Klingefjord’s Coasean Compression frames the problem cleanly. When value is hard to specify, hard to verify, risky to promise, and dependent on who else shows up, markets at scale fall back on proxies. Swipes for connection. Beer for vibe. The contract gets compressed, and the platform stops being meaningfully accountable for what the buyer was actually after.

I want to push on one piece of this — Specification — and suggest the compression doesn’t only happen on the supply side. It happens inside the buyer.

Take dating again. The standard story is that Tinder offers swipes because the deeper thing — “a partner I could build a life with” — is too costly to write into a contract. But notice what most users would do if a dating service handed them a blank sheet of paper and asked them to specify what they want. Many would freeze. Some would write things they don’t actually believe. Most would write something noticeably thinner than what they would later, with hindsight, recognize as having mattered. The swipe is not only a compressed offer; it is a compressed demand.

This matters because it changes what kind of fix is on the table. If the friction were purely on the supply side, the remedy would be to lower the cost of articulation for sellers — better verification, better risk-sharing, AI-assisted contracting. Klingefjord gestures at this in the closing move of his essay. But if the buyer also doesn’t know what they want, in language a contract could hold, then richer instruments will keep returning empty: sellers will learn to fill them out with whatever they can confidently deliver, and buyers will sign without protest, because nothing more demanding has formed inside them.

Klingefjord is alive to part of this. He notes that introspection is part of the work of specification, and he is right. But in the four-friction taxonomy, introspection is folded into Specification as if it were a translation cost — as if the value were already there, fully formed, waiting to be put into words. I think that understates it. For many of the goods he lists (belonging, meaning, a vibe, a life), what people actually want is partly constituted by the process of articulating it, often together with others. The shape of the want firms up as you try to say it, and to whom.

This has two consequences for the project he sketches at the end.

First, any market upgrade aimed at restoring fidelity to deeper wants will need a step upstream of the contract: a process that helps buyers articulate what they’re after, and that treats the articulation itself as part of the good being delivered. Approaches like Moral Graph Elicitation point in this direction; ordinary procurement does not. A “richer dating contract” without this upstream step would just route us back to swipes through a longer hallway.

Second, the diagnostic shifts. The trouble isn’t only that markets at scale lose sight of certain values. It’s that markets at scale are very good at giving us thin versions of ourselves and then meeting those — and that the proxy-equilibrium is genuinely comfortable for the buyer too. Swipes are easier to face than the question of what kind of life one is trying to build. We are not only being compressed against; we are participating in the compression. Any fix that ignores this will produce well-designed contracts that no one can fill out.

None of this is a refutation of Coasean Compression. It is closer to an amendment: the four frictions live partly in the world and partly in us. The interesting question for the next two essays in the series is which of the proposed market upgrades survive that complication, and which quietly assume a buyer who already knows.