On the importance on friction

A few months ago Viktor Lofgren wrote about the disappearing small web—or the IndieWeb as most of us call it, as opposed to the CorpoWeb. Their proposed solution for slowing down, or even undoing, this disappearance was to help increase discovery by—

…linking to websites you find interesting, and publish[ing] it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”.

I have a blogroll on this website and nearly everybody on my blogroll has a blogroll of their own. And then there is the dedicated blogroll.org which serves the same purporse. Like independent websites, that website too is manually curated.

Compare this to the CorpoWeb, which is rushing to automation and artificial intelligence. Things are easier to do, things therefore take much less thought, and so things need to be made more addictive for people to come back to them. A blogroll then becomes an automated, algorithmic barrage of recommendations for consumption. What brings us back to an IndieWeb-site—whether our own or someone else’s that we like—is not the same thing that brings us back to Youtube or Instagram or whatever else new is around the corner.

The fundamental difference between the two is friction. The CorpoWeb tries to erase friction, the IndieWeb in some ways embraces it. Friction is part of a good life. Things take time and effort. Time nurtures thought and meaning. Meaning adds value. Friction is not a waste of time as the CorpoWeb villifies it to be; on the contrary, friction can help ensure that our time is in fact being put to good use.

Consider Steve Ledlow’s ‘intentional web manifesto’ for example, which speaks of ensuring that content written by humans. It seems like such a fundamental idea, but that too is viewed as friction to be erased on the CorpoWeb: why write when a machine-learned programme can do it for you? Even writing is friction. After all, writing takes time and effort.

The manifesto goes on to promise that “we curate our consumption”, that is, we put time, thought and effort—intent—to be mindful of what we consume. On the CorpoWeb, consumption of content is made easy using algorithms that feign service to users while in fact working for the corporation to ensure users return and remain addicted, or at the very least mindless. The CorpoWeb has made the term ‘frictionless’ a marker for deceptive successes.

An interesting example comes by way of Manuel Moreale’s recent blog post on Substack. He says he dislikes the platform because “it’s incredibly easy to get started on Substack and also very easy to get going”. What sounds like the very reasons Substack’s marketing team might exploit to draw new users becomes Manu’s reason to disregard the service: the frictionless onboarding, writing and publishing process come at a price. Manu’s solution of preferring one’s own domain &c. come at a different price—increased friction—but one that is worth it in the end.

Friction has value beyond the IndieWeb too. The spread of misinformation can be slowed by ensuring a bit of friction. This is not necessarily a burden as some corporations would have us believe, rather it can give the act of sharing content just enough pause to make it more intentional, forcefully handing people an extra moment without which they may have mindlessly shared something that a bit of thought would have made them hold back on. Sort of like the days before Twitter added a re-tweet button. The IndieWeb has this built in in some sense: it is harder to log into your website, or git push your new article, than it is to fire away a tweet or toot or whatever other noise we are making these days.

In the context of the web, friction is defined in a 2022 research article by Cambridge’s Marcus Tomalin as “any unnecessary retardation of a process or activity that delays the user accomplishing a desired action”. The article concludes that “there are several reasons why an entirely frictionless future is a profoundly disturbing one.”

Now one can always argue that too much friction can be a bad thing. Indeed this is what got the CorpoWeb on its way, and it is still what is preventing many from embracing IndieWeb-sites of their own. But in my mind the solution is not to erase this friction entirely, rather to make it manageable and, more important, learn to appreciate its many ancillary benefits. The solution is not to employ friction as a signifier of incorrectness. And as a bonus, if the web as a whole embraces a bit of friction, the IndieWeb might not look as daunting to newcomers as it does now.