Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
eugenehealey.substack.com
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Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
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.
Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
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.
Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
Friction is also what gives people agency to create, not just consume.
Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
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.
Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
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%.
Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
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... See more
If there’s one thing I noticed over those 10 years, it was the slow death of this cultural... See more
Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
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.
Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
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
... See moreFriction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death
Through friction we develop our own unique taste, perspective on the world and conviction in that perspective.