1/ Smoothness is the sign of the times, the deletion of the negative, the ironing out of anything other and against. It links phone screens, slick car designs, shaved bodies, bland architecture. Symbol of a drift towards self, towards the ease of what we already accept.

2/ Communication 'must' be smooth in our time. Hit the like, use the emoji, be polite, share, meme. If anyone doesn't conform to the appropriate level of blandification, cancel them. Don't worry about anything that's hard to interpret. Just binge-watch smooth entertainment.

3/ Don't shake, injure, unsettle. Even ugliness must be smooth. Make it accessible. Emotion smooths things out, unlike the hard work of thinking. Emotion is a hermeneutical lubricant. Everything is rendered near, immediate, not slowed down by reflective distance.

4/ So we keep it agreeable. Well, that seems to be the way of things. Don't worry about the profound, the difficult to digest, anything that requires an acquired taste. Rapid consumption is the aim. Scroll. Like. Keep it easy to assemble to ensure the Ikea effect kicks in.

5/ The aesthetic becomes the anaesthetic. Thoughtful communication (communication that involves distance and even disagreement) is replaced with contagion (pure, thoughtless immediacy). Nothing must be concealed. We can't microdose the smooth. We must consume it wholesale.

6/ The interplay of concealment and presence, or mystery and revelation, that gives us the graces of experience and desire — it's sure to be converted into uninterrupted smoothness. Everything revealed like a data set, everything revealed so that we're left with nothing to see.

7/ Smoothing things out makes total transparency normal. It's easy to go into the confession booth and tell the whole world your sins. But when we know everyone's sins, we see that humanity is rough, not smooth. In Smoothworld, cries for blood drown a deeper need for forgiveness.

8/ Forgiveness is not smooth, and so it will be resisted by anyone bowing before the idol of the smooth. Forgiveness involves knowledge, and knowledge is gained by resistance. We have to know what we forgive. But the smooth wants to feel and not know. Knowing is too hard.

9/ The smooth is easy to like, but it is not a likeness. It is only a semblance. Reality stylized. Frictionless. Neat. Fast. Smoothness favors youth and those photo filters that iron out all your laugh lines. The ideal selfie in Smoothworld is a face in the throes of erasure.

10/ The smooth has no inwardness, no depths. It offers a world, and the people in it, converted into surfaces. Sophistic aesthetics. When beauty atrophies, it becomes smooth. It's all so very relatable. But how odd is it that all that smooth relatability is so very alienating?

11/ Of course, the smooth is not everything, but the allurement of the smooth is like the sugary house of the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel. It's so sweet and tasty that we may forget, with so much of it there to consume, that it isn't the nourishment we need.