I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis and the air.

Friction isn't fungible.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”

In "Mind and World", McDowell criticizes this sort of thinking, too, saying:

> We need to conceive this expansive spontaneity as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain off representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a void.

And that's really what this is about, I think. Friction-free is the goal but friction-free "thought" isn't thought at all. It's frictionless spinning in a void.

I teach and see this all the time in EdTech. Imagine if students could just ask the robot XYZ and how much time it'd free up! That time could be spent on things like relationship-building with the teacher, new ways of motivating students, etc.

Except...those activities supply the "wants and struggles whose consummations" build the relationships! Maybe the robot could help the student, say, ask better questions to the teacher, or direct the student to peers who were similarly confused but figure it out.

But I think that strikes many tech-minded folks as "inefficient" and "friction-ful". If the robot knows the answer to my question, why slow me down by redirecting me to another person?

This is the same logic that says making dinner is a waste of time and we should all live off nutrient mush. The purposes of preparing dinner is to make something you can eat and the purpose of eating is nutrient acquisition, right? Just beam those nutrients into my bloodstream and skip the rest.

Not sure how to put this all together into something pithy, but I see it all as symptoms of the same cultural impulse. One that's been around for decades and decades, I think.

I think that's partially true. The point is to have the freedom to pursue higher-level goals. And one thing tech doesn't do - and education in general doesn't do either - is give experience of that kind of goal setting.

I'm completely happy to hand over menial side-quest programming goals to an AI. Things like stupid little automation scripts that require a lot of learning from poor docs.

But there's a much bigger issue with tech products - like Facebook, Spotify, and AirBnB - that promise lower friction and more freedom but actually destroy collective and cultural value.

AI is a massive danger to that. It's not just about forgetting how to think, but how to desire - to make original plans and have original ideas that aren't pre-scripted and unconsciously enforced by algorithmic control over motivation, belief systems, and general conformity.

Tech has been immensely destructive to that impulse. Which is why we're in a kind of creative rut where too much of the culture is nostalgic and backward-looking, and there isn't that sense of a fresh and unimagined but inspiring future to work towards.

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful.

Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.

This is perhaps one of the most articulate takes on this I have ever read - thank-you!

And - for myself, it was friction that kickstarted my interest in "tech" - I bought a janky modem, and it had IRQ conflicts with my Windows 3 mouse at the time - so, without internet (or BBS's at that time), I had to troubleshot and test different settings with the 2-page technical manual that came with it.

It was friction that made me learn how to program and read manuals/syntax/language/framework/API references to accomplish things for hobby projects - which then led to paying work. It was friction not having my "own" TV and access to all the visual media I could consume "on-demand" as a child, therefore I had to entertain myself by reading books.

Friction is good.

I don't think I could agree with you more. I think that more in tech and business should think about and read about philosophy, the mind, social interactions, and society.

ED Tech for example I think really seems to neglect the kind of bonds that people form when they go through difficult things together, and the pushing through difficulties is how we improve. Asking a robot xyz does not improve ourselves. AI and LLMs do not know how to teach, they are not Socratic pushing and prodding at our weaknesses and assessing us to improve. The just say how smart we are.

> but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment

You are positing that we are active learners whose goal is clarity of cognition and friction and cognitive-struggle is part of that. Clarity is attempting to understand the "know-how" of things.

Tech and dare I say the natural laziness inherent in us instead wants us to be zombies being fed the "know-that" as that is deemed sufficient. ie the dystopia portrayed in the matrix movie or the rote student regurgitating memes. But know-that is not the same as know-how, and know-how is evolving requiring a continuously learning agent.

In my experience part of the 'frictionless' experience is also to provide minimal information about any issues and no way to troubleshoot. Everything works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you are now at the mercy of the customer support que and getting an agent with the ability to fix your problem.

Looking at it from a slightly different angle, one I find most illuminating, removing "friction" is like removing "difficulty" from a game, and "friction free" as an ideal is like "cheat codes from the start" as an ideal. It's making a game where there's a single button that says "press here to win." The goal isn't the remove "friction", it's the remove a specific type of valueless friction, to replace it with valuable friction.

I don't know. You can be banging your head against the wall to demolish it or you can use manual/mechanical equipment to do so. If the wall is down, it is down. Either way you did it.