The Fiction of Frictionless

Did tech remove too much friction from our lives?

Minimizing friction is a golden rule of product design that nearly no one disputes. Who wouldn’t want to cut ten steps to three, or digitize a manual process, or make a feature always-on? Over the past twenty or so years humanity has made giant strides in removing all sorts of friction from our daily lives.

Nostalgia and High Friction

My wife and I just rewatched Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 classic ‘Chungking Express’, and it struck me how sending a message from one human to another used to be such a high-friction, almost ritualistic experience. Making a telephone call in a booth, writing out your address on a piece of paper, sealing a letter inside an envelope — the friction in these rituals carried a tinge of romance and drove the characters’ moods and dreams.

A post showing the old Pokemon Gameboy Color cartridges popped up on my Instagram feed yesterday, and it took me back in a swirl of nostalgia… back to a time when my brothers and I would make our regular pilgrimage to the game store and browse the stacked shelves with sparkly eyes. We bought Pokemon Blue as our first Gameboy game, and we got so excited about opening the box on the way home that the blue cartridge fell to the floor. I rushed to pick it up and blew puffs of air onto the backside of the cartridge, all the while praying that it would still work. I inserted it into the console and turned it on. After a moment of suspense, the Nintendo logo flashed — let the fun finally begin. It all felt so visceral.

Today, I purchased a game through my Xbox cloud account. I had been eyeing on Hogwarts Legacy for months, and today I pulled the trigger. I logged on, clicked Buy, and… that’s it. The download and installation all happened over the air. Mindlessly easy, but also kind of… unceremonious. Compressing the path leading to the actual playing experience should be hailed as an improvement right? Well, it turns out that the dance of anticipation may be half the fun. I almost wanted to work harder to get the game, if only to signal to myself that it matters to me. The climax can only be so if there is build-up.

As I waited for the game to load, I picked up my phone and opened my Messenger app. I sent a birthday greeting to a high school friend. I checked messages from colleagues and our family group chat. I have in my hands the power to reach out to nearly anyone I’ve known in my life, from preschool to university to work, and they could do the same. Unlike the characters in ‘Chungking Express’, messages now chase us at every moment, from all directions, without us having to do anything.

Everything is just taps and swipes now — ordering food, watching a show, recording a movie, finding a date — all from a device we carry all the time. Our almighty thumbs now do all our work for us. That by itself should be a miracle of human progress worth celebrating, yet we seem to have become increasingly blasé and detached. Anytime, anywhere is a neat proposition, but the price is giving up the anchors of place and time. We can now study on the train, play games in the library, and work at home - there’s no longer dedicated places and timings for anything . We are unencumbered and unmoored.

I wonder if something got lost in the frictionlessness of it all.

Curious Cases of Extra Friction

To struggle is to imbue meaning. The sense of importance we place on a task or object tends to be directly proportional to the effort we put in. The moments that leave the deepest impressions tend to be those that demanded the most from us. Even little frictions like a daily commute somehow make work or school feel more weighty, compared to a totally remote setup. Friction, struggle, and meaning are somehow intertwined. By taking away all the friction, are we over-indexing on convenience at the expense of meaning? Could frictionless not be as indisputably good as we thought?

I remember being puzzled at Snapchat’s confusing interface, until they explained that they want users to learn specific gestures to distinguish the in-group from the outsiders. Finance apps now add UI prompts as signals to users that transferring money is a serious, weighty task, and we cannot just flick through the screens without caution.

When Taylor Swift asked listeners to click on ‘Taylor’s version’ of her songs on Spotify, she designated a micro-ritual that could elevate the true ‘Swifties’ over the casual fans. We saw the most extreme case of this in NFTs, where buying an overpriced JPEG serves as your initiation rite to enter the community. These rituals make you more attached to the thing and binds you to the tribe.

The paywall is a curious case of extra friction. When done well, it works wonders. I read every single article of a publication that I subscribed to, simply because I paid for it. I am way more likely to finish an online course that I paid for, rather than one which could’ve been more compelling, but without a financial bind. All-access buffet-style models pull more people in, but we subconsciously discount them because they feel more disposable.

That bit of pain to spend more money or effort plants a stake deep into our cognitive grounds, a signal to ourselves that this activity is important. In a high-speed, fast-food society, we may need that focus more than we think.

Holding the Fort

AI is poised to remove even more friction from our lives. While tech companies were mostly focused on removing friction to consume, generative AI like ChatGPT are now also removing the friction to create. It sounds all well and good, until we take it to its logical extreme and realize that this invention could strip the essence of who we are. Who are we but the sum of the things we love and produce? I could very well have generated drafts of this topic through ChatGPT, but I chose to write every word here — not only because writing is close to my heart, but because I cannot divorce the act of writing from the act of thinking, and by extension the act of being. I write, therefore I am, thus I have to hold the fort.

Learning itself is an act of friction. Smooth-sailing learning is almost an oxymoron. The most effective way to ingest a lesson is to wrestle with a problem, to grapple with it until you manage to squeeze out a solution. Instant AI-generated answers do have their place, but not at the expense of short-circuiting the whole learning process.

Applying Intentional Friction

Breaking the frictionless fiction is a start, yet the answer may not simply be adding or subtracting friction, but applying intentional friction.

We all have different priorities. We can continue to remove friction from the chores like bill payments or flight bookings or parsing spreadsheets. But we could add selective friction to the activities that matter to us, whether it is cooking, or solving math problems, or photography, or connecting with people.

This will play out even more as software and AI continue to eat the physical world. Some of us will purposely add friction simply because the extra effort is the only way to honor the things that we love, even when more convenient options exist. If you care about photography, learn how to work with the intricacies of manual exposure control instead of just applying AI filters. If you care about reading, relish the sensation of writing on the margins of a paperback instead of just scrolling through a pdf. And if you care about connecting with someone, stow away the perpetually-buzzing phone and venture out to touch grass, gaze at the stars, and into each other’s eyes.