Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
Why we must be willing to struggle in an age promising endless convenience
Earlier this year I delivered a keynote at Pinterest’s holiday event where I put forward an argument for friction as the missing piece in modern lives, particularly online.
The inspiration for this keynote dates back to a passage I read in Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less all the way back in 2020:
“We might be able to hold the iPhone in our hands, but we should also be aware that the network of its consequences is vast: server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin. It’s easy to feel like a minimalist when you can order food, summon a car, or rent a room using a single brick of steel and silicon. But in reality it’s the opposite. We’re taking advantage of a maximalist assemblage. Just because something looks simple doesn’t mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice or even unsustainable excess.”
It’s this contradiction that I wanted to explore.
Kyla Scanlon has written thoughtfully about friction from an economic perspective; I wanted to explore the concept through the lens of culture, human experience, and brand.
This piece is also a reflection of what I’ve seen with the young people in my life.
I spent 10 years teaching at the University of Melbourne (and 5 years prior studying at it), primarily because I’m a romantic about higher education and the enormous growth it forces upon you as you navigate its various trials, frustrations and contradictions.
If there’s one thing I noticed over those 10 years, it was the slow death of this cultural narrative; with students gradually withdrawing into themselves, being less and less comfortable with uncertainty, terrified of not knowing things instead of excited by the prospect of learning them.
Before I begin: in this piece I am defining friction as things that make the final outcome more difficult, or take longer.
If you’ve worked in, or with, tech brands in your life you’ll be familiar with their attitude towards friction. In fact, I’m fairly certain Frictionless Growth was part of a proposition I developed for one earlier in my career.
Both internally and externally, through their enormous influence they’ve conditioned our society to believe friction is a great evil - an obstacle to our collective freedom. The project of big tech for the last 20 years has thus been the wholesale removal of friction from our lives - in the name of speed, scale, simplicity.
Algorithms are the most obvious example - removing the friction of selecting content we engage with - making discovery a passive and effortless ordeal, but also one click checkouts, one touch payments, voice assistants.
And the project now feels it’s reaching its zenith with AI. We’re moving from the friction of the search model to the zero-friction ask/response model. And soon, perhaps, we won't even need to formulate our own questions: AI will anticipate what we want before we know we want it. The final frontier means removing the effort of even thinking what to ask in the first place.
All this convenience comes at a high cost.
Even from a marketer’s perspective, which is to say, a decidedly amoral one, it’s one of the contributing factors to our current social media engagement recession. Facebook brand interactions are down 47% YoY, Instagram is hovering at a 0.43% median engagement rate, while the artist formerly known as Twitter is languishing at 0.015%.
As platforms optimise for dwell times over interactions, they condition users to be more passive - they’re less likely to take an action, let alone buy something.
People are still tuning in but paying less attention - the net effect being that attention has gotten much more expensive and hard to get - and is reliant even more on dopamine hacking and spectacle. The Sydney Sweeney American Eagle debacle was another sordid reminder that ragebait seems to be the only thing currently capable of creating a monocultural moment.
But worse, the removal of friction is leading us headfirst, in the words of Stuart Whatley, to a society that is bored to death - leaving us vulnerable to toxic and damaging ideologies:
"Mass movements, like some ascetic religious sects, feed on their members' self-contempt. Their followers are those who have nothing to offer themselves. When they look inward, they find a dusty hollow. The typical adherent is not only frustrated with his circumstances but also bored and unhappy with himself.”
This is the logical endpoint of a frictionless society: when every external stimulation is instantly available, people are left with nowhere to turn but inward, and what do we find? Emptiness. The unending stream of content hasn't filled the void; it's simply distracted us from developing the internal resources to cope with it.
And into that vacuum rush the demagogues, the conspiracy theorists, the tribal movements that promise to give purpose to lives that have been optimised out of all meaning. The very technologies that promised to liberate us from boredom instead created the perfect conditions for it, and now we’re desperately susceptible to anyone offering an escape.
We’ve got to start thinking about life another way.
Because underpinning the zero-friction society is an insidious belief: that every instant that we spend with other people without transacting is a transaction cost getting in the way of efficient market exchange.
It’s easy to forget that friction is often what makes experiences desirable.
A long, slow, laborious, high-touch check-in at a luxury hotel is what settles you into the fact that you’re on holiday, that you can finally relax rather than thinking about time as something you need to ruthlessly self-optimise (something I covered earlier this year in my post-luxury status symbols series).
During the peak sneakerhead era, waiting in line for the sneaker drop the night before was a key part of the value equation - not only for the clout, the scarcity, the collectors high - but because it provided a place to engage you with the community while you were at it.
Spending time in nature is a very high friction experience as anyone who’s erected a tent in the pouring rain will tell you - or for that matter tried to disassemble one on day 3 of a festival. The longer and harder the hike, the more it makes small moments matter. Your little sachet of dehydrated cup noodles ends up tasting better than the hatted/starred restaurant you ate at the week before.
In each of these experiences, more friction is directly correlated with more meaning.
Friction is also what gives people agency to create, not just consume.
When there's no friction, there's no imagination. You're left as a pure consumer - a medieval king feasting in front of a court jester. You grow overstuffed and lazy upon your throne.
Against that culture, what friction promises is effectively, adventure. A leap into the unknown. And with that leap comes agency. You are given the agency to explore the world and to find and make things that are meaningful to you and you alone. You transcend your status as just a consumer and explore your own personhood.
Through friction we develop our own unique taste, perspective on the world and conviction in that perspective. This is in part why our society venerates the archetype of the struggling artist. Yes, it’s an incredibly damaging trope that all great art comes from pain.
But it teaches us that great, truly individual work, comes from those who can hold within them life’s challenges, its darkness, its contradictions, and one can only make great things by exploring those feelings rather than hiding from them.
This is all the more important in an age where AI is flattening the value of human knowledge.
For all AI’s extraordinary capabilities, it is a composite of perspectives. It will always have a taste that trends towards the mean - which means that the bar for mediocrity has never been lower.
Anyone who's opinion is effectively a composite of others opinions is destined to suffer in the next era. But those who have perspectives that are ruthlessly individual are those that stand to benefit.
There are a million other cogent thinkpieces already on why Taste is the new premium in the age of AI. All I have to say is that in developing your taste, you must be willing to struggle.
How brands can design more consciously high-friction experiences
To round this out, a few key principles for brands looking to design more high friction experiences.
Friction Principle 1: Don’t be afraid to niche down and (gently) gatekeep
The society of the 2010s said the goal was to make everything for everyone. Algorithms promised us we could kill all the tastemakers and just discover what we like for ourselves.
What we’re rediscovering now, as Chayka also demonstrated in filterworld, was that that principle just made everything look and feel exactly the same. Taste trended towards the mean.
Now we’re relearning that it’s boundaries that make certain networks meaningful. A little bit of gatekeeping creates a shared language for people to congregate around.
The experiences that we keep coming back to right now are those that ask something of the audience.
This is what Miu Miu tapped into excellently with its salon series and book club pop-ups it ran in Milan and New York.
Within the activation there is a recognition that in a chronically online world, connecting IRL is its own form of luxury, and amongst a culture of instant gratification, reading a book is a status symbol: because it communicates your ability to take time, slow down and delay gratification.
By connecting these worlds Miu Miu is able to transfer associations of quality and permanence across to the brand.
Friction Principle 2: Be the Canvas, not the Paintbrush
Your brand does not have to make your brand the main character all the time. Sometimes it can be about being a background to the users’ overall experience.
Gaming brand integrations are a good example of this principle in practice. Brands have often failed to understand gaming because they tried to apply existing advertising frameworks to the online world: billboards and e-sports sponsorships.
But doing it right means integrating the brand into the existing rules of the gaming world as a canvas for self-expression.
Coach, a brand once dead in the water, has resurrected itself as a Gen Z darling in great part through their digital strategy.
For their SS24 ‘Find Your Courage’ campaign they placed Coach assets into the Roblox game Fashion Famous 2 - where you’re dropped into a shopping mall and have to create a runway outfit aligned to a theme, as well as building virtual stores for customers to experience.
This does two things. On the surface it allows users to engage with the brand in a risk-free environment where people arguably feel most comfortable.
But at a deeper level it shows that Coach has niche cultural understanding and importantly respect for online communities. This is important for an industry like fashion that has historically been seen to sneer at subcultures like gaming as the domain of nerds and losers.
Friction Principle 3: Embed Worlds with Real Joy, Whimsy and Fiction
If we want to encourage people to put in more effort, we should be using it to show them how that effort opens the possibility for other, better possibilities than the world we have now.
Zohran Mamdani’s latest scavenger hunt in NYC was not only a fantastic way to engage voters, it was an excellent scaffold to his broader campaign narrative - that there should be room for play and joy in ever New Yorker’s life, regardless of their income.
Another recent ‘brand launch’ I’m a huge fan of was the promotion of Bon Iver’s latest album release Sable, Fable.
The theme of the album was ‘steering towards the sunlight’ - and the launch executed that theme across a broad range of different products, activations, and channels
A tin of smoked salmon with cult brand Fishwife, featuring a poem printed inside the lid & hand drawn artwork
Scented candle & incense that smell like a cabin in winter
Limited edition coffees with flavour notes to complement the sounds of the album from Ruby Coffee Roasters
An app that gave you directions to the nearest listening party
A basketball game played at his local stadium
Every touchpoint here scales into the more significant aggregate narrative. It balances the friction of the depth, understanding the artists themes/concepts, with a sense of playfulness that makes it accessible.
And it finds joy in unexpected collaborations - reminding us that in this present attention era, we should be unafraid to cross industry boundaries & find brands that align with your purpose and narrative.
We’ve been sold the myth that the world has never been easier to live in. No, the reality is that this is a world where it feels like we’re skating on ice and looking for meaning.
And I think the real opportunity and responsibility is for brands who can give us a feeling that we’re standing on solid ground.