The eerie silence of automation

The machine that took your task and your story.

Sep 26, 2025

There’s a particular kind of silence that only exists in smooth systems. It’s the hush of the automatic door that opens before you decide to push, the bill that pays itself while you forget what month it is, the file that syncs somewhere in a server-farm sky without ever asking to be touched by a human hand. My little Austrian city in the morning hums with this silence: the tram hisses perfectly to a halt; you tap your card and the validator chirps like a polite bird; inside the supermarket, the self-checkouts blink with cartoon eyes, asking you to perform a pantomime of “shopping” without ever looking anyone in the face. No cash; no conversation; no waiting. Everything slides.

People keep saying automation will take our jobs. I don’t think that’s the first thing it takes. First, it takes the texture: the friction that gave the day its shape and the self a place to rub against. Then, when the day is smoothed, it comes for something more serious—the story you used to tell yourself about what you do, and who you are while you do it.

We underestimate how much meaning lives inside small resistances. Not the heroic stuff, not some myth of the noble worker swinging a pickaxe at dawn. I mean mundane, stupid little snags: the printer jam that forced you to kneel down and curse at a plastic drawer; the espresso machine that wanted its handle locked at exactly the right angle; the invoice you had to walk to the office next door to get stamped by a person with a specific pen; the child who interrupted you mid-email and demanded you be a human right now, not a productivity organism. Friction, everywhere, like grit in the gears. Annoying. Time-wasting. And weirdly, crucial.

Because friction makes you slow down just enough to notice that life is happening. It leaves fingerprints. When my job is frictive—when the task resists me, even a little—I have to invent myself as someone capable of pushing back. I become a protagonist, if only for the length of a queue. You stand at the post office clutching a package; you eavesdrop on an old man lecturing the clerk about stamps; you are temporarily a node in an unoptimized web of bodies, and the world feels like a world. When the task vanishes into a frictionless funnel, so does that little ritual of selfhood. The machine does it, and you are relieved; the machine does it, and you are somehow diminished.

Automation promises to free you from the stupid parts of life. And it does. But it also frees you from the parts of life that kept you real.

The ideology of smoothness always arrives with kindness in its eyes. It says: let me help. Let me take the suffering away. Let me remove the “waste”—the lines, the forms, the misclicks, the typos, the human awkwardness. You’re left with the pure activity: the buying without paying, the writing without typing, the travel without traveling. You’ve saved a minute here, five there; multiply that across the week, and look, you’ve saved hours. Okay, but what for?

The system already knows for what. “For more.” More deliverables, more reach, more intake, more output, more measurable you. Automation rarely widens life; it compresses it, squeezing out the air between tasks until you live at the density of a PDF. The free time created by machines is immediately privatized by targets. The hour you saved becomes an obligation to squeeze an extra hour’s worth of “value” from yourself. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s simply the logic of a culture that cannot recognize time that is not accounted for.

Mark Fisher talked about the “slow cancellation of the future,” but there is also a slow cancellation of friction. The bumps that used to snag us—forcing us to compose ourselves, to make a choice, to touch the world—are shaved down into beige. You notice it in your body first: fewer micro-rituals, fewer interruptions that involve other people. You forget how to ask for help because you’ve learned to ask the interface. You forget the smell of a waiting room because there isn’t one. You forget your own patience. You forget that patience is a muscle. In smoothness, we weaken.

And yes, I know: friction can be cruelty. Bureaucratic labyrinths are sadism painted beige. Old systems produced their own forms of humiliation—standing in a corridor in some government institution while a fluorescent light flickers and a clerk tells you to come back with another certificate you’ve never heard of. No nostalgia for that. But be careful: when the new system promises to “remove the pain,” it often means “remove you.” The app will “handle it,” which means it will handle you, which means you must become handleable—legible, predictable, compliant. What we gain in smoothness, we lose in agency. In the old maze you were at least a rat; in the smooth tunnel you’re cargo.

There’s a particular pain that automation intensifies, the pain of being a person who no longer gets to feel their own edges. How do you prove you exist when everything you do happens without you? Your rent pays itself; your groceries arrive; your documents sign themselves; your writing completes itself; your calendar summons you like a dog whistle. Even desire is automated—recommendations, playlists, “For You.” You start to suspect that what’s for you is not from you.

People call this convenience. It’s a smooth hell.

In this smooth hell, the taskbar of life runs quietly in the background. Your day becomes a sequence of acknowledgments. You are no longer an agent; you are an approver. You grant permissions to scripts that never stop humming. You live like a middle manager of yourself, approving, approving, approving. Click “yes” to cookies; click “yes” to terms; click “yes” to the future. The irony is that the automation was supposed to remove management from your life. Instead, it installs management inside your skull.

There’s another thing that vanishes with friction: the stories we used to tell about competence and craft. You used to know someone because of the way they did something, a signature embedded in repetition. The way a friend rolled a cigarette while walking; the way your grandmother folded dumplings; the way a colleague, god help them, formatted a slide deck with perverse pride; the way a tram driver took a corner like a pianist negotiating a difficult run. Skill is not just what you can do; it’s how you do it, and how you become yourself by doing it again and again. When the machine takes over, the task is done perfectly—no signature, no accident, no idiosyncrasy. The output is fine. Your story dissolves.

We pretend we don’t care because caring would be sentimental. We praise the sleek, the clean, the unseen, because we are told that visible machinery is a kind of failure. But the unseen machinery is not absent. It has been buried, and with it, the meaning-making accidents of our hands. Marx wrote that “all that is solid melts into air.” Today it’s more like: all that is textured melts into glass.

I’m not an idiot; I use the machines. I like it when Google Maps shows me exactly when I need to leave the house; I like that the dentist texts me so I don’t miss the appointment; I like that digital signatures mean I don’t have to take two buses to stamp a page. I also notice the weird emptiness that creeps in, like fog, when my day has no resistance. If nothing pushes back, I cannot tell what I’m pushing against, and if I cannot tell what I’m pushing against, it becomes very hard to say who is doing the pushing. Me? The app? The “workflow”? The algorithm? The economy? The Big Other in a hoodie?

Maybe friction is not the enemy of freedom. Maybe friction is the price of reality.

So what now—go Luddite? Throw the phone in the river and churn butter? That’s a cute fantasy until your landlord demands a near-instant money transfer and your job lives inside a browser tab. The point is not to reverse time. The point is to re-introduce resistant matter into a life that has been laundered into obedience by convenience.

Resistant matter can be small. Pay cash sometimes and look at the person who takes it. Cook something that requires your hands to learn a new motion. Walk to the store even when the delivery app is blinking at you like a hungry cat. Print a page and mark it with a pen that leaks. Say the thing you would normally type. Refuse the default route on your map app and get lost once a week, on purpose, in your own city. Build a chair and sit in it while it wobbles because you made it and your body now knows something the algorithm cannot know.

In digital work, you can add resistance back in without making it theatrical. Turn off autocomplete and feel your sentences again. Let a paragraph be ugly for a day before you beautify it. Don’t optimize every keystroke out of existence; let some keystrokes linger, like footsteps on a real floor.

Collective resistant matter is harder and more interesting. Meet in rooms without agendas. Organize around the slowness you’re not supposed to have. Use the time automation “gives” you to do something automation cannot measure: care poorly, together, with the inefficiency of being human. That might mean talking to your neighbors; it might mean learning the names of the people who keep your building warm; it might mean being the person who stands in line for someone else who can’t.

There’s a punk line that rattles around my head—“the future is unwritten.” It’s a cliché now, stamped on tote bags, but it hints at what friction did for us: it forced us to write the day by hand. Smooth systems promise a future already written for you in a neat font. You will like this; you will be this; you will go here; you will produce that; you will approve. But sometimes the only way to discover what you actually want is to scrape against what you don’t. Wanting requires resistance. In a perfectly optimized life, you can only select.

I don’t think the answer is to sabotage every machine (although some machines richly deserve it). The answer is to become opaque to the smoothness that wants to pass through you without contact. To be a surface that bites back a little—your own tooth. Refuse to be fully interoperable. Be inconvenient sometimes. Demand time that cannot be explained on a timesheet. If the system calls that laziness, call it life.

At night the city is even quieter now. The tram rests. The validators sleep. The self-checkouts dream of tomorrow’s apples. Somewhere in a server farm, a million tasks are being completed beautifully without anyone ever knowing they were tasks. In that eerie silence, put your hand on something real and feel it resist you. Listen to the sound it makes: not a song, not a notification, not a KPI. Just the old sound, the good sound, of a world that doesn’t immediately let you in.

Thanks for reading and supporting my work,

Antonio Melonio

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