Frictionless

Go play it first. Play it here. You'll want a laptop with a webcam, headphones if you have them, and a few minutes. It works better if you don't know what it's doing yet, so come back after.

You've played it.

I've kept walking into the same thing in different places. There's a way you're supposed to be inside a company or an institution. Nobody says it. It's not in any handbook. But the whole weight of the place leans on you to take that shape, and if you don't, it slowly moves you out. I sometimes sensed I didn't satisfy a thing no one would name. It took the last place, one built to shape the people who pass through it, before I saw the thing I wasn't satisfying wasn't really about me. It was a structure.

Most people inside it never see the structure. They're already close to the right shape, so there's nothing to feel. You only notice it when you push against it, and pushing is what it punishes.

That's the piece. Go with the current and you glide, the score climbs, and the longer you stay the more it feels like freedom. Push, and you find out it was there the whole time. You map a little of it, and everything in the system is built to charge you for that. The friction costs you. It sounds bad. What you mark gets pulled back into the flow and erased before you can hold it. You can win and have touched none of it. The score and the map are opposites.

I used to think this was about good people and bad people. I don't anymore. We all live inside systems, and a system stays a system by needing us not to see past it. There's no view from nowhere, including mine. I got pushed far enough outside one of them, once, to feel the wall.

I can't hand you what that showed me, you have to feel it yourself. It's not the kind of thing words carry.