Writing Is Not The Goal: How Communication Evolves Toward Least Resistance

Communication follows the path of least friction. For any message with required fidelity, agents choose the feasible method that minimizes perceived effort across encoding, transmission, and decoding. Automated encoding collapses the encode term while meeting fidelity, making writing optional for transmission and valuable chiefly where it improves content quality or satisfies legitimacy constraints. This paper states the least-friction law, explains the perceived–actual effort gap, identifies where manual writing remains efficient, offers falsifiable predictions, and notes the zero-encoder limit where transmission friction vanishes. The result is a general decision rule for communication that is independent of any particular technology.