Friction is a Feature

The world is about to get weird

13 years ago Ben Thompson wrote a sentence I’ve thought about almost every day since he published it:

“If there is a single phrase that describes the effect of the Internet, it is the elimination of friction.” (from his article, Friction)

This statement has shaped my daily life for the last decade, and I bet yours too. Mostly in positive ways. When I’m exhausted at the end of the day, I can pull up DoorDash and select from hundreds of restaurants. A decade ago, my options were pizza and Chinese food. I can see an estimate of what my house is worth in real time. I could get another college degree from my couch if I wanted to. I can book a flight to anywhere. I can pay back my friend for lunch with the click of a button.

You get the idea because you have lived a million of these little, low-friction, conveniences enabled by the internet.

There is an ugly side to minimizing friction, too, because friction is neutral. It doesn’t default to “good”, because human nature is weird and messy and confusing, and removing friction just means people can be weird and messy and confusing - and do bad things - at faster speeds and with fewer guardrails.

Here’s a concrete example: Talk to younger folks today about dating in “the app era” and you will hear some genuinely horrifying stories. There’s a reason people in their 30’s and 40’s talk about meeting their spouse in real life like they caught the last helicopter out of Vietnam.

Or how about online gambling? You used to have to drive to a casino. Or go to Vegas. Now you can parlay the number of hotdogs Joey Chestnut will eat on July 4th with the 2027 Super Bowl Champion. Gambling has insidiously wormed its way into every crevice of our daily lives.

It turns out the internet was just a warm-up.

The internet only minimized friction, it didn’t eliminate it entirely. It felt like we eliminated friction, until AI showed us what zero friction actually looks like:

This showed up on my timeline last week. A company called pettylawsuit.com. That’s right - With AI, you can sue your enemies in minutes. Don’t celebrate, because he can sue you right back with the click of a button (hopefully your AI Agent lawyers will resolve the dispute with a few algorithmic stablecoins).

Today, a small business owner has a bad day when they wake up to a bad Yelp review. Tomorrow she will wake up to a lawsuit in her inbox. Knowing America, she will probably wake up to three.

With AI you can apply to any job with the perfect resume, because AI will adapt it effortlessly to the job description. Unfortunately for you, everyone else will be submitting the perfect resume as well. And the company you applied to will use AI to quietly put your resume in the virtual trash bin with all the others.

Applying to a job has never been easier. Getting one is now way harder.

Here’s the dirty little secret that Silicon Valley doesn’t want you to consider. Friction is good, actually.

We would be wise to consider the lesson of Chesterton’s Fence.

Chesterton’s Fence, described most succinctly, says:

“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

What people are quickly and painfully realizing as AI removes fence after fence after fence: Friction wasn’t a barrier to the system working. It was an essential part of the system.

There’s value to having a little bit of friction in the college application process, to asking someone out on a date, to deciding to sue someone.

The college essay is supposed to highlight the human behind the test score. Now the admissions counselor is drowning in a sea of identical essays. Approaching someone in person signals courage, social awareness/aptitude, and accountability. Now you just need to swipe and copy/paste your opener. Suing someone is a very serious thing to do! It has massive, monetary (and often social) implications! Now you just need to submit a form.

So what happens next?

The world is about to get very weird. What will society look like when the cost to sue someone goes to zero? When the cost to submit the perfect resume goes to zero? When spam costs zero?

Consider our legal system. America is already the most litigious country in the world. Our society is already buckling under the weight of our 1.3 MILLION lawyers. We have a court system completely incapable of handling the case volume of our NIMBY nation, who learned long ago that nothing stops progress like a lawsuit. Just ask California, who has spent $15B on their high speed rail system so far, and doesn’t have a single operational mile to show for it.

Our legal culture is already a tax on our progress, growth, and standard of living. Now imagine an America with even MORE lawsuits. An America where anyone can sue anyone for anything with the click of a button. Why submit a bad Yelp review when you can just sue the small business instead? Neighbor playing loud music? Sue them. Dog barking too loud? See you in court.

When AI can create a valid legal complaint in the time it takes to write a prompt, the friction serving as a thin piece of duct tape holding together our already-strained legal system gets ripped in two. With AI you can DDOS your enemies through a legal system that has no defense infrastructure to protect itself or its citizens.

I think there is also a very real risk that AI exacerbates inequality. Which sounds strange, because one might think of AI as an equalizer. Intelligence in your pocket for $20 a month. Sounds about as egalitarian as it gets.

But consider this:

When a system gets overrun, the people with means find the side door. When public school systems decline, the rich kids go to private schools. When cities get dirty and violent, people with means to move go to the suburbs.

Take job hiring. Open roles are now getting thousands and thousands of the most perfectly-crafted resumes and cover letters. If everyone can contextualize their resume, then nobody stands out. The temptation will be for hiring managers to rely even more on their network, even more on the filtering work already done by elite institutions, the Mag 7, and this year’s hot startups. Ask anyone who has tried to get a job recently. The job board is already mostly performative. Who stands a chance against 15,000 people applying instantly? The ones with access to the side door. In a world of abundant AI, the advantage compounds for the Stanford grad, the Google alum, the already-connected friend of a friend.

The people who can afford to step outside the system, which has been flooded with zero-signal AI slop, will quickly and efficiently do so. In fact, they will be greeted with open arms by the person on the other side of the transaction.

Those with connections will build their own social networks, both online and offline. This has already happened on social media. The action isn’t on the timeline, it’s in the group chats. Those without the connections will remain on the public timeline, posting in the sea of AI agents spamming garbage.

Ultimately, I think it’s inevitable that we will use AI to fight AI. And the absurdity of this scenario is that everyone pays more only to be worse off. Applicants paying $20 to refine their resume, companies paying $50k/yr for an AI screening tool, only for the hiring manager to hire through the side door.

The same will happen for college admissions. AI essays screened with AI detectors. The one part of the application process meant to highlight the unique humanity of applicants - to celebrate and distinguish them as more than a test score - destroyed by slop.

The best candidate didn’t win. The filtering mechanism didn’t even work. The winning candidate left the AIs to fight each other and circumvented the entire charade. The token dealers will get rich, and we will be increasingly frustrated.

Here’s the truly depressing part: If human nature has shown us anything, it’s that once friction is removed from the system, you can’t fix it by trying to add friction somewhere else. You can see that on the internet, where CAN-SPAM laws and GDPR cookie pop-ups and screen time limits haven’t really fixed the problems caused by the reduction in friction. We are all growing more addicted to being online every day, feeding more of our personal information into a giant ad targeting cannon that fires hyper-targeted content and products directly into our eyeballs as we scroll for hours on end.

And you can see the impact of removing friction in offline areas, too. We removed as much of the friction as possible from our food system and now 40% of the adult population is obese. The obesity epidemic is placing significant strain on our healthcare system, and the CDC now estimates that obesity costs the US healthcare system almost $173B a year.

Humans, it turns out, are not good at adapting when friction is removed from a system. We’re solving the problem in a very American way - not by reintroducing friction into the system (although some people prefer to shop at their local farmer’s market), but by using drugs to make people skinny again.

To be clear, I’m not a total doomer. Eliminating friction isn’t all bad. People are building new things in larger volumes than they ever have, faster than ever. I loved this slide from Redpoint’s recent slide deck on the state of software markets:

But that’s a post for another day.

I’ll conclude with Ben’s ending from 13 years ago, because it remains more true than ever:

“We are creating the future, and ‘better’ does not win by default.”