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 acc

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.