Death to efficiency

Efficiency is a muddied word that fell from grace into the slop pit.

In pristine form its roots are in physics, where we say things like
“How much energy is conserved in a process” or “Any difference between
input energy and energy transferred into useful work.”

But if you search using US Bigtech engines, or ask “AI” oracles,
you’ll get back a ton of slop about “not wasting materials, efforts,
money” and “markets, industries, and society”. To me, “efficiency” is
a word now used euphemistically to hide great brutality and
destruction. And lately I think it’s become synonymous with Fascism.

What do most people think of when you say “efficiency”? Getting made
jobless. Having less money. Being squeezed harder by the man.
It’s not a happy, bunnies leaping in the daisies, kind of word.

If a boss says “We’re making some efficiencies…”, who cheers “Oh
great, count me in!”. Efficiency is one of those words we pretend to
understand, like and support, without the first clue as to what it’s
implications are to our lives. It’s so perfectly, exquisitely
meaningless we can nod along dreamily without having to think.

Fascists love efficiency. Even more than slogans. The Holocaust was
defined less by scale or aims than by methods of “efficient”
industrialised murder. Efficient rounding up, efficient transportation
and efficient disposal. All efficiently made perfectly legal by the
signing of proper documents, and efficiently driven by the data
collection of the extant bureaucracy.

Fascism lost some popularity in the aftermath of WW2, but of course
its ideas live on eternally, taking on new slogans, symbols and
followers. Bad ideologies hide behind much loved truths,
shape-shifting, transforming and looking for a new host. In the last
Reich a mythical past was summoned. Perhaps in this one, mythical
technologies will.

In creating a department of efficiency the Trump/Musk outfit look
like capitalist extremists. But attacking government through its
financial structure – on terms that nobody dare oppose – bloody sacred
“efficiency” – was only one of several possible moves. Traditionally
departments of “Information” are the choice of tyrants. In this case,
Musk already owns one or two.

So in 2025 efficiency remains a totem. It’s still heresy to challenge
it. It has an armour of legitimacy, afforded by proximity to
“economics”. People, at least in America and UK, strangely respect
rich folks and those who cloak themselves in the wizardry of
“economics”. They value apparently being good with money over ability
to run anything, because they have confused the two. So, in calling
their henchmen DOGE the US technofascists have painted their
banner. What they’re a “department of” is efficiency, and that’s
something we must all agree is good, right?

Now, I’ve actually heard people say they “believe in efficiency”, as
if it were a coherent value system, or a football team. But far from
being even a wispy ideology, efficiency is unfortunately an entirely
empty and pointless token. In a universe of abundant free energy we
should care not a jot about squeezing out last percentages of
loss. We’ve been on the up-slope for a century. Human potential has
doubled and doubled, and the prospect for universal comfortable
existence has been within our grasp for many decades now. Computing
potential has grown so extraordinarily far we’ve long outgrown
actually useful applications and entered a phase of technological
non-progress called “enshitification” or the “rot economy” in which
the infrastructure cannibalises itself. Technology turns inward on the
population, causing digital harms and misery.

We can build and do almost anything thanks to science. The hard
questions are about what we choose to do. Who we let lead. So we
must ask why our organising principles are so broken that we’re still
worrying about “efficiency”? Has the word “efficiency” perhaps come to
mean something else, perhaps some place to hide a bad old ideology?

I do appreciate efficiency of course, as an electronics engineer I’ve
had to grind through efficiency calculations for loudspeakers, power
supplies and amplifiers that would turn any economist grey overnight.
Besides, as an optimist I am sure, if we really want more efficiency,
we can just quite easily do that through education, research and being
smarter. Electronic communication made things so damn efficient we got
optimally efficient. No, the problem with technology, for those who
crave control, is that it made things much, much too efficient by
far.

Lack of efficiency, by any common sense, is not what’s afoot
here. Just as one might suspect a Ministry of Truth is dissembling
rot, might a Department of Government Efficiency have an Orwellian
shadow? What happens in the equations as size tends to zero, is
efficiency shoots up. A non-existent government is maximally efficient
of course. Since I’m broadly a believer in government, I’ll paint
“Down With Efficiency” on my banner. I’d rather have an inefficient
government than none at all.