Friction

But, nevertheless, the change has in it elements of real contrast.

One week ago I shared the frictionless life of a country seat.

Frictionless, I mean, in the movement of an elaborate system which ministers luxuriously to the physical needs of life.

Frictionless, perhaps, only to those to whom it ministers.

Now I am out of all that, and am sharing instead the life of the humblest form of labor upon which that superstructure rests.

This is not a frictionless life in its adjustment to daily needs, very much the reverse.

They move to the next one.

Frictionless, shared game experience.

Very fast.

And I don't think it's seen as a bit of a bad thing, but no, it's just we didn't have access to that.

There was no weirdness.

Frictionless.

This is this thing at the moment about the friction, having a frictionless life.

And this idea of people trying to cordon themselves off from anything that is different or difficult.

How do you see that changing consumer spending habits, the way we spend? What are retailers doing to adapt to these new payment methods, and do we actually spend more because it's frictionless? Some of that, but the other thing it gives retailers, data.

It gives them data on what the customer's buying, when they're buying, where they're buying, so they know more about their customer that they can curate the assortments.

Frictionless payments is becoming standard right now.

Look at how we all, whether you take a train, whether you p- whether you pay for something, it's just tap and go.

And that's become, frankly, normal cost of, normal cost of business.

Seamless.

Frictionless.

The smoothest outro you've ever heard.

You can email us at afriendlyorbit at gmail.com. And now for the smoothest outro.

Might as well get a month of Netflix.

Those kinds of decisions weren't possible because it was too much friction to do it before.

So I think that we're seeing extraordinary, Frictionless onboarding and offboarding.

I'm glad that there's money for good shows.

Don't worry about it.

Companies use this kind of stuff, but we should use it on ourselves also.

So choice architecture is the idea that if you can change the environment in some way, then to influence the level of friction around choices, you can, you know, uh, encourage certain choices more than others, right? Or discourage certain choices more than others, depending on what you're doing with the friction.

So if I want to drink more water, how can I leverage portion size effect and affordance to change my environment? Uh, and if I reduce the friction of drinking water, I'm going to drink more.

If I increase the friction of drinking other things, I'm more likely to drink water because the other things, you know, you get the point.

So a bigger water vessel, that's easier drinking potential.

better affordance for drinking.

This one has a screw top, not a push button top.

So it doesn't accidentally ever pop open.

Especially when our modern culture optimizes almost exclusively for speed and, you know, frictionless reach.

Exactly.

Frictionless.

But the texts emphasize a really crucial psychological component that answers your question.

This unglamorous physical old school music development creates a byproduct that the algorithm absolutely cannot manufacture on its own.

You are a place that you can get into and out of easily.

Frictionless trade, man.

Now, there's another nice map of actually the city itself.

You can hear the sound effects of this clack, the, the mandatory sound effects of a European museum-