The Violence of Velvet: Disrupting the Enchantment of Convenience

Convenience, that sly and shimmering promise, is everywhere—lurking in our pockets, humming in our kitchens, quietly shaping the decisions we make each day. The world, it seems, has been placed under a velvet enchantment, each object and interface meticulously designed to erase friction, to conjure shortcuts, to offer a spell for bypassing the necessary rigor of living. But what, in truth, do we forfeit when we surrender ourselves to the current of ease? What is the actual price of a life anesthetized against resistance, stripped of the bracing cold of difficulty, the generative memory of pain?

This inquiry charts the invisible toll exacted by a life rendered too smooth, mapping what quietly disappears when comfort becomes the sovereign principle. Drawing upon Nietzsche’s warnings about herd morality and following the tangled, rhizomatic logic illuminated by Deleuze and Guattari, the investigation moves beyond the surface of daily habit to probe how convenience not only shapes our routines, but also circumscribes the boundaries of what is remembered—and what is quietly erased. Through the haunted architectures of Morrison, Killens, Schuyler, and others, forgetting emerges as a kind of machinery, an apparatus that organizes the past for the benefit of the present, often at the expense of truth and justice.

From the algorithmic amnesia of artificial intelligence to the ghosts that refuse burial in literature, this work considers what it means to resist the narcotic comfort of forgetting. What unfolds when one chooses the inconvenient path, when memory and difficulty are held close, when the bracing chill of what is hard and true is embraced? Ultimately, this is an invitation to step off the moving staircase of ease and walk—deliberately, sometimes painfully—toward the deeper, messier labor of being fully alive.

The Spell of Ease

The allure is undeniable. Who among us does not crave a world rendered softer, its edges dulled, its surfaces smoothed? Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality, warns with characteristic incisiveness that the pursuit of comfort—what he terms “herd morality”—operates as a subtle toxin, leaching vitality and anesthetizing our capacity for discernment. Societies, in their insatiable appetite for safety and order, barter away the wild, creative energies that lend life its meaning. We become, in Nietzsche’s formulation, “tame and sickly,” content to drift along the path of least resistance, our spirits diminished by convenience.

Thomas Tierney, in The Value of Convenience, sharpens this critique for the contemporary moment. He contends that convenience is not merely a technological or aesthetic phenomenon, but an entire value system—a reorganization of existence around the systematic avoidance of effort. The peril, he suggests, lies in the gradual redefinition of struggle itself as a flaw to be engineered away, rather than a crucible through which humanity is forged. We risk forgetting that those things which matter most—love, justice, memory—are often arduous, and that it is precisely in the wrestling with difficulty that we encounter the fullness of ourselves.

The Comfort of Forgetting: A Thousand Plateaus of Memory

But what if forgetting is not a simple void, but a machinic process—a smoothing, a stratification, a convenience that organizes the unruly flows of history into something digestible, marketable, governable? Deleuze and Guattari urge us to distrust the arborescent model of memory, with its singular trunk and roots, and instead to apprehend forgetting as a rhizome: sprawling, subterranean, erupting in unpredictable places, connecting trauma and solace, violence and ease, across the plateaus of lived experience.

In the American context, the drive to forget is not straightforward erasure but an ongoing process—a convenience that allows the present to glide frictionlessly over the jagged strata of the past. This is not simply a matter of private recollection, but a collective enterprise: textbooks that elide, monuments that sanitize, neighborhoods “revitalized” through erasure and displacement. What lines of flight are foreclosed when forgetting is rendered so effortless? Who is deterritorialized, and who profits from the new territory of amnesia?

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a rhizomatic text, haunted by a past that refuses domestication. The ghost is not mere metaphor but a living node, a pulsing plateau where memory and forgetting intersect, where the violence of slavery deterritorializes the present and erupts through the floorboards of the everyday. Is forgetting, in this context, a mere option, or is it a violence—a stratification that denies the multiplicity of suffering, that overcodes the singularity of Black experience into something manageable, forgettable, convenient?

John Oliver Killens, in The Cotillion, and George S. Schuyler, in Black No More, trace the serpentine lines of convenience as they wind through Black identity. What is the machine that promises transformation, that offers the ultimate convenience—erasing Blackness for the price of belonging? Is the cost not the loss of the rhizome itself, the uprooting of community, the flattening of multiplicity into a single, striated line? What becomings are foreclosed when the pressure to forget is so relentless, so seductive?

Bruce Baum’s The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race exposes race as a fiction, a code engineered for the convenience of power. Yet, as Nafissa Thompson-Spires demonstrates in Heads of the Colored People, the consequences of this fiction are real, material, embodied. The convenience of forgetting is not a neutral drift but a series of micro-striations—a policing of difference, a daily negotiation with the violence of erasure. What new assemblages might emerge if we refused this convenience, if we allowed memory to proliferate, connect, deterritorialize?

Albert Murray, in The Omni-Americans, gestures toward a radical refusal of simplification. What if Black culture is not a tree but a rhizome—irreducible, uncontainable, always becoming? What if the work is not to smooth over, but to multiply, to let memory leak, to let the ghosts speak in a thousand tongues? What if the comfort of forgetting is precisely what must be ruptured, so that new lines of flight, new becomings, new solidarities can emerge?

To forget is never innocent. It is a machinic operation, a convenience that organizes, stratifies, and polices. Yet the rhizome always returns, erupting through the cracks, connecting what convenience would keep apart. What would it mean to inhabit the plateau of memory, to refuse the comfort of forgetting, to let the past proliferate into the future—not as nostalgia, but as the engine of becoming?

The Algorithmic Trap

Now, conjured from the fever dream of modernity, artificial intelligence emerges—the latest, most dazzling spell in the arsenal of convenience. Algorithms glide beneath the surface, promising to smooth away friction, to anticipate needs before they are spoken, to curate not only memories but entire histories. Yet, what is truly happening beneath this shimmering promise? What ghosts are swept aside, what complexities flattened, when a machine is tasked with remembering for us?

Is AI genuinely neutral, or does it inherit the shadows and blind spots of its creators, quietly amplifying the exclusions and biases already woven into the social fabric? Critical voices—Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, Simone Browne—have posed unsettling questions about the ostensible objectivity of algorithms, illuminating the ways they police, sort, and erase in the name of efficiency. Can a system built on data ever be free from the violence of what is omitted, the stories never counted?

Paul Beatty’s The Sellout lampoons the absurdities of a world obsessed with order and convenience, hinting at the dangers of allowing machines to arbitrate what (and who) matters. But is the danger only in what is forgotten—or in the insidious ease with which forgetting itself becomes invisible, a seamless feature rather than a rupture?

Perhaps the real enchantment of AI lies not in what it remembers, but in how it lulls us into believing that the labor of struggle, of remembering, of questioning, is no longer necessary. What possibilities are foreclosed when the algorithm whispers that the hard parts have already been solved? What new forms of resistance and remembrance might arise if we sit with these complications, refusing the comfort of easy answers, daring to ask—what else might be possible?

The Road Less Traveled

What, then, is to be done? The answer, I suspect, lies in the road less traveled—the path of difficulty, of remembering, of facing what is hard and painful. Nietzsche calls us to embrace struggle as the crucible of meaning. Morrison, Killens, Schuyler, and Murray urge us to hold fast to our histories, to resist the easy erasures of convenience. Thompson-Spires and Beatty remind us that laughter and satire are weapons against forgetting, that art can jolt us awake.

To choose the inconvenient path is to choose to be fully alive, to meet ourselves and each other in the messy, complicated, beautiful struggle of being human. It is to refuse the comfort of forgetting, to insist on remembering—not just for ourselves, but for those who came before and those yet to come. In the end, it is through difficulty that we find connection, meaning, and perhaps even a glimpse of something greater than ourselves.

The Living Memory

Consider, for a moment, the way Morrison’s Sethe is haunted by Beloved, or the way Schuyler’s Max Disher is haunted by the memory of his former self. These are not simply stories of individuals, but stories of a nation wrestling with its own ghosts. The past is never truly past; it persists in the bodies and minds of those who remember, and in the systems and structures that shape our lives.

In Heads of the Colored People, Thompson-Spires offers characters who are constantly negotiating the boundaries of identity, memory, and belonging. Their stories are often laced with humor, sometimes tragedy, always animated by the tension between the desire for ease and the need for truth. The act of remembering, of refusing to relinquish the past, is a form of resistance—a way of insisting on one’s humanity in a world that would prefer to forget.

Albert Murray, in The Omni-Americans, writes of the “heroic optimism” that animates Black American culture—a refusal to be defined by suffering, but also a refusal to forget it. This is not the optimism of convenience, but the optimism of struggle, of making something beautiful and true out of the materials at hand.

The Cost of Convenience

What, then, is the cost of convenience? It is the loss of memory, of connection, of the richness that comes from wrestling with difficulty. It is the danger of becoming, in Nietzsche’s words, “tame and sickly,” content to let others do our thinking, our remembering, our living for us. It is the risk of losing ourselves, of becoming strangers to our own histories.

Yet there is another way. We can choose to remember, to struggle, to make space for what is hard and painful. We can insist on the value of difficulty, on the necessity of bearing witness to suffering, on the imperative of truth—even when it is inconvenient. We can refuse the easy path, and in so doing, rediscover ourselves and each other.

The Magic of Resistance

There is a kind of magic in resistance—in the refusal to be swept along by the current of convenience. It is the magic of memory, of connection, of meaning. It is the magic of saying, “I will not forget. I will not let you forget. I will hold on to what matters, even when it is hard.”

This is the animating force in the works of Morrison, Killens, Schuyler, Murray, Thompson-Spires, and Beatty. It is the magic that Nietzsche glimpses in the figure of the artist, the creator, the one who is willing to embrace difficulty for the sake of something greater. It is the magic that Tierney warns is imperiled if we surrender ourselves to the cult of convenience.

The Road Ahead

The moving staircase of convenience will always be there, humming quietly, ready to carry us away. But sometimes, the most courageous act is to step off, plant our feet firmly on the ground, and walk—deliberately, perhaps painfully—toward the truth.

Ultimately, the trappings of convenience are just that: traps. They promise us the world, but ask us to forget who we are, where we come from, and what we owe to each other. The road less traveled is harder, yes—but it is also richer, deeper, more alive. It is the path that leads us back to ourselves, and to the possibility of something greater.

Let us remember. Let us struggle. Let us make space for what is difficult and true. Let us refuse the comfort of forgetting, and in so doing, find our way home.

References

Baum, Bruce. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Beatty, Paul. The Sellout. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Killens, John Oliver. The Cotillion. New York: Trident Press, 1971.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans. New York: Da Capo Press, 1990.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

Schuyler, George S. Black No More. New York: The Macaulay Company, 1931.

Thompson-Spires, Nafissa. Heads of the Colored People. New York: 37INK/Atria, 2018.

Tierney, Thomas. The Value of Convenience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.