How friction is being redistributed in today's economy

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:

    \ /
    \ /
    \ /
    \ /
  **   **
  *     *
  *******

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."

> 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)

  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.

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.

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?