By The Intrepid in POSIWID — 04 Jan 2026

The Politics of Friction: You Wanna Be the Brake Pad?

On Systems, Sacrifice, and the Distribution of Cost

Introduction: The Seduction of Simple Numbers

A piece of equipment from manufacturer A has a failure rate of 1 in 100,000 cycles. Manufacturer B's equivalent fails at 1 in 50,000 cycles. If your use case requires 20,000 cycles, manufacturer A's component is still half as likely to fail as B's, right?

The math checks out—under certain assumptions. But the confident simplicity of "twice as reliable" is doing enormous work. It compresses a probability distribution into a ratio. It assumes a constant hazard rate. It treats failure as binary rather than graded. And it quietly erases the question of what happens in the tails, where the costs actually land.

This is not an essay about reliability engineering. But it starts there because the pattern that emerges from thinking carefully about failure rates turns out to be the same pattern that governs policy debates, institutional behavior, and the distribution of harm across complex systems.

The pattern is this: systems compress complexity into legible proxies, and someone always absorbs what the compression erases.

"Twice as reliable" is a proxy. So is "common-sense regulation." So is "the system weathered the storm." Each phrase offers clarity by flattening something that resists flattening. Each creates a gap between what the number claims and what actually happens to people when the number is wrong.

Stafford Beer, the British cybernetician, offered a diagnostic that cuts through this: POSIWID—the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. Not what it claims, not what its designers intended, not what its mission statement promises. What it does. If a system reliably produces a certain outcome, that outcome is its purpose, regardless of rhetoric.

Applied to the simple numbers we use to govern complex situations, POSIWID asks: what do these compressions actually produce? Who benefits from the legibility? And who pays when the proxy diverges from reality?

This essay develops two frameworks for answering those questions, then proposes a practical test for evaluating any intervention that claims to add beneficial friction to a system. The first framework—what I'll call the Galen Erso Model—addresses how large systems change. The second—Who Gets to Be the Brake Pad—addresses how systems maintain themselves. The test that follows from both asks five questions that any proposed friction should be able to answer.

The examples come from domains that don't usually share analytical space: reliability engineering, firearms policy, healthcare regulation, and the quiet work of coaching novice shooters at a public range. The argument is that they're all instances of the same underlying dynamics—and that seeing those dynamics clearly is the first step toward designing systems that don't treat some people as sacrificial by default.

Part I: The Galen Erso Model

How Large Systems Change Through Structural Positioning Rather Than Persuasion

In Rogue One, the scientist Galen Erso is forced to work on the Death Star. He cannot refuse, cannot escape, cannot persuade the Empire to abandon the project. So he does something else: he embeds a vulnerability in the reactor design—an exhaust port, shielded against most attacks but not all, positioned where a precise strike could trigger a chain reaction.

Erso doesn't defeat the Death Star. He creates the possibility of defeating it. The actual activation requires events he'll never see: the theft of the plans, a desperate transmission, a pilot willing to take an impossible shot. Two movies' worth of collective sacrifice to exploit one engineer's quiet act of structural positioning.

This is a useful model for how large systems actually change—not through persuasion, not through winning arguments, but through altering the conditions under which future decisions get made.

The Limits of Persuasion

Arguments rarely move systems. This is frustrating for people who believe that good reasoning should matter, but it's structurally predictable. Large systems—governments, corporations, legal frameworks, cultural norms—are optimized for stability, not truth-seeking. They absorb dissent, route around objections, and metabolize critique into something that doesn't threaten continuity.

When someone says "we need to change minds," they're usually imagining a world where the people with authority are open to updating their beliefs based on evidence. Sometimes that's true. More often, the people with authority are embedded in structures that reward not updating—that treat consistency as legitimacy and hesitation as weakness.

Galen Erso understood this. He didn't try to convince the Empire that planet-killing weapons were wrong. He accepted that the system would continue on its trajectory and asked a different question: Where can I alter the structure in ways the system won't notice until it's too late?

Design Over Intent

The Erso model privileges design over intent. It's not about what you believe or what you want; it's about what you can embed in the architecture that momentum passes through.

This means identifying:

Positions where small changes have large downstream effects: chokepoints, standards, defaults, legal precedents
Constraints that can survive review: changes too small to trigger alarm, too technical to attract scrutiny, or too embedded to remove without stopping everything
Activation conditions that don't depend on you: the leverage you create may only become usable when circumstances align in ways you can't control or predict

The exhaust port wasn't a protest. It was an architectural decision that looked like engineering and functioned as sabotage. That's the key insight: effective structural positioning often doesn't look like resistance. It looks like normal work, performed by someone who understands the system well enough to know where its assumptions are load-bearing.

Latency and Alignment

The Erso model assumes latency. The person who creates leverage may never see it activated. This requires a particular kind of moral patience—the willingness to act without expectation of credit, recognition, or even confirmation that the act mattered.

It also assumes that activation requires alignment. Individual action is necessary but insufficient. Erso needed Jyn, Cassian, the Rogue One crew, the Rebel fleet, and eventually Luke Skywalker. The vulnerability existed for years before circumstances produced a coalition capable of exploiting it.

This is why systemic change so often looks abrupt to outside observers. The preparation is invisible—legal briefs filed, judicial appointments made, scholarly articles published, test cases selected—and then suddenly the landscape shifts. Roe v. Wade was settled law for fifty years, and then it wasn't. The Second Amendment was understood as militia-focused for most of American history, and then Heller redefined it. Brexit seemed unthinkable until a referendum made it irreversible.

In each case, the change wasn't spontaneous. It was the activation of leverage that had been quietly positioned over years or decades.

Case Studies

Roe and Dobbs: The overturning of Roe v. Wade didn't happen because abortion opponents won a national argument. Public opinion remained relatively stable. What changed was the composition of the courts, the result of decades of focus on judicial appointments, lower-court decisions, and legal scholarship that repositioned the constitutional questions. By the time Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reached the Supreme Court, the structural conditions for reversal were already in place. The decision felt sudden; the positioning was generational.

Heller: For most of the twentieth century, the Second Amendment was interpreted—including by courts—as tied to militia service. The individual-rights reading existed but was marginal. Then, over several decades, legal scholars, advocacy organizations, and litigators rebuilt the doctrinal foundation. By the time District of Columbia v. Heller arrived, the individual-rights interpretation had become intellectually respectable, lower courts had begun to diverge, and a clean test case had been engineered around a narrow jurisdiction. The opinion was 5-4, but the groundwork made that vote possible.

Brexit: The 2016 referendum didn't create Euroscepticism; it activated infrastructure that had been building for decades—media ecosystems, political factions, legal theories about parliamentary sovereignty, and a diffuse but persistent dissatisfaction with the European project. The referendum itself was a binary compression of enormous complexity, forced into a yes/no frame that converted latent sentiment into irreversible procedure. The "Leave" campaign didn't persuade a majority that Brexit was wise; it mobilized existing disposition through a mechanism that didn't require wisdom—only turnout.

The Limits of the Model

The Galen Erso model explains a great deal, but it's not a complete theory of change. It privileges structural positioning and tends to underweight other dynamics: coalition-building, incremental reform, persistent pressure that makes the status quo more expensive than adaptation.

Civil rights legislation in the United States didn't require a Death Star explosion. It required sustained institutional pressure across courts, legislatures, and public opinion—decades of work that made segregation increasingly costly to maintain. That's a different model of leverage: not latent vulnerability waiting for activation, but continuous friction imposed until reform becomes the cheaper option.

The honest version of the Erso model, then, is not "this is how all change happens." It's "this is why so much change surprises people who thought things were settled." The model explains the abrupt character of shifts that were actually prepared slowly. It doesn't claim that abrupt activation is the only path.

What it does insist on is this: if something you care about exists only because "everyone knows it's settled," it is living on borrowed time. And if something you oppose feels immovable, look for where its assumptions are quietly load-bearing.

That pair of observations is uncomfortable precisely because it's symmetric. It applies regardless of what you want to preserve or destroy.

Part II: Who Gets to Be the Brake Pad?

How Systems Maintain Themselves by Routing Costs to Those Least Able to Refuse

If the Galen Erso model asks how systems change, the brake pad question asks who pays for systems to stay the same.

The answer, with depressing consistency, is: whoever is most legible to the system and least able to exit it.

Friction as Control

Before developing that claim, it's worth rehabilitating a concept that modern systems have taught us to despise: friction.

In physical systems, friction is not the enemy of control—it's the precondition for it. A tire without friction doesn't go fast; it hydroplanes. Brakes work by converting motion into heat through resistance. A rudder only steers because water pushes back. An aileron only works because air resists.

Remove friction and you don't get elegance. You get loss of authority.

What friction provides is coupling—the mechanism by which intent translates into effect. Without resistance, inputs stop mattering. The system becomes ballistic: once launched, it follows initial conditions and momentum, not ongoing judgment.

This is why the relentless drive to remove friction from modern systems—"seamless," "frictionless," "one-click"—often produces instability. The system moves faster, but it can no longer steer. Corrections come too late or cost too much. The people inside the system feel the acceleration but can't find the controls.

The Sacrificial Component

Here's where the physics gets uncomfortable.

Brake pads work by converting kinetic energy into heat through their own degradation. That's not a metaphor; it's the mechanism. The system keeps moving; the pad absorbs the cost and eventually needs replacement.

In social systems, the same logic applies—but the "pads" are usually people.

When a system imposes friction, that friction localizes. Heat shows up somewhere specific. Material gets consumed somewhere specific. And the people deciding when to apply the brakes are almost never the components that wear down.

"Brake pads exist for a reason" is the comfortable observation from the systems-thinking whiteboard.

"Fine, you wanna be the brake pad?" is the response that reveals what the abstraction hides.

Who Ends Up in This Role?

The elderly. The precarious. The conscientious. The on-call. The "responsible" ones.

What these groups share is a structural position: legibility to the system combined with limited exit options. The system can find them, route costs to them, and count on them staying. They're visible enough to be identified as friction-bearers, and constrained enough that they can't refuse.

The 3:45 AM on-call engineer absorbs the friction between "ship fast" and "don't break things." They convert organizational contradictions into personal stress, sleep deprivation, and eroded judgment—so that the system can maintain velocity without resolving its own tensions.

The Swedish care home resident during COVID absorbed the friction between "maintain societal openness" and "accept mortality risk." Sweden's approach was defensible as a system-level tradeoff—but the costs weren't distributed evenly. The system weathered the storm; the elderly bore the heat.

The person relying on ACA subsidies absorbs the friction when those subsidies expire. "Fiscal responsibility" is the stated value; the mechanism is transferring load to people who organized their lives around coverage the system told them to expect.

The community already overrepresented in enforcement statistics absorbs the friction when new regulations are added to an already-biased policing substrate. The stated goal is safety; the effect is more discretionary encounters with people who were already bearing disproportionate cost.

The Pattern

"The system weathered the storm" always has a silent suffix: and here's who paid.

Resilience, in this light, is not a neutral property. It's relational. A system can be resilient in the sense of continuing to function while being extractive toward the people who make that continuation possible.

This is why the question "resilient for whom?" is not rhetorical. Stability is not morally neutral. Slack is not equitably distributed. And friction is not an abstract property—it is experienced as exhaustion, illness, stalled careers, lost years, and sometimes early death.

Observability vs. Governability

Modern systems are very good at observing themselves. Dashboards, alerts, metrics, SLOs, error budgets—the apparatus of site reliability engineering represents genuine sophistication in technical self-diagnosis.

But technical observation is not the same as organizational response. A system can detect its own failure in real time while remaining institutionally incapable of acting on that detection.

The PagerDuty alert at 3:45 AM is often not a control surface; it's a heat dump. The system offloads entropy onto a human because it hasn't been designed to metabolize the problem internally. The human becomes the sacrificial interface between momentum and reality.

The gap between observability and governability is where brake pads live. The system sees the stress; it just routes the stress to whoever can't refuse to absorb it.

A sharper formulation: We are very good at building systems that can detect their own failure in real time. We are very bad at building institutions that can legitimize acting on that detection in real time.

That gap—not AI, not speed, not even ideology—may be the central unsolved problem of contemporary governance.

Part III: The Five-Question Friction Test

How to Evaluate Proposed Interventions for Proportionality, Targeting, and Distributive Justice

If friction is necessary for control but unequally distributed in its costs, then any proposal to add friction to a system should be able to answer five questions:

What harm channel does this friction actually target?
Where does it localize costs?
How reversible is it?
What data will tell us it's abrading the wrong people?
What off-ramps exist for compliance without punishment?

These aren't rhetorical questions. They're audit criteria. A proposal that can't answer them isn't necessarily wrong, but it is incomplete—and incompleteness in friction design is how systems end up grinding down the same people who were already bearing disproportionate load.

Question 1: What Harm Channel?

This question forces specificity about what problem the friction is supposed to solve.

Consider firearms policy. The dominant harm channels include:

Suicide: crisis-time, impulse-amplified, lethality-sensitive
Homicide: distributed across domestic violence, criminal activity, and mass public violence
Negligent discharge: training-sensitive, storage-sensitive, culture-sensitive

These are different problems. They have different causal structures and respond to different interventions. Suicide is primarily about access during acute crisis windows; the relevant variable is how quickly intent can become irreversible action. Mass public violence is about casualty multiplication; the relevant variables are rate of fire, magazine capacity, and target density. Domestic homicide is about interpersonal dynamics, escalation, and weapon availability within relationships.

"Assault weapon" bans primarily address the mass-violence channel (plus symbolic politics). They do relatively little for suicide prevention, which accounts for the majority of firearm deaths. Conflating the channels produces policy that is emotionally satisfying but poorly targeted—friction that generates heat without steering toward the stated goal.

If the primary harm vector is suicide, then the most meaningful frictions are ones that create small buffers in the worst hour: storage norms, temporary transfer options, voluntary delay mechanisms, family-level safety planning. These interventions are unglamorous, local, and behavioral. They don't make good headlines. They also don't confuse symbolic action with mortality reduction.

Question 2: Where Does It Localize Costs?

Every friction lands somewhere. The question is whether the landing zone is proportionate and just.

In 2022, Oregon's Measure 114 proposed new permit requirements and magazine restrictions. A racial and ethnic impact statement was required but largely deferred with claims that "data was not available." But data was available—from Massachusetts, which had implemented similar restrictions and subsequently saw stark racial disparities in enforcement. Black residents were vastly overrepresented in possession charges, particularly for secondary offenses layered onto other stops.

Oregon's own enforcement substrate was already documented as biased. The Criminal Justice Commission, the ACLU, and Department of Justice oversight had all identified patterns of racially disparate policing. Adding new friction to that substrate wouldn't neutrally reduce harm; it would predictably concentrate enforcement on communities already overrepresented at every decision point.

The question "where does this localize costs?" demands that proponents specify who will absorb the friction—and acknowledge when that absorption pattern is already skewed.

Question 3: How Reversible Is It?

Friction that creates permanent status crimes is different from friction that creates temporary barriers.

A waiting period is reversible friction: delay, not prohibition. A training requirement is potentially reversible if training is accessible. A permit system can be reversible if permits are obtainable without prohibitive cost.

A possession ban with no amnesty period is not reversible. Once the deadline passes, the person who didn't comply—for whatever reason: ignorance, inability, lack of access to legal guidance—becomes a criminal. The friction has converted into permanent status, with all the downstream consequences that criminal records produce.

Non-sacrificial friction design includes long grace periods, clear amnesty pathways, and emphasis on compliance before punishment. It distinguishes between "we want fewer of these in circulation" and "we want to punish people who have them."

Question 4: What Data Will Tell Us?

This question insists on feedback loops.

If a friction is supposed to reduce harm without disproportionate burden, there should be a way to detect when it's failing. That means:

Required reporting on enforcement patterns by race, ethnicity, income, and geography
Independent oversight with authority to access data
Automatic triggers for corrective action when disparities exceed thresholds
Public transparency so that affected communities can see what's happening

A policy that adds friction without specifying how to detect discriminatory application is a policy that has already decided not to care. The absence of a feedback mechanism isn't neutral; it's a design choice that insulates the policy from accountability.

Question 5: What Off-Ramps Exist?

The final question asks whether compliance is possible without punishment—whether the system creates paths to conformity or just paths to criminalization.

Off-ramps might include:

Fee waivers for low-income applicants
Accessible training with flexible scheduling
Predictable timelines and transparent criteria
Appeal processes for denials
Cure periods for paperwork violations

These aren't concessions to bad actors. They're recognitions that friction affects different people differently, and that equity of access must be a core feature of friction design, not an afterthought.

A system that makes compliance expensive, confusing, or inaccessible has already decided who its brake pads will be. The question is whether that decision is explicit and accountable, or hidden behind procedural neutrality.

Part IV: Friction in Practice

The Tinkerer, the Coach, and the Prosecutor

The frameworks developed above are abstract. This section grounds them in a specific domain: the ecosystem of firearms modification, training, and legal consequence.

The Tinkerer's Path

Modern firearms—particularly those built on the Glock pattern—exist within an unintentional commons. Glock's core patents expired years ago. The design entered the public domain. Companies like Palmetto State Armory now produce compatible frames, slides, and components at a fraction of Glock's price.

This has created a "Ship of Theseus" culture: start with a factory pistol, swap the slide, add an optic, change the trigger, upgrade the barrel, replace the frame. At what point is it still "a Glock"? At what point is it something else entirely?

For the hobbyist, this modularity is empowerment. It allows experimentation, personalization, and the kind of iterative learning that only comes from taking things apart and putting them back together differently. The culture celebrates this: forums, YouTube channels, classes, and competitions all reward the tinkerer who has "dialed in" their setup.

But modularity has second-order effects that the benign-hobbyist framing tends to elide.

Normalization: The tinkerer ecosystem turns firearms into familiar consumer-tech objects—things you "optimize," "build," "EDC," "upgrade." That shift changes baseline attitudes about presence, ubiquity, and risk. It can increase adoption among people who would otherwise treat a gun as a single serious purchase, or not a purchase at all.

Diluted accountability: When a firearm is recomposed from parts sourced across multiple vendors, questions of provenance, tolerances, and responsibility become harder to answer. Whose QC is implicated when something fails? What parts were installed at the time of an incident? The platform doesn't distinguish between responsible experimentation and reckless assembly.

Speed optimization: Competition culture rewards modifications that reduce the time between shots: ported barrels to minimize muzzle flip, lightened triggers for faster reset, aggressive texturing for grip under recoil. A build optimized for ".2 second splits" is optimized to reduce the friction between "decide to shoot" and "shoot again." That's the opposite of what measured response requires in a defensive context.

None of this makes tinkering inherently wrong. It does mean that a culture celebrating experimentation should be honest about what experimentation produces at scale.

The Coach's Position

At the other end of the ecosystem is the person who adds friction back in.

A range coach at a public training facility occupies a specific structural role: catching small failures before they cascade. A muzzle that drifts toward the firing line. A trigger finger that forgets "home base." A new shooter overwhelmed by the coordination demands of stance, grip, presentation, and trigger press.

The work is unglamorous. It doesn't resolve the contradictions baked into firearms culture, training access, or regulatory policy. But within a system that moves people quickly toward capability and far more unevenly toward judgment, being present, attentive, and willing to slow things down is a form of applied friction.

What makes training access particularly fraught is its class signature. A full-day course, several hundred dollars in ammunition, reliable transportation, comfort entering a law-enforcement facility, and the ability to pass background checks without complication all function as quiet prerequisites. The people most able to pursue structured responsibility are often those already buffered by time, money, and institutional trust.

Meanwhile, firearms circulate far more widely than the opportunity to learn how to handle them safely.

This is the brake pad problem in miniature: the friction that produces safety is not evenly distributed. Capability scales easily; judgment doesn't.

The Prosecutor's Framing

If a heavily modified firearm is ever used in a defensive shooting, everything about the build becomes narratively available.

The ported slide. The competition trigger. The aggressive stippling. The extended magazine. None of these are legally relevant to whether force was justified. But juries aren't legal reasoning machines; they're narrative processors. And a build that screams "speed optimization" tells a story that a stock Glock 19 doesn't.

"This wasn't someone who kept a firearm for protection. This was someone who built a weapon. Look at the modifications. The red trigger. This is someone who was preparing for violence. Someone who anticipated killing."

That framing is unfair. It may also be effective. The same modularity that empowers the hobbyist creates a liability artifact in any legal proceeding.

The practical wisdom, understood by anyone who has thought carefully about defensive use, is: carry guns that look like serious tools, not projects. Save the hot rods for the range and competition. If it would look bad in a headline, it will look bad to a jury.

That's self-imposed friction—a constraint the system won't apply until it's too late, so you apply it yourself.

Synthesis: The Two Threads as One Fabric

The Galen Erso model asks: How do systems change?

The Brake Pad question asks: Who pays for systems to stay the same?

These are not separate inquiries. They're the same question viewed from different positions within the system.

Systems persist by externalizing costs onto brake pads—people who absorb friction, heat, and wear so the system can continue. Systems change when structural leverage is activated—when accumulated positioning finally aligns with circumstances that allow a new trajectory.

The people creating leverage and the people serving as brake pads are rarely the same. The scientist embedding a vulnerability in the reactor isn't the pilot who flies into the trench. The legal scholar repositioning constitutional doctrine isn't the person who gets stopped, searched, and charged under the enforcement regime that doctrine enables.

Both costs—of systemic continuity and of systemic change—are real. Both are distributed unequally. Both tend to land on people with less power to refuse.

"That's Just the Way It Is"

Bruce Hornsby's lyric captures the system's most powerful defensive move: collapsing history into inevitability.

"That's just the way it is" reframes accumulated choices as physics. It tells individuals that friction is futile, dissent is naïve, and leverage is imaginary. It's not a belief—it's a stabilization mechanism.

"But don't you believe it" is not a counter-slogan. It's a refusal to let inevitability pass unexamined. It's attention to what's presented as timeless, asking what's load-bearing, recognizing that consensus is not permanence.

The lyric doesn't say how things will change. It just refuses the lie that they can't.

The Design Problem That Remains

If friction is necessary for control but currently distributed in ways that treat some people as sacrificial by default, then the design question is:

What would a system look like that could both absorb hard questions and make the distribution of resulting costs explicit and contestable in real time?

That question doesn't have a clean answer. It may not have an answer—at least not one that survives contact with the political economy of who benefits from current arrangements.

But the Five-Question Test is at least a starting point. Any proposed friction should be able to say:

What harm it actually targets
Where it localizes costs
How reversible it is
What data will reveal if it's abrading the wrong people
What off-ramps exist for compliance without punishment

A proposal that can answer those questions isn't automatically good. But a proposal that can't answer them is almost certainly incomplete in ways that will matter to someone—usually someone without the power to make their objection heard until the damage is done.

The Limit of Diagnosis

This essay has offered frameworks for seeing how systems compress, externalize, and distribute. It has not resolved the value conflicts underneath.

Who should bear the costs of systemic friction? How much reversal is actually possible in path-dependent societies? When is structural positioning legitimate strategy and when is it corrosive subversion?

Those questions don't yield to better frameworks. They're political and moral in ways that analysis can clarify but not settle.

What the frameworks can do is make visible what systems tend to hide: the silent suffixes, the sacrificial components, the assumptions doing load-bearing work. That visibility doesn't guarantee justice. It just makes injustice harder to ignore.

Most systems don't fail because they lack brake pads. They fail because they treat brake pads as free.

The cost is always being paid. The question is whether we're honest about who's paying it—and whether the people with authority to redesign the system are willing to share the cost, or whether they'll continue to find brake pads who can't refuse.

For a reflection on what it means to apply friction directly—one student, one safety correction, one weekend at a time—see "The Easy Part and the Hard Part."