Huh, my take on this has always been the opposite. Friction is how the "attention economy" makes money. You can't monetize people's attention directly - but you can throw in friction - ads, dark patterns - in the way of people. Like a metaphorical donkey on a treadmill hooked up to a dynamo, attention is how you make people chase your carrot; friction is how you slowly bleed them out of their money.
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:
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
** **
* *
*******
That is: low friction when they fall into the hole, moderate friction (sandpaper) as they tumble around inside it, chasing rewards or fulfillment or just wanting the software to do the promised job - that's the part that continuously extracts value - and very high friction (spikes) should they want to try and leave the hole.
Also very visible in (mobile) video games, which limit how much a player can do or achieve in a period of time, but they offer a purchase to unlock that friction / limitation.
Because of the medium that is the internet (low friction and high observability) it has a glaring lack of interest in solving problems where the destination is high friction low observability.
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.
I don't understand from your comment why a 3rd place - the importance of which I do indeed recognize in our modern world - is impossible on the Internet, if that's what you are implying? I imagine most of us on HN have been part of online communities that were meaningful. Some people, myself included, keep those places going - on Discord and the like.
Post is about incentives and qualia; digital 3rd places exist on the internet and have their own value. I'm glad they exist and that people maintain them. Some of the best early digital 3rds were BBSes which were also high friction and low observability.
I mean, it's that digital "places" are not nearly as good as physical places, is the sense a lot of us have.
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.
+100 to that. There are plenty of evidence (e.g. interviews) where the social media folks want other people (including children) to use their shitty products, but they don't 'feed' their garbage to their own children[0]. I remember the filthy snake (sorry.. a CEO) of TikTok trying to convince the world that his child(ren) is/are not on TikTok "because they are too young". As if on their birthday(s) he will gift them an iPhone with a TikTok account in it...
Not saying this is what you're doing, but I find requiring someone to solve a problem immediately after sharing it can (ironically) stifle finding a solution. The act of identifying and the act of solving rarely happen all in one motion, and often the first step to solving a problem is to establish its validity among peers so meaningful solutions can arise.
Tangent to this: I think it's often useful to allow suggesting "bad" solutions to vague problems because good solutions often hang out close to the bad one's and shines interesting light on the problem. Or bad solutions often immediately provokes better ideas. If you immediately see that a proposed solution is bad there's a good chance you know what specifically is bad about it and can propose an amendment.
Suggesting a bad solution is sometimes half the way to a good one.
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 think that it doesn't mean "art" but also has "crafts", and the labour that comes with it, in it. You wouldn't call a 'tech-nician' an 'artist', but "tech" is the part of that "ΤΕΧΝΗ". ("ΤΕΧ" being translated/converted to "TECH").
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)
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.
There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
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.
> There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
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.
> 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.
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.
What is the idea of the article? It's all over the place. Zuck is bad, Trump is bad, a degree in basket weaving can be obtained by a chatbot, it's who you know, the Fed held rates, Uber drivers are somehow related to friction, we need change but we also need things to go back to how they were.
The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it, so the poet isn't limited to any specific form, and many did write in different forms. Similarly unclear what was arbitrary about oil paints, what was a similarly colorful alternative without such limits?
>The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it
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.
> >The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it
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.
I mean poetry is an arrangement of symbols, generally symbols that are related in their representation: assonance, dissonance, rhyme, meter, stress, meaning…
The poet is limited to symbols. And every poet comes up against these limitations.
But the symbols aren't an arbitrary limitation - for example, using non-language symbols would mean that he will simply not be understood, so the understanding is drive by the need to communicate
Toqueville wrote about American believing in themselves, but not in isolation.
> 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.
Feudalism wasn't at all about people. It was about land. That's the principal difference with slaveholding: in a slaveholding society, principal asset is people, and the land is usually cheap, just worthless unless you own slaves who can cultivate it - it is the people who are the limited resource. In a feudal society, it is the land - if you have land, people will come - there was no point to instill gulag-like conditions on them - land was limited, people were not - so there was nowhere for them to run.
I was referring to the rigidly hierarchical management structure at most companies and how there’s a worker/manager/executive class structure that functions roughly based on fealty. It was a rough metaphor maybe but I wasn’t talking about slavery.
You can see it differently: Digital world is almost entirely friction, shoveling useless info into our brains from morning till evening and preventing them from functioning normally. And being offline, lets say stuck in traffic and the phone battery is empty, is a welcome relief.
Is the friction of establishing trust via TLS on the way to consuming all the bandwidth?
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?
The friction is incompatibility. That's what makes it difficult to interact with the system, and for the system to interact with itself.
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.
Most people visit the same half dozen websites over and over anyways. Websites are eventually going to be an artifact of an old medium as we move to like cybernetics and AR glasses and brain implants and whatever else. All that stuff in websites will be forgotten
I have read that some deaf people do not want cochlear implants because their deafness is part of who they are, their identity. They don't want that taken away.
Because we're a post-competence society. Very little useful data will be gained by the operators of these bots. They don't work, and nobody cares they don't work. We're doing everything cargo-cult now. We're building giant machines that do nothing but spew smoke into the air, because that's what they did in the Industrial Revolution and it brought prosperity, didn't it?
I would argue that’s a driver to my point. How many people are never going to visit the source website when Llama can give me a detailed summary of what I need in a few hundred milliseconds? I would consider that in the same category of forgotten. I could’ve been more clear in my other comment.
If a website is not financially dependent on search traffic, they can block all scrapers with a paywall, and their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
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.
Is the correct response to someone who hates their job, who happens to take a hike and enjoy nature once in a while, "why don't you go live in the woods then?"?
Is it the wrong response? If they hate a job there's actual value in assessing whether they need it, especially if they could live life in a different environment they would enjoy with things made by their own hands.
There is value, yes. However, things are rarely so black and white as the commenter above you sees it wherein one could simply disconnect entirely. The reality of it is within our current zeitgeist the digital world is unavoidable - be it in the workplace, the condensation of our activities (incl. unavoidable ones- banking, etc) into apps on our phones.
Of course this is barring the idea of withdrawing all ones savings and moving onto a farm and living off the land :D.
I think this is true to an extent and it’s good to take a step back and remind yourself that thing you think is making you miserable is ultimately a small square of metal and glass. But the actual situation is more complicated. Clearly phones have utility beyond being skinner boxes, the ability to contact your loved ones, navigate roads and transit systems, translate languages, retrieve information from the web, etc are all extremely useful and their absence would decrease your quality of life. But since that’s all bundled together with the stuff people find harmful you’re left in a constant struggle to only your device in a beneficial way. You can lock down your phone but that’s just a band-aid. If someone can figure out a “smart-ish” phone that does the things I listed above but not the harmful things I think there would be a real market for it.
Well, you call it friction, but others call it just the real world. It's going to be there, firm and fine, unaware of this digital, virtual bacteria. Just like those rocks who saw a highway come up beside them, a city getting built, and then all becoming ruins, restoring the natural landscape. All happening in a blip of time for the rocks. Adaptation would restore normalcy.
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.
I don't get the whole friction thing. Yes, it's a thing. No, I don't see how it makes any kind of point here. What you call friction appears to be the inverse of investment. Not monetary investment, but actual resources put towards making something work.
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.
> 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.
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.
This seems like a pretty confused piece, with poorly defined terms and poetic associations more than arguments.
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.
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.
Agree... while there are valuable and interesting notions in the article the final conclusion and the so-called curated friction is just too stretched for me.
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 That
"Friction" in the author's post refers to intellectual friction. The need to think about what you are doing before you do it; as opposed to being led to your next action by the UX of an app or instruction of another person.
"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 That"
> The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly. Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures anymore. When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency
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?
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.
Good read! It exposes something deeply American and probably hard to change.
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?
The bit about writing an essay in 2 hours really hit me. I remember being a student and each essay being an enormous amount of time. There were digital catalogues, but they weren't great, and there were no digital resources like journals. Spent a lot of time just wandering along the relevant sections of library bookshelves looking for books that might be relevant and skimming my way through them.
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.
There's a link in there to "It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl" in New York Magazine. [1] All that stuff about a 15-minute city? They live in one.
Expensively, but not flashily.
Also see the link to the Mark Zuckerberg interview.[2]
Both of those are better than the "friction" article.
Personally, I thought this "friction" article was excellent and a very helpful way of framing things. Recommend reading it in addition to those two links.
This meanders until it devolves into complaining about airlines. No point to be found just repeat what the MBA crowd is obsessed with this year
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.
Friction debt: reducing friction somewhere by taking it from the future.
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.
> I think what we're witnessing isn't just an extension of the attention economy but something new - the simulation economy
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
I like to call our latest economy the jester economy. No longer is it a service economy, but one of influencers, reality tv, and most lately, TikTok stars. We even have a reality tv star for US President!
"And yes, cheating has always existed. But this isn’t traditional cheating. It’s ambient, platform-approved, investor-funded cognitive offloading." really appreciated this bit, it's insane how much some of these vendors equivocate when you call them out on this kind of thing
> When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.
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.
how feeding all your data into one system, clicking so many ads that the company can pay an infinite research and power bill, just so you get a virtual imaginary friend can be called "frictionless"?
I've posted this before, but on the topic of cheating, if you look at the Google Trends for ChatGPT searches, its popularity seems to track the school year remarkably well:
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.
I am not sure why kids need to be in school. As long there are good labor protections in place they’d probably find it more valuable to work and make their own money rather than get yelled at by parents and teachers all day while they goof off doing unproductive labor like scrolling through instagram or playing fortnite or whatever it is kids do these days to waste time.
Everyone wants to persecute the poor for using AI to assist them climbing the ladder but no one wants to persecute the rich to have always gotten there off other's backs. Wealthy college students have always had an army of tutors and their dad's entire company helping them. Why not address this problem?
Is it just me who thinks this article is silly? The entire point of it seems to establish causation that removing digital friction increases friction in the real world.
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?
It is a bit silly, but I think it is silly in a different way than you do.
For me it is silly in a way that some American discovered that real world do not exists just to keep Americans happy and content, but it requires real, continuous hard work of million of people to keep infrastructure running.
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.
My partner has lived in China for 2 years, and I can assure you many people who live in China are also buying automatic cat feeders and in fact the domestic market is their primary one.
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.
I was not trying to convince you that you cat feeder is not necessary.
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.
lol this convo was kinda all over the place, but honestly the friction vs efficiency thing stuck with me - I've seen way too many times where stuff broke down cause someone tried to optimize too much. you think there's a way for things to stay efficient but not fall apart when life hits hard?
Huh, my take on this has always been the opposite. Friction is how the "attention economy" makes money. You can't monetize people's attention directly - but you can throw in friction - ads, dark patterns - in the way of people. Like a metaphorical donkey on a treadmill hooked up to a dynamo, attention is how you make people chase your carrot; friction is how you slowly bleed them out of their money.
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:
That is: low friction when they fall into the hole, moderate friction (sandpaper) as they tumble around inside it, chasing rewards or fulfillment or just wanting the software to do the promised job - that's the part that continuously extracts value - and very high friction (spikes) should they want to try and leave the hole.Also very visible in (mobile) video games, which limit how much a player can do or achieve in a period of time, but they offer a purchase to unlock that friction / limitation.
Because of the medium that is the internet (low friction and high observability) it has a glaring lack of interest in solving problems where the destination is high friction low observability.
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.
I don't understand from your comment why a 3rd place - the importance of which I do indeed recognize in our modern world - is impossible on the Internet, if that's what you are implying? I imagine most of us on HN have been part of online communities that were meaningful. Some people, myself included, keep those places going - on Discord and the like.
Post is about incentives and qualia; digital 3rd places exist on the internet and have their own value. I'm glad they exist and that people maintain them. Some of the best early digital 3rds were BBSes which were also high friction and low observability.
I mean, it's that digital "places" are not nearly as good as physical places, is the sense a lot of us have.
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.
Where do RTO mandates (2nd place friction) fit into this model?
I think drug dealers figured this out a long time ago, just because you sell something doesn't mean you should use it for yourself.
+100 to that. There are plenty of evidence (e.g. interviews) where the social media folks want other people (including children) to use their shitty products, but they don't 'feed' their garbage to their own children[0]. I remember the filthy snake (sorry.. a CEO) of TikTok trying to convince the world that his child(ren) is/are not on TikTok "because they are too young". As if on their birthday(s) he will gift them an iPhone with a TikTok account in it...
[0]: https://www.thelist.com/677684/the-real-reason-tech-moguls-d...
Glad to hear it, what’s your approach?
Not saying this is what you're doing, but I find requiring someone to solve a problem immediately after sharing it can (ironically) stifle finding a solution. The act of identifying and the act of solving rarely happen all in one motion, and often the first step to solving a problem is to establish its validity among peers so meaningful solutions can arise.
Yes, but: The top level comment specifically said they were working to solve the problem. I think in that case it's worth asking about their approach.
Tangent to this: I think it's often useful to allow suggesting "bad" solutions to vague problems because good solutions often hang out close to the bad one's and shines interesting light on the problem. Or bad solutions often immediately provokes better ideas. If you immediately see that a proposed solution is bad there's a good chance you know what specifically is bad about it and can propose an amendment.
Suggesting a bad solution is sometimes half the way to a good one.
Exploring the problem space is necessary to determine what a bad solution versus a good solution even is.
I get the idea, and it's a pretty good one.
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’ve had this in my head as well “constraints yield art”. But it’s also required to engineering
Τέχνη, as the Greeks called it.
That seems to just mean "art" AFAICT? I couldn't find anything about constraints
I think that it doesn't mean "art" but also has "crafts", and the labour that comes with it, in it. You wouldn't call a 'tech-nician' an 'artist', but "tech" is the part of that "ΤΕΧΝΗ". ("ΤΕΧ" being translated/converted to "TECH").
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)
Texel, as the Dutch call it.
I had a beer by that name last time I was in NL. No friction in consuming it 9.5/10
> It's not a commodity and it's not valuable.
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.
There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
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.
> There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
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.
> 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.
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.
What is the idea of the article? It's all over the place. Zuck is bad, Trump is bad, a degree in basket weaving can be obtained by a chatbot, it's who you know, the Fed held rates, Uber drivers are somehow related to friction, we need change but we also need things to go back to how they were.
Heh, from the headline I expected this to be another blog post about how to find your market niche and what you can monetize, ultimately.
Instead I got a pretty interesting article about human nature and the economy as a whole.
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The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it, so the poet isn't limited to any specific form, and many did write in different forms. Similarly unclear what was arbitrary about oil paints, what was a similarly colorful alternative without such limits?
>The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it
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.
> >The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it
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.
Not just in abstract - mixed poetry exists in reality, so it holds at the level of an individual poem as well.
I mean poetry is an arrangement of symbols, generally symbols that are related in their representation: assonance, dissonance, rhyme, meter, stress, meaning…
The poet is limited to symbols. And every poet comes up against these limitations.
But the symbols aren't an arbitrary limitation - for example, using non-language symbols would mean that he will simply not be understood, so the understanding is drive by the need to communicate
Toqueville wrote about American believing in themselves, but not in isolation.
> 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.
Businesses are associations. They just unfortunately come with a lot of feudal assumptions these days.
Feudalism wasn't at all about people. It was about land. That's the principal difference with slaveholding: in a slaveholding society, principal asset is people, and the land is usually cheap, just worthless unless you own slaves who can cultivate it - it is the people who are the limited resource. In a feudal society, it is the land - if you have land, people will come - there was no point to instill gulag-like conditions on them - land was limited, people were not - so there was nowhere for them to run.
I was referring to the rigidly hierarchical management structure at most companies and how there’s a worker/manager/executive class structure that functions roughly based on fealty. It was a rough metaphor maybe but I wasn’t talking about slavery.
In feudalism peasants were not free to leave their lord or his land.
Please, I am begging you. Research actual feudalism.
Yeah. And universities are (generally) far more feudal than 99% of modern western businesses ever want to be.
Which is not to say that's a good idea. Nor that it's working out, longer-term, for the universities.
A better comment would assume that this person has indeed researched feudalism and would criticize the analogy based on that assumption.
You can see it differently: Digital world is almost entirely friction, shoveling useless info into our brains from morning till evening and preventing them from functioning normally. And being offline, lets say stuck in traffic and the phone battery is empty, is a welcome relief.
High friction to do what you want. Low friction to do what they want, until you forget what you want.
Is the friction of establishing trust via TLS on the way to consuming all the bandwidth?
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?
The friction is incompatibility. That's what makes it difficult to interact with the system, and for the system to interact with itself.
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.
Most people visit the same half dozen websites over and over anyways. Websites are eventually going to be an artifact of an old medium as we move to like cybernetics and AR glasses and brain implants and whatever else. All that stuff in websites will be forgotten
Eh, I think a huge amount of people would never want anything implanted in any part of their body. Most people don't even want smart glasses.
Most people didn’t want to carry a computer around with them all the time 40 years ago as well.
Though I don’t agree that AR would eliminate the usefulness of websites.
Except a necessary, special purpose device, e.g. a pacemaker, I wouldn't have anything implanted.
Now, an artificial ear for the deaf starts to be more compelling.
I have read that some deaf people do not want cochlear implants because their deafness is part of who they are, their identity. They don't want that taken away.
> All that stuff in websites will be forgotten
Why are LLM scraper bots hammering websites globally, if websites will be forgotten?
Because we're a post-competence society. Very little useful data will be gained by the operators of these bots. They don't work, and nobody cares they don't work. We're doing everything cargo-cult now. We're building giant machines that do nothing but spew smoke into the air, because that's what they did in the Industrial Revolution and it brought prosperity, didn't it?
Hopefully any actual scraper bots are writing data to de-duplicated cloud storage. The rest should be served with Anubis, PoW or other DDOS defenses.
I would argue that’s a driver to my point. How many people are never going to visit the source website when Llama can give me a detailed summary of what I need in a few hundred milliseconds? I would consider that in the same category of forgotten. I could’ve been more clear in my other comment.
If a website is not financially dependent on search traffic, they can block all scrapers with a paywall, and their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
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.
> And being offline, lets say stuck in traffic and the phone battery is empty, is a welcome relief.
Then sell your phone?
Sorry to be dismissive, but you are locked in a prison of your own making.
Is the correct response to someone who hates their job, who happens to take a hike and enjoy nature once in a while, "why don't you go live in the woods then?"?
Is it the wrong response? If they hate a job there's actual value in assessing whether they need it, especially if they could live life in a different environment they would enjoy with things made by their own hands.
There is value, yes. However, things are rarely so black and white as the commenter above you sees it wherein one could simply disconnect entirely. The reality of it is within our current zeitgeist the digital world is unavoidable - be it in the workplace, the condensation of our activities (incl. unavoidable ones- banking, etc) into apps on our phones.
Of course this is barring the idea of withdrawing all ones savings and moving onto a farm and living off the land :D.
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> Sorry to be dismissive
Then don't be dismissive?
Seriously, isn't this answer the exact application of your own philosophy?
I think this is true to an extent and it’s good to take a step back and remind yourself that thing you think is making you miserable is ultimately a small square of metal and glass. But the actual situation is more complicated. Clearly phones have utility beyond being skinner boxes, the ability to contact your loved ones, navigate roads and transit systems, translate languages, retrieve information from the web, etc are all extremely useful and their absence would decrease your quality of life. But since that’s all bundled together with the stuff people find harmful you’re left in a constant struggle to only your device in a beneficial way. You can lock down your phone but that’s just a band-aid. If someone can figure out a “smart-ish” phone that does the things I listed above but not the harmful things I think there would be a real market for it.
I don’t want to miss any slack notifications while I’m walking my dog
Why?
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Well, you call it friction, but others call it just the real world. It's going to be there, firm and fine, unaware of this digital, virtual bacteria. Just like those rocks who saw a highway come up beside them, a city getting built, and then all becoming ruins, restoring the natural landscape. All happening in a blip of time for the rocks. Adaptation would restore normalcy.
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.
I don't get the whole friction thing. Yes, it's a thing. No, I don't see how it makes any kind of point here. What you call friction appears to be the inverse of investment. Not monetary investment, but actual resources put towards making something work.
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.
> 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.
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.
This seems like a pretty confused piece, with poorly defined terms and poetic associations more than arguments.
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.
Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."
My personal formulation of this, which I arrived at during COVID, is: "Some inefficiencies are safety margins"
three kinds of "inefficiencies"
- 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)
I'm so glad this idea is starting to go mainstream.
Me too.
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.
So, the financial incentives are wholly dysfunctional, innappropriate, and badly thought out (if thought about at all).
Sidenote: what's up with all these substack submissions in last 24h
I can't dismiss the cookie banner on android (ff) so not reading
I have long lobbied for an archive.today link bot for all of the popular spam-adjacent domains (bloomberg, medium, substack, etc)
https://archive.ph/hInjm
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...
Does the reader mode not take care of all the unnecessary formatting, including the banner?
It's just providing the most valuable commodity of friction. :)
Did I miss where the author defines what "friction" is actually meaning?
But certainly a very impressive exercise in creative writing based on taking an analogy too far.
I thought it was excellent. Do you have any specific critiques of claims that we could disagree on?
Agree... while there are valuable and interesting notions in the article the final conclusion and the so-called curated friction is just too stretched for me.
> Did I miss where the author defines what "friction" is actually meaning?
They were responding to a tweet, cited in the second paragraph:
¹ https://nitter.poast.org/Bonecondor/status/19184554398066568...Original X link because that other one does not load for me and perhaps others.
https://x.com/Bonecondor/status/1918455439806656872
I'm not sure what your point is to be honest.
"Friction" in the author's post refers to intellectual friction. The need to think about what you are doing before you do it; as opposed to being led to your next action by the UX of an app or instruction of another person.
The "[structural] friction" is defined by the tweet, not the substack article responding to the tweet.
"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 That"
You consider that a definition?
It's context. A branch of a discussion thread. Not a dictionary.
If you want a faster (less friction?) answer, you could post your question to substack comment thread or twitter.
> The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly. Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures anymore. When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency
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?
(reposting dead comment from Zoethink, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959658)
Good read! It exposes something deeply American and probably hard to change.
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?
Starts to sound like Russia. Keep things running, just barely, thanks to liberal use of piano wire and chewing gum.
The bit about writing an essay in 2 hours really hit me. I remember being a student and each essay being an enormous amount of time. There were digital catalogues, but they weren't great, and there were no digital resources like journals. Spent a lot of time just wandering along the relevant sections of library bookshelves looking for books that might be relevant and skimming my way through them.
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.
I completely agree with this.
Money is the way you solve problems in America so your life's friction is inversely proportional to your money.
There's a link in there to "It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl" in New York Magazine. [1] All that stuff about a 15-minute city? They live in one. Expensively, but not flashily.
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
Personally, I thought this "friction" article was excellent and a very helpful way of framing things. Recommend reading it in addition to those two links.
This meanders until it devolves into complaining about airlines. No point to be found just repeat what the MBA crowd is obsessed with this year
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.
Friction debt: reducing friction somewhere by taking it from the future.
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.
> I think what we're witnessing isn't just an extension of the attention economy but something new - the simulation economy
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.
> 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
I like to call our latest economy the jester economy. No longer is it a service economy, but one of influencers, reality tv, and most lately, TikTok stars. We even have a reality tv star for US President!
It's called good project management to account for these real world gaps and delays... Albeit that's something we don't see enough of
"And yes, cheating has always existed. But this isn’t traditional cheating. It’s ambient, platform-approved, investor-funded cognitive offloading." really appreciated this bit, it's insane how much some of these vendors equivocate when you call them out on this kind of thing
> When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.
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.
The value of a commodity is a function of its necessity and of its rarity and difficulty of obtainment.
Something readily obtained anywhere, of which there is an inexhaustible supply, simply isn't valuable, even if it is essential.
how feeding all your data into one system, clicking so many ads that the company can pay an infinite research and power bill, just so you get a virtual imaginary friend can be called "frictionless"?
I've posted this before, but on the topic of cheating, if you look at the Google Trends for ChatGPT searches, its popularity seems to track the school year remarkably well:
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.
I am not sure why kids need to be in school. As long there are good labor protections in place they’d probably find it more valuable to work and make their own money rather than get yelled at by parents and teachers all day while they goof off doing unproductive labor like scrolling through instagram or playing fortnite or whatever it is kids do these days to waste time.
> The digital world has almost no friction.
So only me gets "Accept cookies?" ten times a day?
Everyone wants to persecute the poor for using AI to assist them climbing the ladder but no one wants to persecute the rich to have always gotten there off other's backs. Wealthy college students have always had an army of tutors and their dad's entire company helping them. Why not address this problem?
Is it just me who thinks this article is silly? The entire point of it seems to establish causation that removing digital friction increases friction in the real world.
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?
It is a bit silly, but I think it is silly in a different way than you do. For me it is silly in a way that some American discovered that real world do not exists just to keep Americans happy and content, but it requires real, continuous hard work of million of people to keep infrastructure running.
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.
My partner has lived in China for 2 years, and I can assure you many people who live in China are also buying automatic cat feeders and in fact the domestic market is their primary one.
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.
I was not trying to convince you that you cat feeder is not necessary.
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.
well writen update on the ideas of inertia, momentum, and how friction effects both
Wwi I'me
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lol this convo was kinda all over the place, but honestly the friction vs efficiency thing stuck with me - I've seen way too many times where stuff broke down cause someone tried to optimize too much. you think there's a way for things to stay efficient but not fall apart when life hits hard?
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