Friction is displaced rather than eliminated onto the lives of the excluded

Evidence

These, moreover, are the lucky denizens of the Shadow Lands, the relative winners. They have jobs that allow them to send money home to their families, or to pay for a few extras in prison. Countless others have been pushed into even more shadowy corners of our world—immigration detention facilities and holding zones, or boats that won’t make it through a mild storm, or tent cities that grow in our gleaming cities as real estate becomes the site of ever more profitable speculation. Frictionlessness is the great promise of our age. But friction doesn’t disappear just because we don’t see it—it is simply displaced onto these lives of pure friction, in the Shadow Lands. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 779

Categorization

• XREF: The friction-displacement inversion resonates with physical and thermodynamic frameworks of the noise/silence books in the reader’s library — friction as a conserved quantity displaced, not removed. — connects to: Lockean property logic lets oustees be displaced without being dispossessed. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 458
• DEEPTHINKING: The governing inversion — frictionlessness marketed as an escape from friction while actually redistributing it onto the excluded — is a compact structural insight that organizes the whole chapter and has wide applicability across political economy and environmental questions.