The American Ergonomic Ideal
American power has long been driven by what I call an “ergonomic ideal”: squeezing every bit of extraction out of a system while disguising or displacing any strain or struggle.
Where once muskets, supply lines and garrisoned forts bore the physical weight of conquest, today that same work is done through bureaucratic paperwork, court-mandated defaults and invisible lines of code.
However, every administrative shortcut—from the 1830 Indian Removal Act’s declaration of “vacant” deed rolls to the pre-checked data-harvest boxes of our era—carries within it the spark of its own undoing, in the refusals it inevitably provokes.
From Soldiers to Surveyors
In 1830, Congress transformed settler-colonial violence into routine administration. Under the Indian Removal Act, any parcel lacking a European-style deed was legally declared “vacant,” allowing surveyors to replace soldiers and expel tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek and other nations onto the Trail of Tears.
The cost savings were immense—no costly sieges or pitched battles—yet the Act’s veneer of legality could not suppress resistance.
Seminole guerrillas in the Everglades, Sauk warriors along the Mississippi, and covert peace delegations repeatedly punctured that façade. Ambushes forced Washington to fund fresh militias and clandestine logistics—proof that stolen sovereignty cannot be erased with ink alone.
This pattern of administrative violence and insurgent pushback underpins my essay “Who Gets to Tell the Story?”.
Slavery's “Zero-Marginal-Cost” Power Play
By mid-century, the logic of chattel slavery underwent its own calculus-shifting optimization. Before Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, purchasing an enslaved field hand cost roughly the price of a modest home—and escape, disease or revolt always threatened that investment.
Two legal-technical “innovations” changed the game:
the Three-Fifths Compromise grafted congressional representation onto each person in bondage at zero extra cost, and
the gin’s mechanized separation of cotton fiber multiplied yields fifty-fold, collapsing payoff horizons from decades into a single harvest.
Emancipation seemed to shatter this code, only for Southern legislatures to recast vagrancy or “breach of labor contract” as felonies, funneling Black men and women into the convict leasing system at pennies per head.
Only the mass jailbreaks and daring rescues of the Underground Railroad, followed by the deployment of Union troops during Reconstruction, forced states to internalize the policing budgets they had long off-loaded.
I explore these “waste metrics” of human lives in “Edge-Case Medicine: How Profit Logic Treats Life as Waste.”
Factory Rationalization and the Return of Friction
As industrial capitalism accelerated, Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion studies and Henry Ford’s moving assembly line atomized skilled labor into machine-like gestures. The Model T’s assembly time plummeted from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes—but only by consigning crushed limbs, blinding dust and sealed fire exits to “industrial overhead.”
That overhead remained invisible until 1911, when 146 garment workers perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
The subsequent Uprising of the 20,000 strike forced the very companies that optimized for speed to pay for safety: mandating fire codes, union contracts and factory inspections.
In “The Amnesia Engine”, I show how catastrophe becomes the only reliable mechanism to re-embed friction into a system designed to erase it.
Redlining as Segregation’s Ergonomic Fix
Under the New Deal, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew “Residential Security” maps that tinted Black neighborhoods red—automating mortgage denial with a single crayon stroke and starving city services while white suburbs thrived. This was the birth of modern redlining, a process that turned racialized risk into a line-item calculation.
Yet rent strikes in Chicago, community credit unions in Detroit and waves of Fair Housing Act litigation dragged banks into courtrooms, compelled the disclosure of hidden risk-scoring models and imposed punitive fines. Those legal battles forced lenders to publish and justify the racial calculus they had long concealed, rewriting the ledger of urban development.
I unpack these dynamics in “Actuarial Medicine & Hidden Exclusion.”
Environmental Harm was Deferred Until Blockades
Industry’s shortcut to environmental compliance followed the same blueprint. Toxic dioxin was benignly relabeled an “industrial by-product,” and oil spills became “operational incidents,” deferring cleanup costs until Love Canal blockades or Exxon Valdez class-action lawsuits made pollution a headline liability.
Regulators then hiked insurance premiums, investors sued directors, and legislators codified remediation bonds—demonstrating that prevention, if priced correctly, always trumps scandal.
These episodes illustrate how narrative reframings and deferred liabilities conceal extraction until refusal makes inaction impossible.
Digital Defaults and the Birth of Platform Solidarity
Our digital age simply casts these centuries-old patterns in code. A pre-checked “consent” box once harvested millions of Facebook profiles for pennies per record; ride-hail platforms wield five-star ratings as invisible firing levers.
Only when Cambridge Analytica exploded into public view did the EU’s GDPR mandate two-click opt-ins and levied multi-billion-euro fines.
In turn, wildcat strikes by drivers, municipal regulations and the rise of platform cooperatives have forced transparency in rating criteria, guaranteed pay floors and formal appeal processes—patches of friction re-woven back into code.
My guide “Accept All / Reject All” outlines these micro-resistance tactics in the interface layer.
Carbon Offsets as an Ergonomic Gambit
Even the climate crisis has been subject to this ergonomic gambit. Under-verified carbon offsets once allowed utilities to “erase” millions of tons of CO₂ for less than the cost of a scrubber retrofit.
Only after blockades in Cancer Alley, Indigenous Amazon protests and exposés of fraudulent forestry credits did regulators tighten accreditation, raise per-ton liabilities and roll out real-time emissions monitoring—finally making direct decarbonization more cost-effective than “pay-to-pollute.”
In “Emergence Is an Excuse”, I argue that exposing these thresholds can turn exploited loopholes into levers for systemic repair.
The Designed Levers of Extraction—and Their Inversion
Across every chapter of this history, four design levers repeat:
Thresholds determine who—or which lives—count.
Defaults automate compliance and consent.
Narratives recast violence and harm as accidents.
Black-boxes conceal the human authorship behind policies and code.
But every shortcut that enshrines extraction also provokes acts of collective refusal that pry the levers apart, force hidden liabilities onto the balance sheet, and compel power to internalize its externalities.
If coercion is designed, so can care be.
By publishing every eligibility threshold alongside budgets,
by making privacy, essential services, and the right to dissent opt-out rather than opt-in,
by mandating remediation bonds and waiting periods for mass layoffs, and
by embedding transparent appeals into every contract and algorithm,
we can rebuild governance and markets on an ergonomic ideal of dignity rather than domination.
In that world, refusing harm wouldn’t be a protest—it’d be protocol, and collective care would become the path of least resistance.