Latency

The delay between an action and its result across a network. Small numbers you never notice; large ones that ruin everything live.

Latency is the distance between doing and seeing, measured in milliseconds and felt as trust: below a threshold, systems read as extensions of the hand; above it, as bureaucracies processing requests. Nothing else about a live experience survives its latency being wrong.

For recorded work it hides in the seams, the pause before play begins, the beat between click and response, and those seams are designable: lighter first payloads, nearer servers, work begun before it is asked for. The audience never praises low latency. They simply stay, which is the praise.