But the main thing that has come to annoy people is more philosophical. A futurist named Thomas Klaffke warns that “frictionless” is not just a word but also a worldview — a “super dystopian” vision of “no toil, no effort, no thinking.” Essayists fret that the dream of a frictionless existence is making people fearful and lonely, unable to tolerate challenge or discomfort. (Friction, after all, is what happens when two things touch.) A business writer in India says we’ve “overextended the metaphor,” that a tough-but-rewarding conversation is simply not the same thing as a frustrating user interface. A piece in New York magazine evangelizes “friction-maxxing” — in which, rather than seeing “life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from,” you build your tolerance for difficulty by doing things the rough way.
These complaints, funnily enough, echo the oldest use of “frictionless” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary — from an 1848 satirical poem, which mentions “a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, / Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot, — / A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on / The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button.” That’s what some blame our love of hyperconvenience for doing: turning us into cool-brained lumps whose most profound relationships are with delivery apps. The accusation is well-worn and schoolmarmish but hard to dismiss. A huge share of human wisdom — intuitions about child-rearing, research on education, adages about the meaning of life — revolves around the idea that too much ease really does lead to helplessness and stagnation.
If it’s any consolation, though, there’s at least one reason you might worry slightly less about this. When you hear “frictionless” today, how often is it about a system that clears the path toward your goals, as opposed to the system’s designers guiding you toward theirs? Consider the digital marketing service that advises companies to “ditch friction words like ‘sign up’” in favor of language like “get instant access” — language that might lure slightly more of us to fork over the email addresses we were hoping not to. (One day, of course, when you want to delete that account, you’ll be confronted with as much artificial friction as the company can legally get away with.) In office jobs, removing friction is usually about nudging customers, clients or employees to do what the business wants. These well-lubricated slopes are optimized for sales or productivity or cost-cutting, not for your pleasure.
This is in fact part of what writers like Klaffke warn about — the amount of time we spend being herded through a landscape built to discourage us from thinking, acting disruptively or deviating from a set path. It can be weirdly encouraging, though, to imagine our most annoying battles with that environment as a positive sign. The idea that modern society is dangerously geared toward hyperconvenience can be easily punctured by a single phone call to your health insurer. The challenge that follows might not rival the rewards of making friends or taking up woodworking, and it’s still surrounded by plenty of efforts to cater to your desire for ease. Still: It’s a useful reminder that the world is not, and never will be, trying to pamper you into oblivion.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
