Premium Friction
But when the stopwatch stops, we flip. We crave other people. Leisure is a hall of mirrors, and only another mortal can polish the glass. A robot could throw perfect strikes forever, but no one would pay to watch. We want the thrill of potential failure. The human tremor that turns repetition into story. Stockfish calculates deeper than Magnus Carl... See more
What's in the cards?
We hate other people when latency becomes intolerable. As soon as a task is about speed, other humans feel like an irritating inconvenience. The Uber driver’s small talk annoys us. We wish we were in a Waymo. The cashier’s tip screen feels like a micro-ransom when all we want is a bottle of water. Elevator operators, switchboard attendants, bank te... See more
What's in the cards?
But when ease becomes the default measure of value—when “fast” and “frictionless” are always better, we lose something critical: the slow, inconvenient texture of real life and real relationships.
Israa Nasir • A good life is inconvenient.
- The digital world has almost no friction.
- The physical world is full of it.
- And in certain curated space s - like the West Village, or your AI companion -friction has been turned into something you can pay to remove.
Kyla Scanlon • The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction
The closer technology brings us to the cusp of feeling like we are the gods of our time, the more incredibly offensive it seems to be reminded of all the ways in which we still aren’t. So you get this utterly bizarre situation where the world speeds up and gets more and more efficient, and we have all this technology for saving time, but it doesn’
... See moreKrista Tippett • Oliver Burkeman – Time Management for Mortals
Myself and people my age have been trained under the illusion that we can effectively eliminate any and all friction from our lives. We can work from home, Amazon prime everything we need, swipe through a limitless array of mediocre dates, text our therapist, and have a person go to the grocery store for us when we don’t feel like it, all while con... See more
Rosie Spinks • The Friendship Problem
Over the weekend, hundreds of BookTok authors gathered in the Baltimore Convention Center for the Million Lives Book Festival. The event was billed as a magical weekend where readers could meet their favorite authors, especially romance and fantasy fiction authors who are popular on BookTok.
The Fyre Fest of BookTok
Will we start seeing more FyreFest type events? Optimized for online, failure to execute IRL
There are startups now, like one called Cluely that promise real-time assistance for everything: campus tests, dating, even thinking. Their slogan is: “So you never have to think alone again.” Their plan is eventually to develop a chip for your brain.
Kyla Scanlon • The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction
those glasses that help you “cheat” during meetings or interviews