Friction

In a world without seams, things falls apart

A few years ago, Amazon launched the next generation of stores around the world. Customers would walk in, pick out their items and simply walk out again, the items automatically charged to their Amazon account. ‘Just Walk Out’ promised a seamless shopping experience that would cut queues, time and, above all, the need to interact with other human beings. This experience was made possible by cameras, AI and sensors which made the whole experience seem automated.

Of course, it wasn’t. 

As the tech giant announced in March it was ditching its own bespoke technology, an investigation revealed that such technology was in fact 1000 workers in India watching shoppers and manually notating purchases. Amazon pushed back saying these workers only worked to verify the AI system. Cool—but if your AI system relies on cheap imported labour, the real artifice is that it’s only been designed to look intelligent. 

Welcome to modernity, where our hi-tech societies are powered by over-exploited workers and materials from the majority world. Silicon Valley constantly over-promises and under-delivers, something explored in joyous detail on the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us. We are incessantly fed the line that technology will make our lives easier, but it simply makes life busier, for all that time saved by using technology is then spent using different technology, often generating billions for the richest people on earth who sell our data and allegedly collaborate with genocidal regimes. 

The role of technology in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinain people is critical to understand. Israeli writer Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus recently argued that Israel’s use of technology, including using AI to target members of Hamas and killing women and children in the process, makes the destruction of Gaza the first 21st century war. War, made seamless. Israel has achieved what Silicon Valley promises: the destruction of human relationships.

The horrors of war have always been achieved by a series of offsetting: soldiers follow orders, and those who give orders stay away from battle; the responsibility falls on the tongue of the man who calls for battle, but the blood falls on the hands of another. Both parties are removed, in some sense, from the abject horror of destroying life. Technology only makes that easier, adding in yet more layers of accountable deniability, or responsibility offsetting. When “terrorists” are automatically targeted by drones run on an AI system, who is responsible for the collateral deaths of women and children? The coder? The drone engineer? The sergeant? The president? The social media executives who sell data to the regime? 

All of them, in a sense. Some more than others. But they are sheltered by a culture of seamless individuality which denies and destroys human relationships just as it denies and destroys ecosystems; an iron dome for the corrupted soul, if you will, which neither responsibility nor accountability can penetrate. 

Welcome to a frictionless society, where we glance off of one another as if we don’t exist. 

This, ultimately, is the goal of Silicon Valley and elitist regimes around the world: our frictionless existence demands technology and bureaucratic processes and high energy and makes us dependent on the products and regimes that keep that class of people in control. In the past, labourers at least had their hands on the means of production, if not its deed, but now it is not production which generates capital, but communication, leading to Yanis Varoufakis dubbing our economic regime “cloud capitalism”. No more are bodies made to sweat to increase yield, perhaps singing to one another in the fields, a harmonic resistance, an embodied collective that can organise thanks to its proximity. No, there is no need for bodies anymore, only thumbs, gliding across glass, typing “lol” without laughter, “liking” without smiling, and, above all, physically dispersed and organisationally weakened as we coalesce around centralised modes of communication, like barnacles on the rump of a whale, being pulled through changing tides.  

A frictionless existence creates an economy of death in the name of ease. A frictionless existence doesn’t write down your grandmother’s recipe for apple pie because an AI consuming inconceivable amounts of energy can generate one for you in an instant. A frictionless existence doesn’t walk into a party with sweaty palms because an algorithm can show you thousands of faces in one night without any effort. A frictionless existence doesn’t have sex because a fin-tech company can send money instantly to a pornographic content creator whose digital archive is full of wild fantasies. A frictionless existence chats online with that creator, only to find out said creator has hired a “chatter” based in Pakistan. A frictionless existence moves on to an A.I. girlfriend. 

The digital economy inserts itself between every human interaction like an invisible condom, ensuring its survival at the expense of our own. 

We pay so much for the privilege of a frictionless existence yet all we are really doing is transferring power to a centralised regime. Friction is the spark of life: the friction of two bodies creates another; the friction of tension creates a punch-line; the friction of ideas creates breakthroughs. Friction creates heat, it transfers energy, it is the fundamental component to an economy of life, sparking knowledge and desire and wonder and warmth. This is energy, dissipating through material networks. We are energy, as much as fossil fuels or renewables, and we are captured in centralised grids and pipelines by regimes that reap the rewards of our creativity, our laughter, our ingenuity, curiosity, compassion and passion, performing a necro-alchemy to grow their economy of death. Every time we chat with friends over a social media app, they sell our profiles to advertising companies. Every time we order food from another app, they take a cut from restaurants who feel obliged to participate. And every time I walk past a homeless person, I wonder how they’re getting by because none of us carry cash anymore. 

When we choose frictionless-ness over friction we consolidate the power of these regimes, both corporate and political. When we miss the opportunity to engage with another person (let alone the more-than-human world), we ensure all of the friction of ideas-generation is happening in the long halls of the regime. Seamlessness is the death of agency because agency is rooted in the soil of community. There is no such thing as an individual agent—unless that agent is dead. 

But we are creatures of friction, sparking movements against genocide, protests against fossil fuels, political opposition to the regime and economic alternatives to neoliberalism. Our friction is life, wonderful and uncomfortable, sometimes painful but always felt. Friction is a gradient, a passage, a hesitation “on the way to knowing”. Friction is absence-no-more; friction is the present, penetrated deeply; engulfed. 

Friction is the responsibility we have to one another and the love we give with one another. Friction is how we warm our hands without pipelines. Friction is how we survive. 

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