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How friction is being redistributed in today's economy
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- apples_oranges 1y agoYou 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.
- smitty1e 1y agoIs 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?
- thunkingdeep 1y agoMost 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
- walterbell 1y ago> All that stuff in websites will be forgotten Why are LLM scraper bots hammering websites globally, if websites will be forgotten?
- immibis 1y agoBecause 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?
- walterbell 1y agoHopefully any actual scraper bots are writing data to de-duplicated cloud storage. The rest should be served with Anubis, PoW or other DDOS defenses.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thunkingdeep 1y agoI 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.
- walterbell 1y agoIf 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.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoEh, 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.
- smitty1e 1y agoExcept 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.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI 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.
- layer8 1y agoMost 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.
- thomastjeffery 1y agoThe 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.
- sebzim4500 1y ago> 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.
- immibis 1y agoIs 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?"?
- seangrogg 1y agoIs 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.
- cmonBro22 1y ago[flagged]
- hanlonsrazor 1y agoThere 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lucianbr 1y ago> Sorry to be dismissive Then don't be dismissive? Seriously, isn't this answer the exact application of your own philosophy?
- immibis 1y agoHigh friction to do what you want. Low friction to do what they want, until you forget what you want.
- jfengel 1y agoI 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.
- klysm 1y agoI’ve had this in my head as well “constraints yield art”. But it’s also required to engineering
- DiscourseFan 1y agoΤέχνη, as the Greeks called it.
- rambambram 1y agoTexel, as the Dutch call it.
- mikrl 1y agoI had a beer by that name last time I was in NL. No friction in consuming it 9.5/10
- rendaw 1y agoThat seems to just mean "art" AFAICT? I couldn't find anything about constraints
- HenryBemis 1y agoI 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)
- dgan 1y agoSidenote: what's up with all these substack submissions in last 24h I can't dismiss the cookie banner on android (ff) so not reading
- mdaniel 1y agoI 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 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#:~:text=Firefox%20version%20120%20introduces%20the%20cookie%20banner%20blocker https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cookie-banner-reduction...
- nine_k 1y agoDoes the reader mode not take care of all the unnecessary formatting, including the banner?
- jampekka 1y agoIt's just providing the most valuable commodity of friction. :)
- fellowniusmonk 1y agoBecause 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.
- pbronez 1y agoGlad to hear it, what’s your approach?
- mlekoszek 1y agoNot 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.
- andrewflnr 1y agoYes, 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.
- worldsayshi 1y agoTangent 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.
- raffael_de 1y agoDid 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.
- walterbell 1y ago> Did I miss where the author defines what "friction" is actually meaning? They were responding to a tweet, cited in the second paragraph: I want to talk about friction.¹ ¹ https://nitter.poast.org/Bonecondor/status/1918455439806656872 https://nitter.poast.org/Bonecondor/status/19184554398066568... 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
- raffael_de 1y agoI'm not sure what your point is to be honest.
- walterbell 1y agoThe "[structural] friction" is defined by the tweet, not the substack article responding to the tweet.
- raffael_de 1y ago"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?
- walterbell 1y agoIt'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.
- skybrian 1y agoToqueville 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.
- dullcrisp 1y agoBusinesses are associations. They just unfortunately come with a lot of feudal assumptions these days.
- Nasrudith 1y agoPlease, I am begging you. Research actual feudalism.
- bell-cot 1y agoYeah. 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.
- sanderjd 1y agoA better comment would assume that this person has indeed researched feudalism and would criticize the analogy based on that assumption.
- metalman 1y agowell writen update on the ideas of inertia, momentum, and how friction effects both
- immibis 1y agoI 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.
- npodbielski 1y ago> 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.
- tuan 1y ago> 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.
- mdaniel 1y ago> 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
- fragmede 1y agoI 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!
- ranprieur 1y agoKey sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."
- andrewflnr 1y agoI'm so glad this idea is starting to go mainstream.
- Animats 1y agoMe 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.
- euroderf 1y agoSo, the financial incentives are wholly dysfunctional, innappropriate, and badly thought out (if thought about at all).
- hliyan 1y agoMy personal formulation of this, which I arrived at during COVID, is: "Some inefficiencies are safety margins"
- pluto_modadic 1y agothree 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)
- kazinator 1y agoThe 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.
- ZeroNietzsche 1y ago[dead]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoI'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&geo=US&q=chatgpt&hl=en 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.
- DiscourseFan 1y agoI 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.
- Animats 1y agoThere'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 https://archive.is/JKJGf [2] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-2 https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-2
- corford 1y agoPersonally, I thought this "friction" article was excellent and a very helpful way of framing things. Recommend reading it in addition to those two links.
- 1oooqooq 1y agohow 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"?
- zkmon 1y agoWell, 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.
- eviks 1y ago> 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?
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoGood 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?
- euroderf 1y agoStarts to sound like Russia. Keep things running, just barely, thanks to liberal use of piano wire and chewing gum.
- rob_c 1y agoIt's called good project management to account for these real world gaps and delays... Albeit that's something we don't see enough of
- 3abiton 1y ago> 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.
- teddy-smith 1y agoI completely agree with this. Money is the way you solve problems in America so your life's friction is inversely proportional to your money.
- mprast 1y ago"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
- muzani 1y agoFriction 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.
- stevage 1y agoThe 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.
- kittikitti 1y agoEveryone 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?
- gitroom 1y agolol 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?
- Zoethink 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- walterbell 1y ago(reposting dead comment from Zoethink, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959658) 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.
- Aicy 1y agoIs 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?
- npodbielski 1y agoIt 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.
- Lirael 1y ago[dead]
- TeMPOraL 1y agoHuh, 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.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoAlso 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.
- casey2 1y agoThis 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.
- chrisjj 1y ago> The digital world has almost no friction. So only me gets "Accept cookies?" ten times a day?
- vonnik 1y agoThis 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.