But the headline is really bad. It's not a commodity and it's not valuable. It is what creates value; it's what makes value meaningful.

Don't get hung up on the headline. It's a thesis equivalent to the notion that art comes from struggle against some kind of limitation. That limitation is usually arbitrary (the form of poetry, the rules of a game, the difficulty of oil paint and brush), but the result is meaningful despite and because of it.

I can't dismiss the cookie banner on android (ff) so not reading

In fact, because the digital world explicitly competes with friction for engagement any financially incentivized platform must direct people away from the real world and real people.

So the endgame is to replace real people with digital people even in our relationships.

Real spaces with fake places.

Real disagreements with manufacturered ones.

Only people who have been heavily involved in 3rd places seem to be able to quantify what our modern world has unnecessarily thrown away.

It's a glaring ommission once you realize it, working to solve that atm.

But certainly a very impressive exercise in creative writing based on taking an analogy too far.

> Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

But that was based on need, back before a lot of modern institutions existed. Where public schools didn’t exist yet, there were private academies. Before insurance companies, there were mutual aid societies.

Nowadays there are businesses and other organizations serving every need, though sometimes only if you have enough money.

I also don't see a strong connection between the digital world getting more frictionless and the physical world getting worse. Unless you're suggesting that we're forgetting about the physical stuff because we're going all digital, they seem to just be two things happening at the same time. There are ways they can be linked. We're going frictionless digital because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to take your money, and we're going crumbling infrastructure because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to save money. But I don't think it's a direct relationship.

Is the FAA letting air traffic control fail because the FAA is busy tweeting? I don't think so. It's because it's being defunded... by a guy who spends all his time tweeting. Another weak connection there, but it's simply because of government priorities. But it started before then. I think physical infrastructure has been on a slow decline since long before things like social media existed.

Tangential: More than once (I refuse to say the two nickels catchphrase) I have spotted a person at a techno party sitting down with their phone and been like "oh no you don't" and they have never been annoyed by this.

Is it really new? We've been replacing real human connections with online connections/friendships for quite a while now. Social media companies have been giving us a world full of simulated relationships and making profits off of it. As quoted in the post, the average American adult has 3 friends. Look how many friends they have on FB.

Something readily obtained anywhere, of which there is an inexhaustible supply, simply isn't valuable, even if it is essential.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

It's not just that everyone is cheating their way through college. It's that cheating is one of the primary uses -- perhaps the primary use -- of ChatGPT.

Also see the link to the Mark Zuckerberg interview.[2]

Both of those are better than the "friction" article.

[1] https://archive.is/JKJGf

[2] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-2

If social isolation and digital-ness is not rewarded, it would go away on its own. If it is not supported by the decaying social fabric, it would fall like facade of playing cards. Everything must interact with real world and adapt at the ground level.

Human endeavor has insignificantly small effect on the real world. Cultures and schools of thought fall and new ones rise. Real world doesn't adapt to your wish, you adapt to the world.

99% of the world population might not know any stuff you are talking about - trumpcoin, VR headsets, AI etc. That's not what the life on earth is made of.

The wiki definition of efficiency is "the often measurable ability to avoid making mistakes or wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste", so having a lot of breakage is by definition not efficient, and the system isn't optimized for it

Similarly the frictionless digital paradise is imaginary

> Amazon's one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

Wait, that one-click order could be of a counterfeit 5-fake-starred product, does the fail to match your basic need not count as friction in author's digital physics book?

> Meta builds frictionless social interfaces

How is the impossibility to get algorithms matching your needs a frictionless interface?

American culture glorifies inventions and new things. Meanwhile all the stuff invented ages ago is just left run into the ground. It’s very rarely rebuilt.

Transit system failures expose this.

Everyone can point to an example overseas of something shinier - trains that run on time in Switzerland, for example - yet things in the US work “well enough” even when they’re shabby. It’s actually surprising how well some things in the US continue to work despite being decayed and underfunded.

The US has given the world many amazing inventions despite all this shabby infrastructure; it keeps chugging along even though Warren Buffet feels it’s close to collapse. Maybe the rest of the world can learn something from that?

Very enjoyable read! But now I am curious, how does this contribute to the failure of nations, given that removing friction it's one of the first steps to ensure transparency.

Money is the way you solve problems in America so your life's friction is inversely proportional to your money.

Freemium is a direct application of this. You get the product for free now, friction free. The app creator takes on some form of cash debt for this.

The friction is dripped into your experience and you need to pay to get rid of it. The debt is repaid later when you actually purchase the product at a much higher price than you would have if you just bought it at the old one time purchase rates.

It feels to me like it was a pretty valuable way to spend time. I got a much bigger sense of the discipline I was studying, of this collective intellectual culture I was just on the outer fringes of.

I wonder how much ChatGPT-boosted students really end up knowing at the end of their degree.

  This piece beautifully reframes friction not as a nuisance to be eliminated, but as a signal—of value, of effort, of systemic health.

  What strikes me most is the inversion: friction has not disappeared; it’s just been redistributed—offscreen, outsourced, or monetized. In the digital realm, we’re nudged, streamlined, simulated. In the physical world, friction accumulates in deferred maintenance and human fatigue. In curated spaces, it becomes something you pay to suppress.

  Maybe the real question isn't how much friction exists, but who bears it—and what happens when we forget it's still there.

But they barely manage to do this, they just have a single example of their flight being delayed repeatedly over and over. You'd think if this was an actual phenomenon they could come up with lots of examples and not need to keep repeating themselves.

I can think of obvious and damning counter examples, too. In China their physical infrastructure massively improved during the same period they got access to smart phones and unlocked the digital world. Contactless payments, including Google and Apple Pay, along with apps like Monzo to easily send money to friends have rendered cash obsolete where I live (London). I have an app that connects to my automatic cat feeder so I no longer need to feed my cat 3 times a day. She still loves me, sits on my laps and purrs all the same.

Am I missing something or is the central point of the blog that digital frictionless increases real world friction obviously untrue?

In this view, friction is bad - and the reason I've been using this metaphor for years, it because it makes it clear the reason tech sucks is intentional - the parts that suck are the parts that make money.