[HN Gopher] The most valuable commodity in the world is friction
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The most valuable commodity in the world is friction
Author : walterbell
Score : 151 points
Date : 2025-05-09 01:45 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kyla.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kyla.substack.com)
| apples_oranges wrote:
| You can see it differently: Digital world is almost entirely
| friction, shoveling useless info into our brains from morning
| till evening and preventing them from functioning normally. And
| being offline, lets say stuck in traffic and the phone battery is
| empty, is a welcome relief.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Is the friction of establishing trust via TLS on the way to
| consuming all the bandwidth?
|
| One seriously wonders if the cost of zero trust will kill off
| the open internet, reducing us to walled gardens of SSH
| connections that can only be obtained by invitation.
|
| We're falling far short of the vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
| no?
| thunkingdeep wrote:
| Most people visit the same half dozen websites over and over
| anyways. Websites are eventually going to be an artifact of
| an old medium as we move to like cybernetics and AR glasses
| and brain implants and whatever else. All that stuff in
| websites will be forgotten
| walterbell wrote:
| _> All that stuff in websites will be forgotten_
|
| Why are LLM scraper bots hammering websites globally, if
| websites will be forgotten?
| immibis wrote:
| Because we're a post-competence society. Very little
| useful data will be gained by the operators of these
| bots. They don't work, and nobody cares they don't work.
| We're doing everything cargo-cult now. We're building
| giant machines that do nothing but spew smoke into the
| air, because that's what they did in the Industrial
| Revolution and it brought prosperity, didn't it?
| walterbell wrote:
| Hopefully any actual scraper bots are writing data to de-
| duplicated cloud storage. The rest should be served with
| Anubis, PoW or other DDOS defenses.
| thunkingdeep wrote:
| I would argue that's a driver to my point. How many
| people are never going to visit the source website when
| Llama can give me a detailed summary of what I need in a
| few hundred milliseconds? I would consider that in the
| same category of forgotten. I could've been more clear in
| my other comment.
| walterbell wrote:
| If a website is not financially dependent on search
| traffic, they can block all scrapers with a paywall, and
| their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
|
| If a website is financially dependent on search traffic,
| they can go out of business due to loss of traffic to
| LLMs, and their content will disappear everywhere.
|
| If the majority of websites fall into the latter
| category, LLMs would be left with old/archive longform
| content, plus micro content from social media.
|
| If social media (e.g. X.AI) takes their data private for
| vertical integration with payments and internal LLM,
| their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Eh, I think a huge amount of people would never want
| anything implanted in any part of their body. Most people
| don't even want smart glasses.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Except a necessary, special purpose device, e.g. a
| pacemaker, I wouldn't have anything implanted.
|
| Now, an artificial ear for the deaf starts to be more
| compelling.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have read that some deaf people do not want cochlear
| implants because their deafness is part of who they are,
| their identity. They don't want that taken away.
| layer8 wrote:
| Most people didn't want to carry a computer around with
| them all the time 40 years ago as well.
|
| Though I don't agree that AR would eliminate the
| usefulness of websites.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The friction is incompatibility. That's what makes it
| difficult to interact with the system, and for the system to
| interact with itself.
|
| Tim Berners-Lee's vision is great, but no one has really
| figured out how to make it feasible. To make matters worse,
| the interests of capital have taken over the system, and
| replaced most interpersonal interactions with an advertising
| market.
|
| When a participant in the system is able to monopolize
| interaction in that system, they end up writing the rules
| that define compatibility for other participants of the
| system. The effect is not only that people on different
| platforms are isolated from the people on other platforms,
| it's also that they must interact with the system through the
| rules of their chosen platform. Rules don't just define the
| bounds of interaction: they define the interface, the logic,
| the goals, etc.
|
| ---
|
| It's impossible to build a set of rules that captures the
| entire potential of digital interaction. Objectivity is
| impossible, because the moment we write down its meaning, we
| subject it to a specific isolated context.
|
| I'm working on a way to change the perspective that the
| system has with itself, so that subjectivity can be a first-
| class feature, and compatibility can be accomplished after-
| the-fact. What I have so far is still an extremely abstract
| idea, but I do think it's possible.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > And being offline, lets say stuck in traffic and the phone
| battery is empty, is a welcome relief.
|
| Then sell your phone?
|
| Sorry to be dismissive, but you are locked in a prison of your
| own making.
| immibis wrote:
| Is the correct response to someone who hates their job, who
| happens to take a hike and enjoy nature once in a while, "why
| don't you go live in the woods then?"?
| seangrogg wrote:
| Is it the wrong response? If they hate a job there's actual
| value in assessing whether they need it, especially if they
| could live life in a different environment they would enjoy
| with things made by their own hands.
| hanlonsrazor wrote:
| There is value, yes. However, things are rarely so black
| and white as the commenter above you sees it wherein one
| could simply disconnect entirely. The reality of it is
| within our current zeitgeist the digital world is
| unavoidable - be it in the workplace, the condensation of
| our activities (incl. unavoidable ones- banking, etc)
| into apps on our phones.
|
| Of course this is barring the idea of withdrawing all
| ones savings and moving onto a farm and living off the
| land :D.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > Sorry to be dismissive
|
| Then don't be dismissive?
|
| Seriously, isn't this answer the exact application of your
| own philosophy?
| anzumitsu wrote:
| I think this is true to an extent and it's good to take a
| step back and remind yourself that thing you think is making
| you miserable is ultimately a small square of metal and
| glass. But the actual situation is more complicated. Clearly
| phones have utility beyond being skinner boxes, the ability
| to contact your loved ones, navigate roads and transit
| systems, translate languages, retrieve information from the
| web, etc are all extremely useful and their absence would
| decrease your quality of life. But since that's all bundled
| together with the stuff people find harmful you're left in a
| constant struggle to only your device in a beneficial way.
| You can lock down your phone but that's just a band-aid. If
| someone can figure out a "smart-ish" phone that does the
| things I listed above but not the harmful things I think
| there would be a real market for it.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I don't want to miss any slack notifications while I'm
| walking my dog
| jfengel wrote:
| I get the idea, and it's a pretty good one.
|
| But the headline is really bad. It's not a commodity and it's not
| valuable. It is what creates value; it's what makes value
| meaningful.
|
| Don't get hung up on the headline. It's a thesis equivalent to
| the notion that art comes from struggle against some kind of
| limitation. That limitation is usually arbitrary (the form of
| poetry, the rules of a game, the difficulty of oil paint and
| brush), but the result is meaningful despite and because of it.
| klysm wrote:
| I've had this in my head as well "constraints yield art". But
| it's also required to engineering
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Tekhne, as the Greeks called it.
| rambambram wrote:
| Texel, as the Dutch call it.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Heh, from the headline I expected this to be another blog post
| about how to find your market niche and what you can monetize,
| ultimately.
|
| Instead I got a pretty interesting article about human nature
| and the economy as a whole.
| fundaThree wrote:
| > It's not a commodity and it's not valuable.
|
| Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual
| value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something
| means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable
| things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value.
| Very much including the concept of friction.
|
| If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all
| value.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something
| that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less
| valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the
| same thing.
|
| Most software development is a lot of low value commodity
| stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do
| whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do
| valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for
| doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong,
| your product becomes less valuable.
|
| A good example of something that is both a commodity and a
| common source of friction is all the signup and security
| friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you
| do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and
| frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you
| money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily
| directly appreciated but it results in less friction,
| frustration, and overhead.
|
| That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But
| there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction
| by doing a poor job of it.
| eviks wrote:
| The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of it, so
| the poet isn't limited to any specific form, and many did write
| in different forms. Similarly unclear what was arbitrary about
| oil paints, what was a similarly colorful alternative without
| such limits?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The art in poetry is poetry, which includes all forms of
| it_
|
| Only in abstract - before you get to do it. When you do start
| to write a specific poem this doesn't hold anymore, and a big
| part of the art is fitting the form you chose.
| eviks wrote:
| Not just in abstract - mixed poetry exists in reality, so
| it holds at the level of an individual poem as well.
| Affric wrote:
| I mean poetry is an arrangement of symbols, generally symbols
| that are related in their representation: assonance,
| dissonance, rhyme, meter, stress, meaning...
|
| The poet is limited to symbols. And every poet comes up
| against these limitations.
| dgan wrote:
| Sidenote: what's up with all these substack submissions in last
| 24h
|
| I can't dismiss the cookie banner on android (ff) so not reading
| mdaniel wrote:
| I have long lobbied for an archive.today link bot for all of
| the popular spam-adjacent domains (bloomberg, medium, substack,
| etc)
|
| https://archive.ph/hInjm
|
| p.s. I _think_ it is one of goals of Firefox to dismiss cookie
| banners[1] so you may want to file a bugzilla about that
| behavior
|
| 1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cookie-banner-
| reduction...
| nine_k wrote:
| Does the reader mode not take care of all the unnecessary
| formatting, including the banner?
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Because of the medium that is the internet (low friction and high
| observability) it has a glaring lack of interest in solving
| problems where the destination is high friction low
| observability.
|
| In fact, because the digital world explicitly competes with
| friction for engagement any financially incentivized platform
| must direct people away from the real world and real people.
|
| So the endgame is to replace real people with digital people even
| in our relationships.
|
| Real spaces with fake places.
|
| Real disagreements with manufacturered ones.
|
| Only people who have been heavily involved in 3rd places seem to
| be able to quantify what our modern world has unnecessarily
| thrown away.
|
| It's a glaring ommission once you realize it, working to solve
| that atm.
| pbronez wrote:
| Glad to hear it, what's your approach?
| mlekoszek wrote:
| Not saying this is what you're doing, but I find requiring
| someone to solve a problem immediately after sharing it can
| (ironically) stifle finding a solution. The act of
| identifying and the act of solving rarely happen all in one
| motion, and often the first step to solving a problem is to
| establish its validity among peers so meaningful solutions
| can arise.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yes, but: The top level comment specifically said they were
| working to solve the problem. I think in that case it's
| worth asking about their approach.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Tangent to this: I think it's often useful to allow
| suggesting "bad" solutions to vague problems because good
| solutions often hang out close to the bad one's and shines
| interesting light on the problem. Or bad solutions often
| immediately provokes better ideas. If you immediately see
| that a proposed solution is bad there's a good chance you
| know what specifically is bad about it and can propose an
| amendment.
|
| Suggesting a bad solution is sometimes half the way to a
| good one.
| walterbell wrote:
| Where do RTO mandates (2nd place friction) fit into this model?
| svachalek wrote:
| I think drug dealers figured this out a long time ago, just
| because you sell something doesn't mean you should use it for
| yourself.
| raffael_de wrote:
| Did I miss where the author defines what "friction" is actually
| meaning?
|
| But certainly a very impressive exercise in creative writing
| based on taking an analogy too far.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Did I miss where the author defines what "friction" is
| actually meaning?_
|
| They were responding to a tweet, cited in the second paragraph:
| I want to talk about friction.1
|
| 1
| https://nitter.poast.org/Bonecondor/status/19184554398066568...
| I truly believe this lack of structural friction when it comes
| to basically every type of dopamine-frying pleasure on earth is
| a huge part of why gen z is Like That
| raffael_de wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is to be honest.
| walterbell wrote:
| The "[structural] friction" is defined by the tweet, not
| the substack article responding to the tweet.
| raffael_de wrote:
| "I truly believe this lack of structural friction when it
| comes to basically every type of dopamine-frying pleasure
| on earth is a huge part of why gen z is Like That"
|
| You consider that a definition?
| walterbell wrote:
| It's context. A branch of a discussion thread. Not a
| dictionary.
|
| If you want a faster (less friction?) answer, you could
| post your question to substack comment thread or twitter.
| devmor wrote:
| "Friction" in the author's post refers to intellectual
| friction. The need to think about what you are doing before
| you do it; as opposed to being led to your next action by
| the UX of an app or instruction of another person.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Original X link because that other one does not load for me
| and perhaps others.
|
| https://x.com/Bonecondor/status/1918455439806656872
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I thought it was excellent. Do you have any specific critiques
| of claims that we could disagree on?
| skybrian wrote:
| Toqueville wrote about American believing in themselves, but _not
| in isolation._
|
| > Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly
| unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial
| associations in which all take part, but they also have a
| thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very
| general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans
| use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build
| inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send
| missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create
| hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of
| bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the
| support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at
| the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France
| and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive
| an association in the United States.
|
| But that was based on need, back before a lot of modern
| institutions existed. Where public schools didn't exist yet,
| there were private academies. Before insurance companies, there
| were mutual aid societies.
|
| Nowadays there are businesses and other organizations serving
| every need, though sometimes only if you have enough money.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Businesses are associations. They just unfortunately come with
| a lot of feudal assumptions these days.
| metalman wrote:
| well writen update on the ideas of inertia, momentum, and how
| friction effects both
| immibis wrote:
| I don't get the whole friction thing. Yes, it's a thing. No, I
| don't see how it makes any kind of point here. What you call
| friction appears to be the inverse of investment. Not monetary
| investment, but actual resources put towards making something
| work.
|
| I also don't see a strong connection between the digital world
| getting more frictionless and the physical world getting worse.
| Unless you're suggesting that we're forgetting about the physical
| stuff _because_ we 're going all digital, they seem to just be
| two things happening at the same time. There are ways they can be
| linked. We're going frictionless digital because it's the easiest
| way for our benefactors to take your money, and we're going
| crumbling infrastructure because it's the easiest way for our
| benefactors to save money. But I don't think it's a direct
| relationship.
|
| Is the FAA letting air traffic control fail because the FAA is
| busy tweeting? I don't think so. It's because it's being
| defunded... by a guy who spends all his time tweeting. Another
| weak connection there, but it's simply because of government
| priorities. But it started before then. I think physical
| infrastructure has been on a slow decline since long before
| things like social media existed.
|
| Tangential: More than once (I refuse to say the two nickels
| catchphrase) I have spotted a person at a techno party sitting
| down with their phone and been like "oh no you don't" and they
| have never been annoyed by this.
| tuan wrote:
| > I think what we're witnessing isn't just an extension of the
| attention economy but something new - the simulation economy
|
| Is it really new? We've been replacing real human connections
| with online connections/friendships for quite a while now. Social
| media companies have been giving us a world full of simulated
| relationships and making profits off of it. As quoted in the
| post, the average American adult has 3 friends. Look how many
| friends they have on FB.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > Look how many friends they have on FB.
|
| I can't tell if you mean it literally, or you're adopting the
| FB nomenclature, but in my mind that FB edge is just _labeled_
| friend, and is not the relationshipStatus between the nodes
|
| I have a to of "connections" on LinkedIn, too, but I can assure
| you I am not "connected" to hardly any of them
| ranprieur wrote:
| Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are
| optimized instead for efficiency, they break."
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I'm so glad this idea is starting to go mainstream.
| Animats wrote:
| Me too.
|
| In the days before electricity deregulation, power companies
| had rates regulated to achieve a fixed return on investment.
| This tended to result in overbuilding. Not huge overbuilding,
| but about 10% - 20%. The quest for "efficiency" wiped out
| some of that safety margin.
| kazinator wrote:
| The value of a commodity is a function of its necessity _and_ of
| its rarity and difficulty of obtainment.
|
| Something readily obtained anywhere, of which there is an
| inexhaustible supply, simply isn't valuable, even if it is
| essential.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I've posted this before, but on the topic of cheating, if you
| look at the Google Trends for ChatGPT searches, its popularity
| seems to track the school year remarkably well:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
|
| It's not just that everyone is cheating their way through
| college. It's that cheating is one of the primary uses -- perhaps
| _the_ primary use -- of ChatGPT.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I am not sure why kids need to be in school. As long there are
| good labor protections in place they'd probably find it more
| valuable to work and make their own money rather than get
| yelled at by parents and teachers all day while they goof off
| doing unproductive labor like scrolling through instagram or
| playing fortnite or whatever it is kids do these days to waste
| time.
| kregasaurusrex wrote:
| Wwi I'me
| Animats wrote:
| There's a link in there to "It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village
| Girl" in New York Magazine. [1] All that stuff about a 15-minute
| city? They live in one. Expensively, but not flashily.
|
| Also see the link to the Mark Zuckerberg interview.[2]
|
| Both of those are better than the "friction" article.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/JKJGf
|
| [2] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-2
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| how feeding all your data into one system, clicking so many ads
| that the company can pay an infinite research and power bill,
| just so you get a virtual imaginary friend can be called
| "frictionless"?
| zkmon wrote:
| Well, you call it friction, but others call it just the real
| world. It's going to be there, firm and fine, unaware of this
| digital, virtual bacteria. Just like those rocks who saw a
| highway come up beside them, a city getting built, and then all
| becoming ruins, restoring the natural landscape. All happening in
| a blip of time for the rocks. Adaptation would restore normalcy.
|
| If social isolation and digital-ness is not rewarded, it would go
| away on its own. If it is not supported by the decaying social
| fabric, it would fall like facade of playing cards. Everything
| must interact with real world and adapt at the ground level.
|
| Human endeavor has insignificantly small effect on the real
| world. Cultures and schools of thought fall and new ones rise.
| Real world doesn't adapt to your wish, you adapt to the world.
|
| 99% of the world population might not know any stuff you are
| talking about - trumpcoin, VR headsets, AI etc. That's not what
| the life on earth is made of.
| eviks wrote:
| > The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly.
| Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a
| backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures
| anymore. When systems that were designed for resilience are
| optimized instead for efficiency
|
| The wiki definition of efficiency is "the often measurable
| ability to avoid making mistakes or wasting materials, energy,
| efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more
| general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully,
| and without waste", so having a lot of breakage is by definition
| not efficient, and the system isn't optimized for it
|
| Similarly the frictionless digital paradise is imaginary
|
| > Amazon's one-click ordering creates a seamless customer
| experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and
| delivery drivers.
|
| Wait, that one-click order could be of a counterfeit 5-fake-
| starred product, does the fail to match your basic need not count
| as friction in author's digital physics book?
|
| > Meta builds frictionless social interfaces
|
| How is the impossibility to get algorithms matching your needs a
| frictionless interface?
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Good read! It exposes something deeply American and probably hard
| to change.
|
| American culture glorifies inventions and new things. Meanwhile
| all the stuff invented ages ago is just left run into the ground.
| It's very rarely rebuilt.
|
| Transit system failures expose this.
|
| Everyone can point to an example overseas of something shinier -
| trains that run on time in Switzerland, for example - yet things
| in the US work "well enough" even when they're shabby. It's
| actually surprising how well some things in the US continue to
| work despite being decayed and underfunded.
|
| The US has given the world many amazing inventions despite all
| this shabby infrastructure; it keeps chugging along even though
| Warren Buffet feels it's close to collapse. Maybe the rest of the
| world can learn something from that?
| rob_c wrote:
| It's called good project management to account for these real
| world gaps and delays... Albeit that's something we don't see
| enough of
| 3abiton wrote:
| > When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized
| instead for efficiency, they break.
|
| Very enjoyable read! But now I am curious, how does this
| contribute to the failure of nations, given that removing
| friction it's one of the first steps to ensure transparency.
| teddy-smith wrote:
| I completely agree with this.
|
| Money is the way you solve problems in America so your life's
| friction is inversely proportional to your money.
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