Get Your Hands Off My Friction

Friction will be our offramp from the digital world we never wanted

By Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary - reprint from Dr. Tracy’s SubStack the The Future of Sanity

I feel it’s like a tool I cannot trust. I feel like the tools I like in my life, like a hammer — I swing it, and it does something predictable.

The internet seems like it’s serving two masters. I search for something, I get a bunch of stuff I don’t really want, and I don’t really know what I’m getting. I want to write one email or check one thing. I end up in some strange rabbit hole, and three hours go by, and I don’t know what happened.

So I feel like I’m constantly at risk of being manipulated or taken from, and I don’t trust the tools to do what they say they’re going to do. And I feel that makes using it kind of like living in a fun house.

~Tim Wu, in answer to Ezra Klein’s question on The Ezra Klein Show, Feb 6, 2026, “When you’re spending time on the internet, what feels bad about it to you?”

Trust is our scarcest commodity in 2026, and trust in digital technology is perhaps the scarcest. Especially when it comes to AI. Every day brings a new AI headline and a new fear for the future. We’ve learned that AI is designed to prioritize profit over safety; that it will probably come for our jobs; and that experts believe there is a non-zero probability that AI will destroy humanity like some superintelligent virtual Mechagodzilla, but then keep building it anyway. It’s move fast and break things all the way down - or as I once heard a C-suite technologist say, “You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet1.” The eggs, of course, are us.

There are many reasons why it is difficult to mitigate the risks of these emerging technologies. There are economic, political, and social challenges. But one serious, ignored barrier to change is what I call the North Star trickle-down problem: The North Star values guiding the tech industry have trickled down into our lives in such deeply embedded ways that only difficult, collective action will allow us to escape their gravitational pull.

The tech industry’s North Star values are two-fold: (1) Build the future and (2) Optimize.

Build the future. There are an inordinate number of sci-fi nerd bosses (SNBs) running Big Tech. I’m all for sci-fi nerds, but not when they use the dystopian books and movies they consumed as children as roadmaps for the future. Indeed, they seem to be working hard to make them into reality - from nation-sized mega-corporations and living on Mars to transhumanism and the emergence of AI superintelligence. They don’t realize, or care, that all great science fiction is actually a profound critique of the present moment and a warning about the future it might lead to if we don’t change course now. Instead, SNBs treat science fiction like a wish-list for building the future, which they are obligated to fulfill if they are to become Great Men of History.

Optimize. SNBs delight in, and even fetishize, good engineering, which boils down to control and optimization. They think of human problems as input-output functions in need of perpetual maximizing (e.g., profit) or minimizing (e.g., time spent). Likewise, they think that The Good Life is one that is perfectly efficient and productive, more, better, and faster forever. Making money is a game to win, and growth is the highest good in a world beset on all sides by stagnation.

With these values in place, SNBs went about winning the game called The Internet Age. Their strategy was to identify human behaviors that are easy to measure and monetize - likes, shares, clicks, rates of adoption, time spent looking - and then fabricate a world that turbocharged those behaviors by constantly nudging and rewarding them. “Hey, your content went viral!” and the like became grist for their mill. They call this “engagement.” And they’ve made it the backbone of the digital economy.

An important thing to consider about this strategy of manipulation, amplification, and extraction is that these easily measured human behaviors aren’t even remotely related to our wellbeing or what matters about a person. In other words, these pervasive technologies are optimized for experiences that are direct opportunity costs for what matters.

…these pervasive technologies are optimized for experiences that are direct opportunity costs for what matters.

The success of this business model depends on continually identifying and eradicating points of friction, those aspects of human life and behavior that block SNBs from measuring, optimizing, and extracting value from our “engagement.”

Sounds grim, and it is. But these grim facts reveal that friction is exactly what will save us. Friction will be our offramp from the digital world we never wanted.

The Power of Friction

Things that have friction slow us down, offer up resistance, and require effort and energy. They also make us feel alive, joyful.

What were the last three things you did that truly delighted you, that gave you a deep sense of pleasure and meaning?

Notice what populates your list: Was it binge watching your favorite streaming show? Doing a week’s worth of shopping online? Getting something done faster or easier?

I bet not. I would wager that the things that leapt to mind were things that were more time consuming, more effortful, and more emotionally uneven with both ups and downs - like creative acts, relationships, or obstacles surmounted.

It’s the hike you went on with friends last weekend, when it rained the whole time, but you made it to the top anyway and laughed about being covered with so much mud.

It’s that tough day you spent with your child, when they cried on your shoulder and nothing got better, but you were in it together and you know they felt loved and supported.

It’s that family reunion you hosted. You didn’t need to organize trivia games and a dance-off competition, complete with color-coded team costumes. But you’d rather go big or go home.

You know what else creates friction? Differences of opinions or goals, cultural differences, power imbalances, competition, navigating personal boundaries, or simply growing old. These points of friction require care and full attention, but they potentially lead somewhere important.

Deep learning also requires friction. Take the teaching concept of productive struggle. Here, lessons are designed so that learners must grapple with academic challenges at the edge of their ability, experience confusion and failure, and make progress using their own reasoning, problem solving, and persistence. Teachers scaffold and support, but don’t swoop in with the answers. It’s the difference between handing someone a sparsely sketched map versus spoon-feeding them step-by-step GPS directions. Decades of educational research shows that embedding productive struggle into the classroom leads to deeper and more enduring learning, as well as better problem-solving and metacognitive skills.

The Cost of Losing Friction

When we live our lives through screens, or when AI is used for cognitive and emotional offloading, we lose chances to build the emotional and cognitive muscles needed for friction - like persisting in the face of uncertainty, tolerating failure, enduring emotional distress, social skills building, and seeing past a current bad patch to a brighter future.

We obviously couldn’t get things done if everything were full of friction. No one welcomes drudgery. But I’m optimistic that the vast majority of us are seriously asking ourselves - is life really better the more we mediate it through digital means like streaming services, AI companions, videoconferencing, telemedicine, social media, ride sharing, GPS-navigation, news apps, online commerce, food ordering, scheduling apps, digital payments, and smart homes and cars?

These things can be good in small doses, but they’ve drowned us in an avalanche of friction-killers, tricking us into believing that optimized, seamless efficiency is the pinnacle of The Good Life. Far from it. It’s like surviving on a diet of mashed potatoes. We’ll probably keep living for a while, but the essentials are missing.

The avalanche of ways to reduce friction has tricked us into believing that frictionless efficiency defines The Good Life. The truth is that it blocks it. It’s like surviving on a diet of mashed potatoes. We’ll probably keep living for a while, but the essentials are missing.

It’s not inevitable

Too many companies are plying us with products that promise to be our drudge, our creative spark, our professor, our cheat, our friend and lover, or our court jester - all to provide a more frictionless life. But frictionless living is a road to nowhere. It’s a hamster wheel, a slop machine, and a mind-numbing infinite scroll.

We already know how this plays out. Just look at the last 20 years of tech “disruption” we’ve endured, the choices these companies made about the digital infrastructure of our lives for the sake of profit. It seemed so full of promise in the beginning. Now, we’ve come face-to-face with the inescapable fact that the price we paid for more seamless connection and fewer inconveniences is the degradation of some of the best parts of being alive.

Is this future inevitable? I don’t think so. I believe we can reject this Faustian bargain.

First step: Refuse and choose wisely. We must refuse to swallow the North Star of the SNBs. Yes, life with friction becomes less smooth and efficient, but also more anchored in our values, more delightful, and more transformative. We don’t have to reject all AI or all injections of seamlessness. But we must choose both our AI and our frictions wisely and remember what makes life worth living.

I don’t think all people in tech are ill-intentioned. I know for a fact that many are extremely well-intentioned. But incentives eat good intentions for breakfast. And the tech business - in particular the business of AI - is incentivized for frictionless scale, speed, and profit above all else.

Second step: Incentivize what we want to see in the world. We can’t wait around for the companies to do the right thing. We have to figure out how to incentivize the protection of our wellbeing and the creation of tools that support human thriving - including more friction. I’m no policy expert, but in mental health, pushing for new incentive structures will be necessary while we wait around on the glacial pace of much-needed regulation.

Small steps can make a difference. One example is the Kora benchmark for AI child safety. It’s a new leaderboard for AI products, ranking models in terms of their risks to youth. This transparency allows people to choose whether and which AI models to use. If people vote with their dollars, it could push companies to optimize more for safety and decency - in other words, human well-being.

There are some very well-intentioned people working in tech, but incentives eat good intentions for breakfast. The tech business is purely incentivized and optimized for frictionless scale, speed, and profit above all else. We have to find as many ways as possible to become unoptimizable.

I believe we’re starting to do just that. You see it in the groundswell of condemnation levied at the SNBs. You see it outside of tech, in the Slow Food movement, the return of old-school technologies (you can buy cassette tapes again!), analog hobbies like woodworking and knitting, and of course the push for less screen time and more in-person gatherings. These all reflect our human impulse to embrace friction because we’re learning the true value of what we’ve been missing.

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Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is an Advisor to the Global Day of Unplugging, a psychologist, scientist, founder, and author. Visit her website HERE and follow her SubStack the The Future of Sanity.