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 would put thins in a sequence and say (1) Imagination, (2) Implementation. I bring over a TECHnician to assess the damage in the plumbing-stuff-thingies, and he/she will use (1) imagination to come up with the solution, and (2) pull out his/her tools and fix the darn thing. Now.. the 50yo guy with low cut jeans flashing a hairy butt-crack from under the kitchen sink, is not an 'artist' (in its typical/expected format - painter, sculptor, etc.) but he will use imagination (and/or experience) to fix the thing. Just as a painter would use the imagination (and/or experience in the types of paper/canvas/oil paint/water paint/etc.) to make one-more-painting (I am thinking for the similarities of Van Gogh's starry night, and similar paintings)
Instead I got a pretty interesting article about human nature and the economy as a whole.
Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value. Very much including the concept of friction.
If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all value.
Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.
A good example of something that is both a commodity and a common source of friction is all the signup and security friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily directly appreciated but it results in less friction, frustration, and overhead.
That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction by doing a poor job of it.
To give a non-software example: think of wearing a clean shirt in a job interview. Nobody will hire you for the clean shirt, but plenty of people will reject you for stains.
I think negative value would look something like bombing someone. Negative relative-[commodity-]value does not imply negative value.
Also, software is not a commodity at all. There's no cost to reproducing it.
> You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right.
I'm not sure what you mean by "commodity". I think you mean "commonplace" or something like that.
Only in abstract - before you get to do it. When you do start to write a specific poem this doesn't hold anymore, and a big part of the art is fitting the form you chose.
Imho the "art in poetry" begins when I had that dinner with that fascinating woman, and I had the "porch test" and in that test it was raining, and I came up with a haiku. But not (only) on the haiku itself.
The poet is limited to symbols. And every poet comes up against these limitations.
I can't dismiss the cookie banner on android (ff) so not reading
p.s. I think it is one of goals of Firefox to dismiss cookie banners[1] so you may want to file a bugzilla about that behavior
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cookie-banner-reduction...
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.
Suggesting a bad solution is sometimes half the way to a good one.
[0]: https://www.thelist.com/677684/the-real-reason-tech-moguls-d...
I've seen some people who have good descriptions or arguments for why they think this is true. But for me, it's pretty much entirely a visceral intuitive feeling about it. But nevertheless I think it's right. I think we need in-person connection to thrive.
But certainly a very impressive exercise in creative writing based on taking an analogy too far.
They were responding to a tweet, cited in the second paragraph:
I want to talk about friction.¹
I truly believe this lack of structural friction when it comes to basically every type of dopamine-frying pleasure on earth is a huge part of why gen z is Like ThatYou consider that a definition?
If you want a faster (less friction?) answer, you could post your question to substack comment thread or twitter.
> 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.
Which is not to say that's a good idea. Nor that it's working out, longer-term, for the universities.
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.
Exactly what I understood. Also if people in country forget that infrastructure need uptake to keep it running this crumbles and to get it running you need to spend 10x times more money to get it up again.
If at all.
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.
I can't tell if you mean it literally, or you're adopting the FB nomenclature, but in my mind that FB edge is just labeled friend, and is not the relationshipStatus between the nodes
I have a to of "connections" on LinkedIn, too, but I can assure you I am not "connected" to hardly any of them
In the days before electricity deregulation, power companies had rates regulated to achieve a fixed return on investment. This tended to result in overbuilding. Not huge overbuilding, but about 10% - 20%. The quest for "efficiency" wiped out some of that safety margin.
- safety margins (keep, to not harm the customer)
- employee benefits (keep, to not harm the employee, e.g. retirement)
- profit margins for stockholders (you could probably get rid of this)
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.
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?
About Chinese people in China: they are working very very hard. My wife family in New Zealand have a new neighbors from China and they are saying that they escaped from China to lead normal life in NZ, instead of working all the time.
You example of Cat feeder: yes seems nice but only because you were able to get it from China or Indonesia or other country like that for 50$ dollars probably. To actually make it and deliver it to you most probably few thousands of people had to do their job, including mining for resources, transportation, design, software, microprocessors etc. just to save you few minutes every day. Exactly what author of this article is talking about. If this would be done in UK, by people that live there you probably would have to pay 5000$ dollars and it would brake every month. At some point you would most probably came to conclusion that feeding your cat by yourself would be much easier.
I am sorry, I am not trying to be personal here, but seems like you are the target of this article, make people understand that our civilization is taken for granted by people glued to their phones for entertainment.
The cat feeder is I understand a feels like a good point as it feels rather trivial, but for the most part technology helps everyone to be more efficient. Even with the cat feeder its not just a few minutes - it means I can stay out later from work, or go on trips for several days without having to worry, or pay someone to come as a cat sitter. Its cost of $50 pays for itself in just one 7 day trip of not paying for a cat sitter, which usually would be some low paid immigrant from East Asia. Efficiency gains all around.
If you need it and think it is totally worth it, great!
What I was trying to say that it is not live essential item. Cost of all of those nice items that western world is buying from China and similar countries, made of the back of low-wage workforce is low just because those people are not having the same lives as you have. Or children mining rare metals in Africa. This is basically modern day slavery with extra steps.
And what I was trying to say, if you cat feeder would be made by your UK fellow citizens from top to bottom, entirely, can you imagine what would be the cost? Would you still be able to afford it? And you would, would be worth it? Or it would be cheaper to pay your neighbor to watch the cat?
And IMHO this is more or less what article is about: 'wow real world takes a lot of hard work to keep it running and it is easier to scroll tik tok instead of work!'. Hardly a new thing, so yes, article was a bit silly.
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.
EDIT:
More aligned with the article, you could say that attention economy strategically manages friction; it removes it where the article is looking for them, and placing it elsewhere. You can imagine the user to be a wooden ball, rolling around until they fall into a pit structured like this:
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
** **
* *
*******
The US largely overspent for decades and decades during it's manufacturing peak, then transitioned to a service economy increasing the cost of construction. That's the simplest theory that explains the current situation no "friction" needed.
Also it's a bit offensive to claim that the digital world is frictionless when software projects are some of our most important and difficult to maintain pieces of infrastructure even during a boom of talent. Unless you are specifically talking about the act of using software in which case the article makes even less sense.
So only me gets "Accept cookies?" ten times a day?
Friction can be both a natural obstacle, an accident, or a deliberate tool of social and business engineering. It's not inherently good or bad. It's value depends on context. We most often think of friction as evil, because it makes easy things hard. But there are lots of cases where someone might decide something *should* be hard (eg the educational examples she brings up, or any kind of athletic or intellectual training where you can need to be good to surpass a threshold of performance).
In a broader context, friction is always part of an effort/reward ratio. It's the effort part, but part of its meaning is derived from the reward.
apples_oranges•9mo ago
smitty1e•9mo ago
One seriously wonders if the cost of zero trust will kill off the open internet, reducing us to walled gardens of SSH connections that can only be obtained by invitation.
We're falling far short of the vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, no?
thunkingdeep•9mo ago
walterbell•9mo ago
Why are LLM scraper bots hammering websites globally, if websites will be forgotten?
immibis•9mo ago
walterbell•9mo ago
thunkingdeep•9mo ago
walterbell•9mo ago
If a website is financially dependent on search traffic, they can go out of business due to loss of traffic to LLMs, and their content will disappear everywhere.
If the majority of websites fall into the latter category, LLMs would be left with old/archive longform content, plus micro content from social media.
If social media (e.g. X.AI) takes their data private for vertical integration with payments and internal LLM, their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
chipsrafferty•9mo ago
smitty1e•9mo ago
Now, an artificial ear for the deaf starts to be more compelling.
SoftTalker•9mo ago
layer8•9mo ago
Though I don’t agree that AR would eliminate the usefulness of websites.
thomastjeffery•9mo ago
Tim Berners-Lee's vision is great, but no one has really figured out how to make it feasible. To make matters worse, the interests of capital have taken over the system, and replaced most interpersonal interactions with an advertising market.
When a participant in the system is able to monopolize interaction in that system, they end up writing the rules that define compatibility for other participants of the system. The effect is not only that people on different platforms are isolated from the people on other platforms, it's also that they must interact with the system through the rules of their chosen platform. Rules don't just define the bounds of interaction: they define the interface, the logic, the goals, etc.
---
It's impossible to build a set of rules that captures the entire potential of digital interaction. Objectivity is impossible, because the moment we write down its meaning, we subject it to a specific isolated context.
I'm working on a way to change the perspective that the system has with itself, so that subjectivity can be a first-class feature, and compatibility can be accomplished after-the-fact. What I have so far is still an extremely abstract idea, but I do think it's possible.
sebzim4500•9mo ago
Then sell your phone?
Sorry to be dismissive, but you are locked in a prison of your own making.
immibis•9mo ago
seangrogg•9mo ago
hanlonsrazor•9mo ago
Of course this is barring the idea of withdrawing all ones savings and moving onto a farm and living off the land :D.
lucianbr•9mo ago
Then don't be dismissive?
Seriously, isn't this answer the exact application of your own philosophy?
anzumitsu•9mo ago
DiscourseFan•9mo ago
npodbielski•9mo ago
immibis•9mo ago