341 / Living in the friction economy

The platforms may be new, but “the power structures remain stubbornly intact. And understanding how friction flows through them – who gets to avoid it and who gets crushed by it – tells us everything about how our economy actually works”.

This redistribution of friction might be the defining economic story of our time – not wealth creation, but the artful arrangement of inconvenience so that it pools wherever it’s least likely to bother anyone important. Which perhaps explains why so many of our problems feel simultaneously urgent and unsolvable: we keep trying to fix things within ... See more