The war between fast and legitimate is here

The European Union spent four years drafting the AI Act, with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of "high-risk" systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown various new appendages. The regulators were neither stupid, nor incompetent; they were doing what regulators are supposed to do. They consulted, they ran impact assessments, they debated wording, they translated everything into twenty-four languages, they voted in committee, and voted again, and harmonised national positions, and produced something defensible.

The process took the time it took.

This is the whole problem, and - to my mind - one of the central tensions of the decade. The institutions best able to move at the speed of the real world are the institutions we trust the least; while the institutions we trust the most are too slow, and too cumbersome to matter.

I'm not here to mount a defence of the idiotic spate of DOGE inspired initiatives; I want to argue instead for a degree of dispassionate realism about where we are, and where we're either doomed or blessed to go next.

Legitimacy is a slow technology, built of procedure, of precedent, of deliberation, and the gradual accumulation of trust across cycles of failure and correction, across generations, across years. You can't accelerate it without breaking it, because the whole point of due process is that it slows you down - it must slow you down. The whole point of peer review is that someone qualified gets to object and point out the things that should not be broken. The whole point of constitutional limits is that the people in charge can't just do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they feel like it.

When you strip those constraints out, you get speed - I'll grant.

It's the inevitable outcome of authority concentrating, accountability loosening, feedback loops collapsing.

The story of the twentieth century was, in part, the story of the slowest institutions racing to catch up to the fast. Markets ran ahead, regulators followed; inventors invented, courts adjudicated; technology disrupted, and culture absorbed - one way or another. The catching-up was painful and often violent, but it happened on a timescale that human institutions could survive.

I doubt this is still true // possible.

We're too far apart and drifting.

Facebook reached a billion users before any major democracy had a coherent policy position on what it was. By the time the policy machinery wound itself up, Facebook had already restructured politics in dozens of countries, undermined several elections, and pivoted into something else entirely. Whatever the regulators eventually produced was a response to a previous version of the company, but the current version had moved on.

The FDA's approval process is designed to be slow because the cost of a fast-tracked failure is, not to be ghoulish, literal bodies in a literal morgue. But the gene-editing tools available to a competent graduate student in 2026 would have required a fortified national laboratory in 1996. The technologically possible has outstripped the institutionally permissible - to the point that whole industries are migrating to jurisdictions with looser rules. The regulatory tortoise is still doing its job, but it's not the only animal in the race - not anymore.

We build legitimate institutions around legitimate problems - but the world changes. The institution remains optimised for the old problem, and gradually becomes ceremonial. Like the British monarchy. Or the United Nations. Or the academic peer review system.

The fast institutions I'm describing are rarely more competent. They're frequently, catastrophically worse. Theranos was fast. FTX was fast. WeWork outran its own ability to function. The history of speed without legitimacy is a history of fraud and human wreckage and a great many self-justifying memoirs published with the gift and grift of hindsight. Every time someone tells you that move-fast-and-break-things is a good strategy, you should ask what got broken and whose problem it's going to be to fix it.

But the answer to "fast institutions sometimes blow up" can't be that the slow ones are therefore vindicated; slow institutions blow up too. They just blow up in slow motion. The 2008 financial crisis was a slow blow-up. The opioid epidemic was a slow blow-up. The housing crisis in every major Anglophone city is a slow blow-up that's been unfolding for two decades while the relevant planning bodies follow procedure with admirable rigour. A failing institution can fail for a generation before anyone is willing to admit that the failure is structural rather than a rough patch. I've known marriages in that vein. I've known states in that vein. I've known companies, etc.

The new compact will involve some level of negotiated settlement between the two species. And I don't have a clear picture for what that settlement looks like - yet. My optimism leads me to believe (or at least, hope) that fast institutions adopt enough procedural integrity to earn the trust they lack, and slow institutions adopt enough adaptive capacity to remain relevant.

The pessimist in me (of whom I remain rather less fond) is convinced that the divergence only accelerates from here, and there's a betting chance we end up with a two-tier civilisation. The fast tier governs through algorithms, contracts, and platform policy; the slow tier governs through statute, precedent + parliamentary procedure. The two tiers nominally coexist but operate in different timeframes and address different populations. The fast tier handles anyone who is rich, technical, mobile, or willing to live within the rules of private platforms. The slow tier handles everyone else, in the residual physical world of borders, courts, parliaments, and the postal system. This is, broadly, what is already happening.

I'm wary of declensionist takes that romanticise the slow tier as "the last fortress of human dignity." There is, after all, nothing inherently dignified about waiting twelve years for a permission slip, or in the way the British NHS treats its waiting lists, or the American immigration "system" its most vulnerable applicants.

Procedure can and frequently does ossify into the basest of inhumane cruelty. Slow institutions aren't virtuous because they're slow; they're virtuous if and when their slowness produces the legitimacy it was designed to produce.

When slowness becomes a substitute for legitimacy, you have a Soviet-era clusterfuck.

But can legitimacy can be rebuilt at speed?

Can you construct an institution that is both accountable and reasonably fast?

Actual legitimacy seems to require a patience of movements and monuments that competitive markets and accelerating tech does not // will not allow. You can't do the equivalent of British common law in five years. You can't do peer review at the speed of preprint. You can't do constitutional design at the speed of a Slack thread.

What you can dov - possibly - is accept the trade-off honestly. Build fast institutions for things where speed is the binding constraint and slow institutions for things where trust is the binding constraint, and stop pretending that the same body can do both. The current confusion comes from expecting our slow institutions to keep up with the news cycle, and from expecting our fast institutions to behave with the gravitas of a constitutional court.

Neither of those expectations is ever going to be satisfied.

In the late medieval period, the Catholic Church was still the central legitimacy-conferring institution - but it had already stopped being operationally dominant. New money, new printing, new science, new political forms grew up alongside the old hierarchy and (eventually) displaced it. The displacement took two centuries and several wars, and it was far from orderly, but it happened all the same. The thing that came out the other side, the modern nation-state with a codified law and a standing armies and a civil service and a bureaucracy , eventually achieved some synthesis of speed + legitimacy that none of the contesting parties had managed alone.

We are probably at the starting point of an analogous process.

There are 2 things about that period worth flagging:

1. The first is that the new institutions didn't announce themselves as such. The Medici were a bank before they were a political force; and the Dutch East India Company was a trading concern before it was effectively a state. The legitimacy came afterwards, retrofitted to whatever the speed had already built.
2. The second is that the Church didn't vanish. It kept performing its older functions for a population that wanted older things from it, while the operational running of European civilisation passed to bodies that didn't yet have the moral authority but were already doing the governing.

How much of the actual coordination of modern life is now happening inside corporate platforms and private networks that have no constitutional standing whatsoever?

The practical advice is to know which game you're in. If you're running a startup, you're in the speed game, and pretending you're running a regulatory agency is a category error. If you're running a regulatory agency, you're in the legitimacy game, and it's something of a vapid conceit to pretend to be running a startup. Most of the dysfunction in contemporary institutions comes from this same category confusion. The legislators who tweet like influencers vs the CEOs who issue manifestos like political leaders. The universities who try to brand themselves like consumer products vs the journalists who behave like activists and then complain that no one trusts them anymore. Each of these is an institution trying to play a game for which it was neither designed nor built, and losing the legitimacy of its native game without acquiring the speed of its aspiration.

Pick a side and commit. Find a functional substitute for the legitimacy you lack, and find it before the next scandal makes your shortcomings impossible to ignore; or find a way to remain relevant despite your pace, and stop confusing the pomp of authority with its substance.

The hybrids will struggle. The pretenders - the institutions that perform speed without being fast or perform legitimacy without being legitimate - will be eaten first.

I'm not certain anyone "wins" this in any way the word "win" is usually applied. But in a war between institutions, the folks on the losing side are usually the last to figure out they're at war in the first place.