smooth (adj.)

Baby Steps (2025) is funny because it questions the concept of control in a game, the value of convenience itself by systematically creating systemic inconvenience for both the player and Nate, the game’s damp, anxious, onesie-clad protagonist. The charm of the game, its comedic hook, is that rather than abbreviating the process of moving Nate into the direction of a single analog stick, it instead breaks out movement across the whole controller: the triggers lift either foot, and the analog stick minutely directs whichever foot is aloft, from whence it falls upon trigger’s release, completing (ha, you wish) Nate’s step. All this eventually starts to work surprisingly well once you start building the muscle memory for Nate’s odd cross-country waddle, at least across more level terrain, unless you keep both his feet on the ground, in which case the stick sort of causes Nate to lunge impotently in the chosen direction, causing him to eat shit. Highly recommend.

The landscape Nate faces is rough and varied, full of curious challenges and obstacle-ridden mountains he must climb in order to proceed...somewhere you know not. The men sparsely populating these surreal, dream-like wastes appear in hilarious cutscenes improvised and voiced by the designers, some (all?) apparently slowly turning into amply endowed donkey-men. (The inclusion of schlongs—unless you disallow them in the settings—is welcome in this writer’s humble opinion.)

At the beginning of Baby Steps, Nate is whisked away from the world that is familiar to this wilderness/nature preserve/desert island/dreamscape/thing without explanation and with seemingly no way of getting back to his parents' basement, watching One Piece (or rather falling asleep while watching One Piece if the "Are You Still Watching One Piece?" message on the TV is any indication). Nate is pathetic, weak, paranoid, noncommittal to a fault. Moving him around is like pulling teeth at first, but after a while you start to get the hang of it, the rhythm of lifting one leg, moving it forward, setting it down, lifting the other leg, moving it forward, setting it down, and so on and so forth, leaving you to wonder at the region's oddities, the cardboard box hell, the castle ruins, the bottomless donkey-dudes.

But progression is never allowed to reach convenience. In fact Baby Steps is pretty ingeniously paced to ensure that as soon as you start to master Nate’s movement, you find you must cross, say, a chasm with only a few two-by-fours sticking up into the gap, requiring precise foot placement at a speed that compensates for the balance inevitably lost by having to nudge Nate’s body forward to reach them. Then you miss, and Nate falls a hundred feet into a slick ditch wet with mud and slides down all the way to the base of the mountain, where he lies still, moaning: “Why.” Disappointing? Yes. Frustrating? Absolutely. Demoralizing? Surprisingly rarely. Sometimes, eventually, you make it. Which got me thinking about smoothness and friction.

Baby Steps’ level design is challenging, but I wouldn’t call it cruel (or if it is, it’s with a wink and a smile). Failing does not feel punishing. For one, it’s consistently funny to watch. But most of the failure chutes (mud-laden ditches, etc.) drop you in the midst of alternative challenges and routes just within view, encouraging you to really play, in the sense of pursuing ephemeral goals for their own sake rather than as means to an end. Baby Steps has a “main story” of sorts, but its details and contours are unclear enough (at least at the 8.6-hour mark, which is where I’m at as I’m writing this) that you don’t always know where to go next, what your goal is. All you know is that you can see in the distance a pile of cans to knock over (if you thought walking was hard, try kicking), a single glowing fruit on a tree at the top of a stupid fucking tower, or a Babel-esque pile of masonry reaching for the heavens that the one hiker guy really doesn’t seem to want you to climb for some reason.

The friction is constitutive of the game’s fun, is what I’m trying to say. One of my favorite moments so far was at the end of a great big circle I unwittingly weaved, which brought me back to a maze of stonework that, seen from a different angle, seemed worth traversing. In this maze, a pile of beams blocked a gap in the stone through which I intuited lay more terrain I had yet to explore, perhaps the very area I had been trying to reach for the last half hour. Just for fun, almost as much to watch Nate’s ragdoll character model squirm around as anything else, I pushed Nate forward into the pile of timber, tumbling him into a truly ridiculous pretzel as he attempted to rise to his feet, but as I kept doing this and giggling uncontrollably, alone in my apartment at 10:30 p.m., I realized there was a chance I could make him fall and squirm just right to brute force the top half of Nate’s model through the small gap between a couple of the beams, taking advantage of his automatic standing animation to bring the rest of him through the gap. The sense of accomplishment I felt when it finally worked tingled from my head to my toes.

While I've been playing Baby Steps, I've been undertaking a kind of artistic recovery. I’ve noticed how much cumulative time I spend (waste) pulling out my phone to check if I've received any notifications for things that aren't urgent or important, opening Bluesky or Discord just to refresh the feeds to no predetermined purpose or searching for answers to my small, curious, spontaneous questions only to forget what I learned in a flash because, really, staying on top of who that one actor was in that one movie is, surprisingly, not that important to me.

But the smartphone is so convenient. It's right fucking there in front of you, on the table, in your pocket. The smartphone is the embodiment of an ethic of convenience: smooth casing, internet connectivity, access to a thousand thousand possible tools for somehow optimizing my life. And of course as the social world comes to require smartphone technology for more and more of its commonest interactions (I can't do my laundry without paying via app, for example), the phone seems all the more convenient as its essentialness grows like a techno-social Ouroboros. Also conveniently, it’s very handy at giving me ways to fill all those interstitial periods in my days when thinking things, feeling emotions, or experiencing my body would be onerous.

And I am beginning to fear that convenience may undo us. It’s been said that capitalism systematically incentivizes the (oftentimes violent) creation of smooth surfaces, whether that's through bulldozing thousands of acres of forest to raise crops (meant for export rather than local consumption), smoothing out the distinctions within a market segment (all cars are kinda the same car, all phones are kinda the same phone, etc.), or removing all the buttons in favor of touchscreens. Ultimately, the smoothness sought is metaphorical, a mad dream of removing as much space, as much friction, between the acts of buying and selling as possible. It is mad because very often the owning class resorts to irrational and unsustainable measures for short-term gain or in search of absolute control of the market (monopoly being another dream of smoothness).

Of course the latest instance of this mad dream is the proliferation of the large language model (LLM) and synthetic text extrusion machines (so-called generative AI). Their proprietors claim that by extracting an ever-increasing amount of data (the technical term is "scraping," another smoothing metaphor) with an ever-increasing amount of computation power (driven so far by the microchips in tech like GPUs, which are themselves a monopolized commodity), generative AI can do practically anything, perhaps even achieve a kind of self-awareness (so-called artificial general intelligence), which is supposed to usher in a new world and solve all the problems inherent to our twisted political economy. The fool’s messiah. The scale is the thing, you see (a premise forwarded by American tech CEOs that is belied by, among other things, Chinese genAI firms doing more with less), and it doesn't matter to them that such scale requires the rapid proliferation of data centers threatening our water supply, burdening our power grids, and reversing any threadbare promises these ghouls had previously made to reduce their megacorporate impacts on the climate crisis.

But coercive convenience precedes the LLM. All that needless computational infrastructure is the end point of a massive, runaway accumulation of data by corporations that began a long time ago to commoditize the internet and manage our social mediation in exchange, one could say, for convenience: we submit to large-scale surveillance when social media companies mediate our public speech, organizing practices, and social and creative lives; our individual and collective labor gets scraped from the internet as grist for the generative AI mills; we daily give data on our location, app usage, photos and videos, faces, purchases, and searches to the companies that own the software on our smartphones and the websites we visit. And beyond the encroachment on our individual privacies, vast swathes of our social infrastructure—our businesses, hospitals, and governments, our communications and digital storage and entertainment platforms—largely depend, as Emily Tucker has succinctly put it, on “products owned by corporations that engage in data collection on the largest possible scale.” Arguing for data redline policy, Tucker argues that we can either have mass surveillance or democracy, but not both: “Economic liberty is not possible when a handful of tech executives control the organization and allocation of capital; freedom of speech and of conscience are not possible in a comprehensively surveilled public square; and justice is not possible when we are all data subjects.”

A lot of artists, in particular, have decried with exasperation that the OpenAIs, Anthropics, Googles, and Microsofts of the tech world are pushing a totalizing technological apparatus intended to automate not our undesirable tasks but the very work that many of us would rather live for, the work we would do for its own sake if we could: art, design, invention, inquiry, research, teaching. Synthetic text and image extrusion is pitched to managers and CEOs (the principal audience for genAI tech, let it not be forgotten) as replacements for work done every day by skillful and creative artists, journalists, writers, animators, designers, teachers. Instead of automating the work we would rather not have to spend our time doing, the work we deem to cost us our free time—the chores, the tedium of our days—so-called AI is here to steal the tasks we’d rather be doing with our lives were we not chained to the will of our supervisors. All while surveilling us even more, as a treat.

One thing that contradiction reveals, I think, is that under capitalism, the creative, intellectual, and pedagogical labor we would in other circumstances pursue freely is all too often caged, zip-tied to the wage we need to survive, and encumbered with if not transformed completely into forms of bullshit by the demands of the owners of capital and their cronies in management: it becomes the means to producing wealth for the owners instead of an end we choose for ourselves. Would we really write corporate social copy, animate advertisements, churn out search-engine-optimized “””content”””, and spend our hours and our talents on all the tedium required to satisfy our contracts, our managers, our administrators, if we had free reign?¹

The reason humans develop technology—part of what Karl Marx calls “dead labor,” past work that has been crystallized into goods and tools that shorten the time it costs for us to do future work—is to curtail the “realm of necessity,” that portion of our days that we count as a cost because we consider it a means toward the end of our survival. Doing so increases the “realm of freedom,” the portion of our lifetime that is unencumbered by necessity, in which we are free, in philosopher Martin Hägglund’s words, “to lead our lives rather than merely secure the means of our survival.”

In his book This Life, which interprets the value of our finite lifetime, Hägglund carries forward Marx’s analysis of capitalism by arguing that the system’s central contradiction is how it measures societal wealth. Implicit in the form of the wage is the idea that our free time is where value really is: instead of slaves, who do not own their time, we are considered wage laborers who sell the time that we theoretically own. In this model, we ought to be able to sell just enough of that time to gain what we need to survive, leaving the remainder of our days free to decide how to spend our individual lives and able to deliberate with our neighbors and peers on how to lead our collective lives. But of course that spare time not required for sustenance is where owners skim the profit from our work, and in a complex series of twists and turns, society turns upside down. Capitalism’s contradiction (one of them) is that it brings such immense technological power to bear on making production more efficient, of reducing the time it takes to produce things, only to exploit the extra time it would otherwise leave us. Means become end.

In a better world, a truly democratic world—for Hägglund, Marx, and me, a world in which we collectively owned the means of production—to be wealthy would be “to be able to engage the question of what to do on Monday morning, rather than being forced to go to work in order to survive.” Such a world requires that we seize it from the hands of a tiny owning class bent upon its mad dreams, a world where societal wealth is measured not in GDP or profit margins but by how much free time the average person has available to them. It’s hard to imagine a more inconvenient state of affairs.

But even barring the question of what a revolution looks like, of how we collectively reevaluate social wealth, engaging the question of what to do and how to live right now is hard. It is far from smooth. What free time we get is fraught with demands on our responsibility, our conflicting commitments, the anxiety of the coming workday. And so it is not all that surprising, in fact at times depressingly understandable that some of us would accept or even embrace the appearance of convenience, the imposition of an LLM between ourselves and the art we imagine having made, or the book we imagine having written, or the information a predictive text extruder might polish enough to appear trustworthy, saying “okay” to a system built on questionably legal data extraction at a planet- and society-eroding scale in order to say “no” to the inconvenience of considering critically the disputed word, of sitting inside ourselves awhile, of receiving and contemplating the world through our muddy senses, of letting ourselves become bored enough to have an original idea, of risking vulnerability with our friends, of considering what a book means as well as what it says, of being truly sad, of being perhaps truly happy, or of being whatever that awful fog is that lives in between, whose whiff we are used to masking with a quick check of our phones until we can find enough dopamine to push past the anxiety of living our lives. Is it any wonder that we fall into this “okay” when we fear at bottom that we are nowhere close to free, when we know we own so little of our time?

When Baby Steps opens, Nate is vegging on the couch in his parents’ basement, avoiding his life, sprawled in his gray onesie at the nadir of cope, stimulating himself without pleasure to the point of dissociation. The onesie and the title both paint Nate as someone in denial of his personhood, that is, his ability to put his circumstances in question, to strive to commit to something freer. When he is inexplicably transported to the dreamworld, he meets Jim, who tries to help him, offering to serve as a guide. But Nate is obstinate in his stranger-danger paranoia, insisting (unconvincingly) that he is self-sufficient, not as weak or pathetic or lost as he appears (and definitely is).

I read this interaction (repeated numerous times with different characters as the game progresses) as a “no” to a specific form of inconvenience, that of interacting with a stranger, of negotiating motivations and needs that may potentially be at odds, in order to reach a place of solidarity and cooperation. I find these moments hilarious and admittedly a little familiar. I’ve also succumbed to the convenience of avoiding the vulnerability inherent to expressing needs and connecting with people you don’t know, even if you have shared interests. But it would seem that if we’re to get free, it will take acclimating to some inconvenience—perhaps quite a lot of it. Maybe sometimes you just have to start by putting one foot in front of the other.

1  At my day job, when my frustration boils at the thought of having to use my years-earned expertise copy editing social media advertisements extruded by an LLM rather than by a human copywriter, I sometimes stop to think how silly it seems to be offended on behalf of a media form I already consider to be (very often) so much effluvia, in favor of writers whose work I already sort of disdain. So much of copywriting is already bullshit. Perhaps synthetic text extrusion technology is an an implicit acknowledgment of that. In which case, fair point, whatever; but the tech bros would claim that evidence of one media form being reducible to bullshit implies that all expression can be reduced thereto, which is also bullshit.