So it’s late at night. Late enough that I probably shouldn’t be responding to a prompt to write about the importance of friction (prompt by V.H. Belvadi, IndieWeb Carnival host). But here I am.
I imagine the IndieWeb community to be fairly tech-focused so perhaps I misread the prompt. If so, I’m sorry.
How important is friction and when do we replace it with convenience? Have we gone too far?
Processed foods take out the friction. Open a box or a package and just eat the thing! But the convenience is costing us our health. We know this, yet most of us do little to change it. By the end of our overly-processed lives, I’m guessing that we have a net increase of friction as a result of our “hack”. We’ll likely face more time at the doctor’s office and worse. We’ll be prescribed more medications which will then tumble us down the friction-filled path of drug-management.
Speaking of food, we also have animal factory farming. The convenience of it all removes the friction-point where we’re faced with the animal’s death. Life, which is sacred regardless of species, is now profane. And the consequences of this convenience are far-reaching.2
Amazon wanted to take the friction out of shopping. But they got so big that trying to find anything on their site is a pain in the ass. Add in the paradox of choice mixed with a rabbit hole of reviews and we’ve got more friction than we’d bargained for. Now, Amazon is really just a great big middle man. Do you know what middlemen tend to do? They muddle (ahem- increase friction). Eventually, like any company that becomes so bloated and confused, it will die (just like Bryan Johnson, despite his best efforts).
I wasn’t going to mention movie theater tickets. I’m probably in the minority on this one, which is fine- I don’t live in a city; movie lines around here have always been tolerable (benign friction). I didn’t care that the seats were old and creaky. And I didn’t care if there was fancy beer or food because that wasn’t the point. I was just happy to go hang out with my friends and watch the damn show. But now, most of the theaters have either closed or have been renovated into reclining-arm-chair-behemoths filled with expensive (but not good) food. For me, pre-purchasing tickets adds friction by reducing spontaneity and forcing me to pick a seat before I can assess my surroundings. Do I want to sit next to the dude who might try beating it under his blankie? No. No, thank you.
How about Ticketmaster? Have they made it easier and more convenient or cheaper to buy event tickets? Here’s the thing- offering a product online brings customers from everywhere and anywhere. For some products, this is good and amazing. But for others, the consequences are negative for everyone except the rich.
And with these tickets (and every other website selling anything or nothing), I’m supposed to get the app because supposedly that will bring me less friction too. Only this is a lie and no, I won’t install your damned app. You don’t need an app for that.
How about Pandora, Spotify and Apple Music? This is convenient because now I don’t even have to remember the name of an artist or a band, let alone support them. This is unsettling to say the least.
And Airbnb was supposed to take the friction out of finding a cheap place to crash. Ha. The friction they’ve unintentionally introduced has not only made travel more expensive- they’ve disrupted the entire economy of certain countries (Greece, Portugal). And if you think it hasn’t contributed to rising housing costs… puh-leeeeze. Which leads me to:
Frictionless homeownership (and why i’m up late writing this essay)
While I support the idea of reducing the friction between the customer and the agent, we should be careful. Buying a house is a big deal and a transaction like that shouldn’t be reduced to the click of a button. Zillow realized this after they lost nearly a billion dollars with their ibuying program- all while the market was white-hot in their favor! Will Opendoor learn?
And here’s another friction-evasion that few people are talking about- REITs (real estate investment trusts). REITs are essentially bundles of real estate assets owned by a single company.3
The original idea behind REITs was to allow small-time investors to buy pieces of large real estate projects they never could have bought/built on their own. Like so many of the industries above, this was an awesome idea until it ran off the rails. Allowing big corporations to use REITs to purchase single-family homes was a mistake.
Today, everyone and their mom is talking about how instead of buying actual real estate, we should all just buy REITs on Wall Street. Landlording is fraught with friction and the new narrative is that REITs are the answer. In fact, these same shills are trying to convince people that owning their own home is too inconvenient and a bad investment. Instead of buying a house (and especially instead of investing in one), a better idea is to own shares of a REIT. Some magical fairy will take care of all the headaches… *we promise you a free lunch*… Please note that their argument contradicts itself (*housing is a bad investment but you know what you should buy— real estate investment trusts full of housing*).
I suspect REIT investors don’t really know what they’re buying. Some of these companies own so many properties they don’t even know what they own! It’s pure insanity. Do you think the people running these REITs are going to be as careful as you when it comes to negotiation, purchase price, and property management? I don’t- because companies that big are really great at outspending their competition to get what they want. The problem with outspending is they overpay. On top of overpaying, they outsource all property management and accounting. To compensate for the self-inflated overhead, they must obscenely raise rents and cut costs where cuts shouldn’t be made. In housing, this spells disaster. The good news is this won’t happen until the percentage of corporate homeownership overcomes that of individual ownership.
There’s an argument that REITs will allow people access to neighborhoods and housing they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. At best, this is short-sighted. At worst- it could be the very thing that brings the wealth gap to the point of collapse.
Who would you rather have as your landlord? Would you prefer ma and pa? Or would you prefer the big corporate entity who corresponds through their newest AI chatbot and delegates decisions to the other AI/bean counter on the mid floor? I don’t even need to ask.
It seems clear: whenever we try to eliminate friction in the short-term, we usually end up increasing it later.
I also find it ironic that the startups of the last 20 years love to call themselves disruptors (disruption is friction). Displacement seems like a more adequate descriptor. After all, they displace the old vanguard of human middlemen with their own tech platform instead.
As we find ourselves bamboozled by this cascade of convenience and enshittification,4 I’ve come to an odd realization:
In real time, it is quite hard to choose where to draw the line between friction and convenience and which problems to solve/not solve.5
Because friction is an invisible force which connects all that is.6
Pessimistic as I may sound, I’m actually pretty idealistic and hopeful.
Thanks for reading,
HouseRat Zero
- Photo Credit: Sad Clown by Kindel Media; found on Pexels ↩︎
- I am a meat eater and I’m also guilty of eating factory-farmed meat- it’s hard to escape. But I don’t buy into the idea that real meat should be entirely replaced with processed fake meat or lab-grown meats either. Those foods will inevitably carry their own “unforeseen” consequences (a balance might be okay though). I may not have the answers but I can see that removing the friction point of slaughter hasn’t been good. ↩︎
- This entire section on REITs was fuel for a follow-up post- stay tuned ↩︎
- Enshittification, as coined by Cory Doctorow, refers to the pattern of platform decay- but really it’s more than that. ↩︎
- and, woah, that’s my problem with longtermism! ↩︎
- Friction as defined by Oxford Languages: the resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another ↩︎