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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #168 (Friction - Part 1)

Published 4 months ago • 6 min read

Family Photo:
Friction

Last week, Luana took the kids and some extended family back to Terra dos Dinos.

The newest addition to Terra dos Dinos is a cart ride called Mega Trenó, billed as "the largest mountain train ride in Latin America". This seems appropriate for the largest dinosaur park in Latin America. Each cart has its own handbrake, so you can control your own descent. Here's Calvin's Mega Trenó Ride Video.

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The promise of technology is to remove life's frictions.

​Derek Thompson's Independence Day essay notes that in 1776, despite Thomas Jefferson having the nation's finest wine collection and a personal library so vast it started the library of Congress, "Monticello was so frigid in winter...that Jefferson's ink froze in his inkwell, preventing him from writing to complain about the cold."

In 1776, the firewood industry—chopping down and burning trees for fuel—was so vital it accounted for more than 25% of US GDP. At the same time, George Washington spent some $15,000 per year on CANDLES (in today's dollars... though perhaps a bargain, considering the product was whale-harvested).

Colonial American life was full of frictions—more than just the ones between the governors and the governed that we commemorate each year.

A cost chart illustrates how artificial light has gone from luxury to ubiquitous triviality. It's a tribute to technology progressively removing frictions from daily life over centuries.

Technology eras I have witnessed: search engines—removing frictions from gathering information, social networks—removing frictions from interacting with people, smartphones—removing the friction of having to get up and go use a computer to access the other friction-defying technologies.

Is there anything more perfectly frictionless than a smartphone's glass screen? It's access to all the world's information. It's access to see and be seen by anyone in the world. With the press of a thumb, anything you want can be delivered to your doorstep. In two taps, you can buy a plane ticket to anywhere in the world. One more tap, and a car can be summoned to take you to the airport.

The danger in a frictionless surface is losing control. You need friction to steer. A hockey player might glide across the ice, but once upended he's helpless until momentum crashes his body into the boards.

I remember I used to come home from school, connect the dial-up modem on the family desktop, and think, "I'm going to spend an hour on the internet now." Ha. Now the internet's everywhere: on computers and televisions; in pockets and airpods.

It's as ubiquitous as artificial light.

And the momentum of the internet seems to be converging on shortform video—it's TikTok, of course, but also YouTube force-feeding YouTube Shorts. It's Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter, and Reddit, and even LinkedIn all prioritizing shortform video in their content algorithms. Shortform video is the content that keeps the users on the apps, so app developers relentlessly optimize, removing any frictions that might disconnect the users from the content.

Technology! Behold thy progress!

It's sad that smartphones can access all the world's information, their potential for education and global connection is almost limitless, but instead their most frequent global use seems to be as shortform video players. A digital k-hole—a place where users turn off their brains because they can't or don't want to think of anything better.

I'm guilty of this myself. Luana rightly scolds me when I habitually reach for my phone to pass some spare moment of boredom. I'm trying to get better.

But what else am I supposed to do? Just think?

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This latest technology era—Artificial Intelligence—promises to remove the friction of thinking. Don't worry about thoughts! Let the machine do it for you!

This seems shortsighted, but also as alluring as shortform video.

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Please don't misunderstand—I'm not anti-technology. The email newsletter of a very-online remote worker, who consults on the business products of the world's largest enterprise software company, would be an odd place for an anti-tech rant.

I like technology! I like progress! I even like AI—Abundance now!

My idea is just that we should be intentional about the technologies we use, and how we use them. What frictions in our lives do we want to remove? What frictions are helpful?

There's an Amish sensibility to this: the Amish consider whether a technology strengthens or weakens the community before choosing whether to adopt it.

The Amish may seem strange, especially if you are "English" (their word for not-Amish), but the Amish are also one of the fastest-growing communities in America, so maybe there's something there.

I don't share their same conclusions on technology, but it seems good to question the default opinion. It seems foolish to mindlessly accept all technology as unambiguously good.

Where should we want more friction?

More next week...

Dad Joke:
Strong Force

video preview​

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Source: The Balloon by Rob Spence​

Highlights:
Frictions

​The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by Kyla Scanlon (2025)​

I want to talk about friction. Not regulations or transaction costs, but the effort required to move through systems, and how that effort is being redistributed in today's economy.
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We were taught that effort matters! That working hard, learning well, and building value would be rewarded. I sound a little like old-man-yelling-at-cloud, but I promise I have a point - we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn't disappear; it just moves.
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Friction has become a defining feature across the economy, with huge consequences for everything from education to infrastructure. And it's created three distinct worlds that operate by entirely different rules:
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- The digital world has almost no friction.
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- The physical world is full of it.
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- And in certain curated spaces - like the West Village, or your AI companion -friction has been turned into something you can pay to remove.

​What VCs Who Passed on Shopify Got Wrong by Tobi Lutke (2024)​

What a lot of free-market thinkers don’t understand is that between the demand and eventual supply lies friction. And I actually think that friction is probably the most potent force for shaping the planet that people just generally do not acknowledge… That was my theory when I turned my snowboard store into Shopify: there was a lot more people like me except there was too much friction which we needed to solve. And Shopify has proven out that every time we make the process simpler, there’s more consumption. At this point, we have a million merchants on Shopify, which is a mind-blowing number. So friction is a major component, and it’s something that software is uniquely good at reducing.

​Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History by Ben Thompson (2021)​

Internet 1.0: Technology The vast majority of the technologies undergirding the Internet were in fact developed decades ago. TCP/IP, for example, which undergirds the World Wide Web, email, and a whole host of familiar technologies, was first laid out in a paper in 1974; DNS, which translates domain names to numerical IP addresses, was introduced in 1985; HTTP, the application layer for the Web, was introduced in 1991.
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Internet 2.0: Economics Google was founded in 1998, in the middle of the dot-com bubble, but it was the company’s IPO in 2004 that, to my mind, marked the beginning of Internet 2.0. This period of the Internet was about the economics of zero friction; specifically, unlike the assumptions that undergird Internet 1.0, it turned out that the Internet does not disperse economic power but in fact centralizes it.​
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The network effects of iOS and Android are so strong, and the scale economics of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google so overwhelming, that I concluded in The End of the Beginning:
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The implication of this view should at this point be obvious, even if it feels a tad bit heretical: there may not be a significant paradigm shift on the horizon, nor the associated generational change that goes with it. And, to the extent there are evolutions, it really does seem like the incumbents have insurmountable advantages: the hyperscalers in the cloud are best placed to handle the torrent of data from the Internet of Things, while new I/O devices like augmented reality, wearables, or voice are natural extensions of the phone.

iamJoshKnox Highlights:
A Low Friction Workplace

My data consulting cooperative, Cooptimize, is searching for a SQL/BI Developer.
If you, or someone you know, might be a good fit, please consider applying here.

Want to Chat?

​Let's Chat!​

Book some time even if you don't know what you want to talk about:
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Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​​

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Josh Knox

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