Freedom Requires Friction

Modern software is optimised for engagement. It removes delay, eliminates boredom, and replaces reflection with reaction. Not through malice — just selection pressure. What keeps us clicking survives.

The result isn't tyranny. It's erosion.

Drift exists to do the opposite.

The problem

We live inside systems designed to close loops as fast as possible. Every pause gets filled. Every impulse gets a shortcut. Curiosity becomes compulsion. Waiting becomes intolerable.

Addiction isn't a moral failing. It's what happens when you remove delay, add variable rewards, and optimise for retention. The pattern works equally well for slot machines, social feeds, and AI assistants.

No single app is the problem. The problem is design patterns that erode cognition quietly, cumulatively, everywhere.

Why it matters

Complex societies need people who can wait. Who can tolerate ambiguity. Who can plan beyond next week and sit with disagreement without reaching for their phone.

All of that requires boredom, delay, and cognitive slack — exactly what optimisation removes.

Societies don't collapse dramatically when this happens. They just get brittle. They lose resilience. That's how complex systems fail.

Lineage

Orwell warned that controlling language could control thought. Today, thought isn't forbidden — it's drowned in noise.

Huxley warned we'd accept control if it felt good. No force required. Just distraction.

Lem went further: systems don't need to dominate us. They just need to make us comfortable enough to stop trying. Comfort replaces competence. Decline feels like progress.

We take Lem seriously.

What we believe

Boredom is a civic resource. Delay is a prerequisite for choice. Not all friction is bad. Some tools should want to be used less.

Freedom can't survive in systems that abolish waiting.

What Drift is

A pause. That's it.

You feel an impulse. You open Drift. You wait. Then you decide whether you still want to do the thing.

No motivation. No gamification. No rewards. No improvement. Just time to decide.

What Drift refuses

Engagement metrics. Streaks. Social features. Behavioural scoring. Growth at the expense of principle.

If Drift becomes addictive, it has failed.

Success

Success isn't retention or daily use or scale.

Success is when you stop needing it. When the pause becomes habit and the app becomes unnecessary.

A tool that's no longer needed has done its job.

Civilisation doesn't only fail through catastrophe. It fails when enough people lose the habits required to sustain it.

Freedom doesn't disappear when it's taken away. It disappears when we forget how to use it.

Freedom begins where optimisation ends.