Democracy on Hard Mode
Choosing Friction in a Frictionless World
How many times a day do you ask yourself, “What the fuck is going on?”
I do it about 47 times before lunch. It feels like vertigo. It feels like witnessing daily bouts of collective insanity while being handcuffed to the radiator.
The onslaught causes fatigue and despair. But mostly, it causes confusion.
So I’m writing. Writing forces me to slow down, turn away from the feed, and navigate my thoughts rather than doom-scrolling into oblivion.
Drowning in the Firehose
Do you feel a blood pressure spike when you open the news? It’s not just disagreement; it’s a specific kind of exhausting noise.
This is the Gish Gallop. Originally a debate tactic where a creationist would drown an opponent in a torrent of half-truths, it has become the default mode of the internet.
But let’s be honest about the mechanism at play. It isn’t just the chaos agent in the White House. It’s a synthesis. This is the Trump-Algorithm Feedback Loop.
Oddly, it took a man from a previous generation to fully unlock the dark potential of modern technology. Trump didn’t code the algorithms, but his rhetorical style perfectly mirrors them. He’s a master of exploitation.
He replaced policy deliberation with pure, unadulterated gut instinct. He floods the zone with so much noise, speed, and confidence that the “truth” becomes irrelevant. He creates a reality distortion field where feeling dominant matters more than being factually correct.
This style mapped perfectly onto an Attention Economy that was already hungry for speed and outrage. The tech giants built the engine; Trump just poured the fuel into it.
It worked so well that it became the template for the entire culture. Now, everyone - from TikTok influencers to Government officials - is miming that style.
Like I said, what the fuck is going on?
The Hardware Problem
Of course our psychological loopholes existed long before 2016. But the smartphone enabled the seamless exploitation of those loopholes by the most powerful corporations in history. As a result, a handful of people are wealthy beyond belief, and the rest of us are served slop and cheap dopamine.
To understand why we eat the slop, you need to understand one of the most important books of the 20th century: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.
This book is a user manual for your brain. Kahneman explains that we have two modes of thinking:
System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional. It is great at spotting a lion in the grass. It is terrible at tax policy.
System 2 is slow, calorie-expensive, and lazy. But it is capable of complex logic and math. It’s the part of you that understands compound interest.
Why We Crave Low Entropy
We evolved with System 1 as the captain because it saves energy. In information theory, entropy is essentially a measure of “surprise.”
High entropy information is surprising, messy, and hard to predict. It forces your brain to wake up and burn calories. Low entropy information is repetitive, predictable, and safe. It tells you what you already expect to hear.
Viral ideas succeed because they are Low Entropy. Their truth value is wholly irrelevant.
When a politician shouts a simple slogan that confirms your bias, it feels good because it is cognitively frictionless. It offers zero surprise. It slides into your brain with no resistance.
Truth, however, is almost always high entropy. It is nuanced and messy. It contradicts at least some of what you thought you knew. And because it requires effort to process, your System 1 treats it like an infection.
The Asymmetry of Weaponization
This is why “common sense” usually fails in complex systems. Our intuition looks for patterns in what we can see, but the truth is often in what’s missing.
In World War II, the military wanted to armor the bullet holes on returning planes. Common sense, right? Reinforce the damage. But mathematician Abraham Wald stopped them. He pointed out they were only looking at survivors. The planes hit in the engines never came back. The truth was in the negative space.
Understanding that required high-entropy, System 2 thinking - the kind that resists the obvious answer.
Today, we are being hunted by algorithms intentionally designed to bypass that thinking. Profit-driven algorithms, foreign disinformation units, domestic engagement farmers - these actors are not neutral. They know that outrage travels faster than analysis, and first impressions are hard to undo. The lie can get 10 million views, the correction a week later might get 10 thousand. The damage is already done.
Autocracy loves System 1. The Strongman offers a Low Entropy story: Here is the enemy, I am the savior, trust your gut.
Democracy, however, requires System 2. Democracy is the acceptance of complexity. It is the boring, frustrating work of acknowledging that your neighbor sees the world differently, and you have to build a sewer system together anyway.
The Mirage of Truth: Value Capture
If System 2 is so important, why have we abandoned it so completely? The answer lies in how we've gamified thought itself.
Why do we fall for it? Why do we trade the richness of reality for the cheap high of a hot take?
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's new book The Score offers a crucial insight into this dynamic in a concept he calls Value Capture.
It happens when we take a complex value - like “Truth” or “Understanding” - and replace it with a simple, easy-to-measure metric - like Likes and Views.
This is simplification. And as Nguyen persuasively argues, simplification is destructive.
Real life is rich and messy. It is hard to know for sure if you are being a "good citizen" or if you truly "understand" a geopolitical crisis. That uncertainty is uncomfortable.
The algorithm offers a solution: It collapses complexity into a score.
But metrics are low-resolution. They cannot capture nuance, localized context, or long-term wisdom. They can only capture reaction. So, when we start optimizing for the score, the richness of the original value evaporates.
We stop trying to understand the world and start trying to win the moment. We hollow out the very thing we claimed to care about. Politics stops being about governance and starts being about performance.
This is, in essence, an outsourcing of judgment. And it’s barely even at the conscious level because we are all so immersed in our phones and social networks.
The algorithm gives us a gamified score of social validation. System 1 loves a scoreboard. It prefers the clear, immediate hit of 1,000 likes over the messy, high-friction reality of actually understanding a trade tariff.
Does System 2 guarantee we all agree? Of course not. You can think carefully and still come to a vastly different conclusion than your neighbor. But that divergence is based on values, not confusion. Without System 2, your morals blow with the wind, and you become susceptible to whatever Low Entropy idea is trending that day.
Emerging From the Quagmire
So, how do we stop playing?
Individual clarity is important. It’s okay to say “I don’t know” and to teach yourself to be comfortable with doubt. Take a stand that you will only take a stand when you have more relevant information in order to form a coherent viewpoint!
Writing is a helpful counterweight to the feed, even if private. Write with the intention of understanding your own thinking.
But individual temperament is only half the battle. We also need to be honest about the economics of the firehose.
We have to face the fact that the modern ad-supported internet might be incompatible with a functional democracy. System 2 is slow. It is boring. It does not grab eyeballs, which means it cannot be monetized by an algorithm optimized for engagement.
If we want institutions that respect our minds, we have to stop eating out of the dumpster just because it’s free. We have to pay for "slow." We have to support media that resists the urge to game the metrics. We have to demand - with our dollars and our attention - a media ecosystem that values the truth more than the score.
The Choice
The algorithm wants you fast, angry, and certain. It wants you to play the easy game of “Value Capture,” chasing points on a scoreboard that doesn’t matter. The pull is constant, and we all feel it.
The alternative is what Nguyen calls Striving Play.
In games, we often accept arbitrary obstacles - like not using our hands in soccer - because the struggle makes the game worth playing. We choose the friction because it gives the activity meaning.
Democracy on Hard Mode is the same choice: we accept the friction of nuance and complexity because the alternative - Easy Mode truth - isn't truth at all.
Be the person at the dinner table who ruins the argument by asking for a definition of terms.
In Striving Play, we don’t endure the struggle to get the prize; the struggle is the prize. The algorithm offers a frictionless slide into oblivion. Choose the climb. Embrace the friction.
Chris Prato combines 16+ years of energy industry experience with a passion for technology and culture. With degrees in Mathematics, Philosophy, and an MBA, Chris offers unique insights into the intersection of energy, technology, and society. Follow him on LinkedIn, Threads, or Bluesky for more analysis on energy and culture (and the occasional hot take).