manifesto. It arrives wearing the mask of innovation, speaking the language of optimization, promising liberation from the mundane friction of human limitation. But beneath the veneer of technological progress lies something altogether more sinister: the systematic erasure of the spaces where meaning is made.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s recent revelation about Klarna’s internal transformation reads like a dispatch from our collective future – 700 people’s worth of work now performed by algorithms, headcount slashed from 5,500 to 3,000, the company rendered “leaner, sharper, more efficient.” Yet even as he celebrates this achievement, he warns of the broader economic downturn such rapid transformations might precipitate. The contradiction is telling. We have built a machine that eats its own tail, and we call it progress.
But this is not about Klarna, or even about artificial intelligence. This is about the mythology of velocity itself—the belief that faster is always better, that friction is always the enemy, that the optimal human is the one who can be replaced by a system. We have confused motion with movement, activity with purpose, efficiency with efficacy. In our rush toward the frictionless future, we have forgotten that friction is where life happens.
THE SEDUCTION OF THE INSTANT
Speed has become our primary addiction. Not the rush of physical velocity; though that too has its place, but the deeper intoxication of instantaneous response, seamless automation, the elimination of waiting. We live in an age where a three-second delay in website loading triggers abandonment, where same-day delivery has become an expectation rather than luxury, where the very concept of “processing time” feels like a relic from a more primitive era.
This addiction runs deeper than convenience. It has rewired our neural pathways, reshaped our conception of acceptable delay, transformed patience from virtue to pathology. We have internalized the logic of the machine – that hesitation is inefficiency, that contemplation is waste, that the pause between stimulus and response is dead time to be optimized away.
But consider what lives in that pause. The moment between question and answer where genuine thought occurs. The space between problem and solution where creativity emerges. The interval between impulse and action where wisdom might intervene. We are systematically eliminating the gaps where consciousness itself takes root.
The technology companies understand this better than we do. They have gamified immediacy, turned instant gratification into a behavioral loop so compelling that delay feels like punishment. Each notification trains us to expect faster response. Each algorithm learns to anticipate our desires before we fully form them. We are being conditioned to mistake speed for satisfaction, to confuse the elimination of friction with the creation of meaning.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF REPLACEMENT
What Siemiatkowski describes at Klarna is not an anomaly; it’s a preview. Across industries, the same pattern emerges: identify the predictable elements of human work, codify them into systems, then celebrate the resulting “efficiency gains” while quietly absorbing the human cost. The language is always clinical: “workforce optimization,” “operational streamlining,” “competitive repositioning.” The reality is starker: we are methodically replacing human judgment with algorithmic approximation.
This replacement is not happening in the abstract. It has names, faces, families, mortgages, dreams deferred. The 2,500 people who no longer work at Klarna were not inefficiencies to be corrected – they were human beings whose livelihoods were optimized away. Each represented not just labor, but knowledge, relationships, institutional memory, the informal networks that make organizations more than the sum of their processes.
Yet we celebrate their elimination as progress because we have learned to see human labor through the lens of mechanical efficiency. We measure success by throughput, not by the quality of work or the dignity of workers. We optimize for speed rather than sustainability, for scale rather than resilience, for cost reduction rather than value creation.
The deeper question is not whether such replacements are technically possible -they clearly are- but whether they are humanly wise. We are building systems that can simulate human judgment without possessing human wisdom, that can process information without understanding context, that can execute tasks without grasping their meaning. We mistake computational power for intelligence, pattern recognition for insight, automation for advancement.
SOCIOLOGY OF ACCELERATION
Speed doesn’t just change what we do; it changes who we are. When we accelerate the pace of decision-making, we necessarily truncate the process of deliberation. When we optimize for immediate response, we eliminate the possibility of considered reflection. When we prioritize efficiency above all else, we inevitably sacrifice the inefficient but essential activities that make life meaningful: contemplation, relationship-building, creative exploration, the cultivation of wisdom.
This is not merely a personal problem – it’s a civilizational one. The institutions that have historically served as repositories of collective wisdom – universities, courts, legislative bodies, cultural organizations- all function on timescales that seem impossibly slow by contemporary standards. Academic research unfolds over years. Legal proceedings require extensive deliberation. Cultural movements develop through generations of conversation and experimentation.
But these institutions are under tremendous pressure to accelerate, to become more “efficient,” to match the pace of technological change. Universities compress degree programs, courts expedite proceedings, legislatures prioritize quick wins over long-term solutions. In each case, the acceleration comes at the cost of depth, nuance, the patient accumulation of understanding that distinguishes wisdom from mere information.
We are witnessing the emergence of what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls “social acceleration” – a feedback loop in which technological acceleration drives social acceleration which demands further technological acceleration. The result is a society that moves faster and faster while losing its capacity for reflection, adaptation, genuine learning.
The human casualties of this acceleration are not limited to job displacement. They include the erosion of contemplative practice, the atrophying of attention spans, the decline of deep reading, the fragmentation of social bonds, the loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer. We are becoming a civilization that knows how to process information rapidly but has forgotten how to think slowly, how to wait, how to sit with uncertainty long enough for wisdom to emerge.
THE ECOLOGY OF MEANING
Perhaps most troubling is how speed disrupts the ecology of meaning itself. Meaning is not something that can be optimized or automated; it emerges from the complex interplay of experience, reflection, relationship, and time. It requires the inefficient process of living with questions, wrestling with contradictions, allowing understanding to ripen gradually.
The velocity machine has no patience for such inefficiency. It wants answers, not questions. Solutions, not mysteries. Outcomes, not processes. It treats meaning as a product to be delivered rather than a garden to be tended. But meaning cannot be manufactured on demand—it must be cultivated through the patient practice of attention, the slow accumulation of experience, the gradual development of insight.
When we accelerate human processes beyond their natural rhythms, we don’t just make them more efficient – we fundamentally change their character. A conversation conducted at the speed of text messages is not the same as one that unfolds over hours around a dinner table. A decision made in microseconds by an algorithm is not equivalent to one reached through careful deliberation by a group of thoughtful humans. A relationship mediated by technology is not identical to one built through sustained, unmediated presence.
The substitution seems reasonable because we focus on the outputs rather than the processes. The algorithm reaches the “same” decision, the digital communication conveys the “same” information, the automated system produces the “same” result. But this equivalence is illusory. The processes themselves are part of what makes us human, and when we replace them with faster alternatives, we lose something essential even when the outputs appear identical.
THE RESISTANCE OF TIME
Time, it turns out, is not neutral. Different activities require different temporal rhythms, and attempting to force them into alien timeframes doesn’t just reduce efficiency – it can destroy the activity altogether. You cannot accelerate pregnancy, genuine friendship, the development of wisdom, the healing of trauma, or the growth of an old-growth forest. These processes have their own internal logic, their own necessary rhythms, their own requirements for patience.
Yet we live in a culture that treats all forms of temporal resistance as problems to be solved rather than truths to be honored. We develop apps to speed up friendship formation, pills to accelerate learning, systems to compress complex decision-making into instant choices. We mistake the simulation of these processes for the processes themselves, not realizing that the time they require is not a bug to be fixed but a feature essential to their nature.
This temporal resistance is not inefficiency – it’s wisdom. The slow processes are often the ones that matter most, that create the deepest value, that sustain us over time. But they are precisely the ones most vulnerable to the velocity machine, most likely to be optimized away in the name of progress.
Consider the difference between information and knowledge, between knowledge and wisdom. Information can be transmitted instantaneously. Knowledge requires time to develop – hours, days, months of study and practice. Wisdom requires even longer – years, decades of living with questions, making mistakes, reflecting on experience. Each level builds on the previous one, but the construction cannot be rushed without compromising the integrity of the whole.
We have become incredibly sophisticated at producing and processing information, moderately skilled at developing knowledge, and increasingly incompetent at cultivating wisdom. This is not coincidental; it reflects our temporal priorities, our impatience with slow processes, our preference for quick fixes over long-term solutions.
THE ECONOMICS OF DESTRUCTION
The economic logic that drives the velocity machine seems unassailable: why employ 700 people when an algorithm can do the same work? Why wait for human deliberation when a system can decide instantly? Why tolerate inefficiency when optimization is available? The mathematics of cost reduction appears to be simple common sense.
But this logic rests on fundamental category errors. It assumes that all forms of value can be quantified and compared, that efficiency is always preferable to other virtues, that the short-term gains from automation outweigh the long-term costs of human displacement. It treats human labor as nothing more than an expensive and unreliable form of computation rather than recognizing it as the source of innovation, adaptation, and meaning.
More fundamentally, it ignores the systemic effects of widespread automation. If algorithms replace human workers across multiple industries simultaneously, who will have the purchasing power to buy the products and services these systems produce? If we optimize away human employment, we also optimize away human consumption. The system becomes parasitic, feeding on its own foundation until it collapses.
Siemiatkowski’s warning about economic downturn reflects this deeper contradiction. The same forces that make individual companies “leaner and more efficient” may make the broader economy less stable and less viable. We are optimizing locally while destroying globally, improving individual metrics while degrading systemic resilience.
This is not an argument against all automation or technological advancement. It’s a call for more thoughtful consideration of what we’re optimizing for, what we’re willing to sacrifice, and what unintended consequences we’re creating. Progress that undermines its own foundation is not progress—it’s sophisticated self-destruction.
THE REDISCOVERY OF WISDOM
The solution is not to reject technology or embrace inefficiency for its own sake. It’s to develop more nuanced criteria for evaluating progress, more sophisticated understanding of what constitutes genuine advancement. Not everything that can be optimized should be. Not every form of speed represents improvement. Not every elimination of friction creates value.
We need to rediscover the wisdom of appropriate pace, the recognition that different activities have different optimal speeds. We need to develop economic models that account for the full spectrum of human values, not just those that can be easily quantified. We need to design technologies that enhance human capability rather than replacing human agency.
Most importantly, we need to resist the seductive mythology of frictionless efficiency and remember that friction is often where life happens. The pause between question and answer. The struggle to understand. The patient development of skill. The slow cultivation of relationship. The gradual emergence of wisdom.
Progress doesn’t break things, as the saying goes. Speed does. And in our rush toward an optimized future, we risk optimizing away the very qualities that make us human. The challenge is not to move faster but to move more thoughtfully, not to eliminate friction but to honor the friction that matters, not to replace human judgment but to enhance human wisdom.
The velocity machine will continue to accelerate. The question is whether we will choose to ride it blindly toward an efficient but meaningless future, or whether we will learn to guide it toward destinations worthy of the journey.
The choice, for now, remains ours. But time, as always, is running out.
