Friction and the Internet

Friction: a word with negative connotations. Associated with strife, fights and reduced fuel efficiency. Of course, it has its positive effects too: try walking on ice to see what I mean. Or imagine a world where meteors and asteroids didn’t burn up in the atmosphere.

But did you know of the positives of friction in the fields of economics or privacy? Huh? Consider what Brett Scott meant when he wrote:
“We’re used to thinking that absence of friction must be a virtue in any transaction, but a local economy thrives on inconvenience.”
ATM’s made it possible to access your money anytime, anywhere. Guess what it did to the bank teller’s job? Or consider how the Internet, by making communication so fast and cheap, played a role in speeding up outsourcing.

Ben Thomson wrote something similar in his blog:
“Friction was the foundation of sustainability, and now friction is gone.”
In the pre-Internet world, it was extremely hard for a new guy/company to make themselves known. Today, that’s so easy. That makes even the most established player a lot more vulnerable. Think of what Facebook did to MySpace or what Google did to Yahoo!

Thomson on privacy and friction:
“One could argue that friction was the foundation of our privacy, and now friction is gone.”
Even communists couldn’t tap into information about everybody. Today your e-mails, tweets, Facebook posts and Google queries can all be accessed by governments so easily.

Thomson goes on to say that “the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries”. And like the Industrial Revolution, not every consequence of the Internet will be positive:
“Change is guaranteed, but the type of change is not…We are creating the future, and “better” does not win by default.”
True, but the genie is out of the bottle. And there are just too many areas it impacts, both directly and in extremely complicated ways (the smartphone was built for the Internet and went on to wipe out Nokia). So it isn’t even possible to try and “control” the Internet genie: one can only try and adapt to whatever it brings next.

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