Started drafting on 7 Dec 2022
I have been thinking lately about the problems of immediacy in the modern world. It seems to me that most mental afflictions, specially in my generation, comes from the weird social conditioning that comes from social media, movies, and digital culture.
More specifically, I’m thinking about a property from our experienced reality called friction. I’m not talking about literal friction, but about the friction that exists for every thing that we can do in this spacetime substrate we call the real world.
There is friction when we walk to a place in order to get something like food. This same friction exists when we use something like Uber eats. And it also exists when we go to the fridge to get food. The difference between the three is obvious. They take different amounts of effort. The varying level of effort is what I call friction.
Let’s take this concept and use it to see how much friction there is when messaging friends, watching a YouTube video, or finding an answer to a question with Google.
If you’re anything like me, you probably have had the thought that you may be spending too much time on social media or watching YouTube videos. And you have probably tried to reduce the amount of time spent there. Maybe you tried tools to block or limit the amount of time you use these platforms. I know I have, and I have failed.
Why is it so hard to regulate the amount of attention we put into these absorbing activities? Do we really need to just stop using YouTube completely? I don’t think so. The reason it’s so hard is because it’s too easy to watch YouTube videos and it’s too easy to remove or disable these tools! We can try to make it harder but you can always uninstall Chrome, create another Google account or something like that.
All software aims to be immediate. It’s thought that this is the key to a better user experience. Something funny though, is that the only times software is not immediate is when it’s slow, buggy, or just awkwardly confusing to use.
I’m not trying to say that software should be hard to use or that it should be slow on purpose. What it’s lacking is organic friction. More precisely, natural spatial friction.
I think most problems in our society today come from forced optimizations. From the idea that we should produce more, faster and more efficiently: “less friction is always better”. We couldn’t be further away from the truth.
Having worked as a software designer and engineer for a few years and being a computer user for basically my whole life, I can see the challenges of implementing organic friction.
How would one begin to change UI trends? Ha! And even before that, how could it be possible to get every tech company to change their UIs?! It definitely sounds like an impossible feat, at least, with the way that software development exists today.
First, I think we have to realize the consequences of lack of friction in our digital lives and agree on that. Just like how we all agree that smoking cigarettes is bad for humans.
Second, we have to realize that we don’t have control of our hardware and the software it runs. This is a political and technical problem that’s not easy to solve.
So what can we do? I believe we can leverage artificial intelligence and the openness of the internet.
The hard problems are closed mobile phone hardware. Sure, there is Android which is open-source and many other alternatives. But not everyone can afford to change to these alternatives, not only economically, but practically. Some jobs depend on specific tools, OSes, and platforms.
I don’t know the solution to the hardware problem. But I’m sure we can arrive to one when we can pin point the exact things to change. This is what we can do, we do know or at least get to know which exact changes phones and software need in order to decentralize UIs and stop being abused by attention stealing apps.
About 65% of people in the world have access to the internet. Mostly through smart phones. That’s billions of people and a great majority. That’s a ton of people being enslaved right there.
So how do we start? What can we do individually? How can we all help? How can developers and designers help?
I think a good first step is to figure out how to implement this organic friction into our digital environments.
We have to change the way we think about digital space. From self-contained programs and apps into a spatiotemporal environment that can be navigated, has “physics” and thus spatial friction.
We need to prototype and explore this. We can start with browsers and desktop OSes. Then move to phones. Or maybe vice-versa. I don’t know. But we have to start doing this now.
Unfinished Thought Experiment
You’re in a rural town. There is only one place where you can get cheese, and to get there you need to get up a hill. It’s a 20 minute walk. Cheese is delicious and nutritious, you love cheese. Usually you would buy it in a super market or order it through something like Uber Eats. But in this hypothetical scenario, those are not options. You need to get up there. Let’s also say cars are prohibited in this town, so the only option is to walk. Since you love cheese, you decide to make the effort and walk there to buy it. The moment you pay for the cheese and talk with the old lady selling it to you as she smiles, you have a feeling of satisfaction, you were rewarded. Now you head back home and enjoy that delicious cheese.
If you were visiting this place and it is not were you live, that would pretty much be the only time you put in so much effort into getting cheese. But let’s say you were forced to move there and you’re actually quite fat.