To Slow Down, We Have to Speed Up｜Leaving the Platforms in the Age of AI

Slowness has come to be prized as a kind of luxury, yet simply slowing down only leaves you behind the times. Looking back over just the past few months, I was making full use of no-code tools until recently, and in the last few days even those have begun to feel dated. That is how astonishing the speed of AI has become now that it acts on its own as an automaton. Almost every day, in my dealings with AI, I feel that human beings have already been shut out of its ecosystem entirely.

If people are to raise the value of slowing down in such a world, I think the answer is not to bind things up with regulations of the kind being debated around the globe. If anything, individuals have to become fast themselves. The key is to build automation into one’s own daily life. That, I feel, is becoming the lifeline that lets us fill our slowness with substance, enjoy it, and make a living from it.

A mere return to analog is nostalgia reenacted, and it gives rise to no future beyond itself. But when the speed of the cutting edge is applied to it, a different future begins faintly to take shape. This week I launched a new blog, and it is meant in part as a way to savor the value of slowness to the full. On the basis of a blog built from scratch, I have rebuilt the websites I had once put together with no-code tools, and I have rebuilt this newsletter as well.

It has only been a few days, but strangely my heart feels lighter. When I ask myself why, the answer may be that I have stepped out of my dependence on the platform companies, or at least my partial dependence, and can now keep my distance from them. A way of thinking is emerging in which one keeps a distance from the platforms in order to cultivate one’s own world slowly and carefully. I believe this will become a major current.

I have used all kinds of platforms over the years, and I still use Substack to publish my English articles. [Note: this was so when the issue went out on 29 September 2026. In October 2026 Takahiro Mitsui’s English writing moved from Substack to Project 2049, https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049.] Yet precisely because these are works that I myself put out into the world, I think it matters to take on all of the responsibility for them, and there is a sense in which keeping a distance from the platforms is what lets one move forward. The other point is dispersal. In other words, a moment will come when something happens and whatever one has prepared until then is what counts.

Social media and the other established platforms lighten data and compress images for their own convenience, and they decide the relationships between users as well. Naturally, there is no freedom of design, and everything is flattened. The readers you want to reach are not your readers but users of the platform, and they are simply being drawn up into it.

There is no need to resolve all of this. Still, it is essential if one truly wants to slow down and build new relationships, and from the standpoint of the time it takes to nurture a relationship, using the platform companies simply does not pay. Over the long run, it is hard to avoid being thrown into confusion by their changes of contract, their stock listings, their bankruptcies, their mergers and acquisitions.

That is all the more true now that we have entered an age in which even large corporations vanish. As we can see from how quickly so much that creators once considered indispensable is being swept away in the age of AI, it seems to me that taking responsibility for one’s own content and carrying it all the way from publication to the building of relationships has become an iron rule of survival in an era when AI acts as an automaton. For that, one should use AI to the fullest. The main battleground of creativity seems to have moved to “the time of human relationships.”

The debate over whether AI is good or bad is entirely outdated, because it separates slowing down from speeding up, when in essence the two are not separate. In other words, to slow down, we have to speed up. If individuals, societies, and nations slow themselves down for the sake of slowing down, they will be left behind in no time. Even if Europe and America firm up their laws and regulations, it all comes to nothing once China ignores them. Now that international cooperation and international peace have both disappeared, there is no way the world will stand united.

What can be said, at least at the level of the individual, is this. Have a place of your own to put your creative work, where it will not be converted at a platform’s convenience. Then build AI automation into your daily life, and while the AI is working for you, take a slow, deep breath, brew a cup of coffee, and step into the light outside. I cannot help feeling that the accumulation of such moments is how we prepare to take hold of a future of richness and of slowness.

Starting with this issue, I am speeding up that first step.