Look, we need to talk about what happens when we let “making things more efficient” become the only way we judge system changes. Because right now, we’re watching a massive shift in how power works - from physical control to interface control - and our usual ways of thinking about ethics and outcomes are leaving us blind to what’s actually happening.

Modern life in many ways obscures the fireworks we see in movies. You think transformation happens in booms, but in reality, it’s a few clicks, a lot of coordination and building alignment. It’s not an overnight process, sometimes it takes years. But the payoff? Worth it. The residuals can last decades.

Writing in the 1950s, Anscombe pushed back hard against the idea that we should only judge actions by their outcomes. When we’re watching systems get “optimized” in ways that strip out human judgment and agency in the name of efficiency, it feels like a remake of the same song.

Misguided people think systems need centralization. There’s value in coordination, but centralization means creating more single points of failure. When you don’t care about failure, and you’re more interested in command and control, you care about being able to develop the panopticon, not whether the system works as it was intended to work.

Each step comes with great metrics. Better efficiency! Faster processing! Improved outcomes! But something crucial gets lost: the ability of humans to actually make the system work for human needs.

This isn’t just about technology - it’s about how we think about systems. In “Seeing Like a State,” Scott how the drive to make things “legible” to power often destroys what makes them actually work for people. When we optimize for control rather than capability, we get systems that look great on paper but fail in reality.

The wild thing is, this works because we don’t have good language for what we’re losing. When someone says they’re making something “more efficient,” they’re often really saying they’re making it more controllable. These aren’t the same thing, but our outcome-focused thinking makes it hard to see the difference.

The stakes here are real. When we let systems get optimized for control rather than capability, we lose more than efficiency - we lose the ability to make things work differently. And that’s the whole game.