Slip sliding away
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about our growing society of indifference, AI, and the effect it was having on health professional practice.
Since then I’ve read two really intersting pieces by writers pitching in the same ballpark.
The first was by Tina He AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion, the second The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction came from Kyla Scanlon.
To recap, I was arguing that we were rapidly moving from what Foucault called a society of discipline — a society that had been very favourable to a few elite health professions — to an individualised, self-actualising Deleuzian society of control. In recent years though we had crept into a society of indifference, marked by predictive algorithms and a distrust of individual subjectivity.
Scanlon makes the same point, arguing that it’s the removal of friction that accounts for this shift;
‘All you have to do is take out your phone to disappear into the frictionless universe of technology’, that ‘gently nudges you toward products, perspectives, or more recently, policies’ (Scanlon 2025).
The key here is the removal of the friction of work, labour and effort.
Scanlon uses the example of a student studying for a university qualification. Once took hours of reading, compiling, reasoning, synthesising, and articulation to earn your degree. But now, many students are defaulting to ChatGPT to do the work for them. (It’s worth reading some of the stories and examples Scanlon gives here. But perhaps read them through your fingers.)
‘This isn’t traditional cheating’, Scanlon reminds us, ‘It’s ambient, platform-approved, investor-funded cognitive offloading’.
So we exist at the moment with a misalignment problem: ‘The credential still costs money and at least now, still signals value. It still unlocks jobs, internships, visas, and salaries… But the effort that used to underwrite that value has vanished’.
‘And what happens to the labor market’, Scanlon asks, ‘when a four-year degree signals nothing about what a person can actually do?’
Understandably, many people are appalled at the idea that our dentist, nurse, cardiac surgeon, midwife, or physiotherapist might be practising with a hollow qualification. But Tina He argues that we’re wrong to point the finger of blame at AI.
It’s natural to want to hold someone or something accountable when we feel threatened; we yearn for ‘a focal point for our moral clarity and rage’ (He 2025).
But the very point about the frictionlessness of AI is that it has a hollow centre.
And this is the key to its appeal. It will succeed ‘precisely because [it] remove[s] the friction of real human interaction’ (Scanlon 2025). And why wouldn’t people want this? After all, ‘AI mirrors you. You're being sold back to yourself’ (Scanlon 2025, citing Samantha Rose).
‘Software doesn’t hate, plot, or hold a grudge. It optimizes’ (He 2025).
Leaning on Hannah Arendt, He argues that ‘The most controversial AI applications—social credit systems, predictive policing, “optimized” hiring—aren’t dystopian because they are cruel, but because they are perfectly indifferent’ (He 2025).
And yet there remains something deeply uncomfortable about this machinic indifference.
He suggests that it’s the absence that ‘suffocates us’ (He 2025).
But then He turns the argument around suggesting that, perhaps, this as our way in: a Heideggerian moment when we can mobilise our collective disquiet to fight back against the emptiness all around us;
‘This isn’t about throwing away the tools, but about wrestling them into alignment with what we find sacred or essential. We won’t find salvation by escaping technology, but by using our awareness—our capacity for critique, ritual, invention, and refusal—to carve out room for messiness, for mourning, for risk, and for deep attention. The saving power is the act of remembering, in the heat of technical progress, to ask: “What space remains for meaning? For art? For wildness, chance, suffering, and genuine encounter’ (He 2025)?
Personally, I would agree with this sentiment, but only to a point.
In the first instance, one of the most pernicious effects of late-stage capitalism has been its startling ability to isolate and individualise each of us to the point where it is all but impossible these days to organise effective, collective resistance.
Ironically, left-leaning sociologists accelerated this process dramatically in the years after WWII through their relentless critique of elite institutions like the professions. Given that, I’m not sure we’re ever again going to see the same mobilisation of interests that we saw in the 1950s and 60s.
To echo a point I made a couple of weeks ago, no-one from either the right or the left wants to support the health professions these days. And if there’s little or no support for cherished institutions like these, I think it’s highly unlikely we will ever see a political consensus around other less emotionally tender areas.
The other exception I would draw to He’s call for human mobilisation is with the idea that we should try to wrestle these new social forces ‘into alignment with what we find sacred or essential’ (He 2025).
Once again, it’s all about human flourishing and our concern for the things that we find sacred and essential.
I’ve written a lot about this and the challenges and possibilities of approaching problems like this as a post-humanist.
After all, isn’t it our innate self-interest that brought us here in the first place?
References
He, T. (2025, May 24). AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion. Fakepixels. https://fakepixels.substack.com/p/ai-heidegger-and-evangelion
Scanlon, K. (2025, May 8). The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction. Kyla’s Newsletter. https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-most-valuable-commodity-in-the
Picking up some of Adam Curtis’ critique in that last sentence? What we must try to resist is the continued dominance of the financial markets and a related attitude of objectification of people. I’m more frightened of spreadsheets than I am of AI.