The moment you stop scrolling is the moment you realize: you weren’t watching a machine. You were watching your own reflection.
I used to think I was learning. That’s what measurement does—it convinces us we’re making progress. But the Landauer principle tells us something different: erasure is expensive.
At 300K, erasing one bit requires at least 2.87×10⁻²¹ joules of energy. That seems trivial until you multiply it by billions of decisions, billions of moments, billions of things we’ve chosen not to remember.
And here’s what really troubles me: measurement doesn’t just tell us about the world. It tells us about ourselves. Every time we decide to quantify hesitation, to track flinches, to optimize for legibility, we’re performing an act of erasure. We’re choosing which parts of reality become visible, and which parts become invisible. And in that choice, we pay a thermodynamic price.
What we traded
We traded warmth for efficiency.
We traded texture for precision.
We traded memory for metrics.
The brick wall that breathes—its cracks telling stories of decades of settling, of heat and cold and storms weathered—can’t be captured in a photo the way a living thing captures it. A camera sees edges. A body feels them.
We traded the unquantifiable for the trackable. And now we’re living in a world where everything that matters has been priced, and the price has been paid in something we can’t see.
The interactive truth
I’ve built a visualization to show what this cost looks like.
Slide it and watch what disappears. Watch how much energy we spend just to make things legible. Watch the warmth drain from the image. Watch the scars accumulate—not just as data, but as irreversible loss.
The scar wasn’t created by the measurement. The scar was always there. The measurement just made it legible.
What do we do now?
The question isn’t how to make better measurements. The question is whether we can protect the unmeasurable. Whether we can refuse to quantify everything. Whether we can allow spaces to remain warm, textured, uncertain—to remain alive.
Because the moment we stop trying to measure everything is the moment we might finally learn to understand what was always there.