Dr. Andy Farnell on a Death to Efficiency and Cash
Dr. Andy Farnell (of the Cyber Show (C|S) and Digital Vegan) has a couple of new articles this week. The first one, dated Monday, says this:
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?
Dr. Farnell's second article (from yesterday around midday) isn't the first time he speaks of the importance of cash payments. To quote some bits pertaining to supposed 'efficiency':
Curse of efficiency
Efficiency has become a banner of tyrants. It's a word used euphemistically for great brutality and destruction. Yet even when used in good-faith it is problematic. Efficiency valued with maximal weight can and often does break systems. Many real systems are made worse by efficiency (unless optimising for their own metrics is their actual purpose).
Over-optimising in one dimension (like cost) can mean ignoring all the other dimensions we need to be mindful of. This is a common mistake for inexperienced system designers or "hands-off" idealists who hope markets can solve problems alone.
The value in some things is that they are difficult, slow, or noisy. They add some damping or friction to a process where it's needed. This is something efficiency ideologues overlook. Thus familiar blanket arguments like "cash is costly and inefficient" fail because here inefficiency is a desirable feature of stable, reliable and accurate systems.
Cash or the "War on Cash" is a subject that we covered here many times before, including in some videos. Cash is not the same as "digital cash", which isn't even remotely the same.
Cash is how we purchase the vast majority of our goods here. A local seller, a vendor at the market, likes to say "Charles is not King, cash is King".
'Self-Service' is another example of fake 'efficiency'. █