Friction

Friction creates warmth

This post was written in response to the January 2025 edition of the IndieWeb Carnival, which is about the importance of friction, hosted by V. H. Belvadi.

The web is a fantastic, powerful tool for sharing information and for doing so efficiently and quickly. Not only is it powerful, it is also very easy to wield this power and few do so with any sense of responsibility.

With great power comes great responsibility.

-- Spider-Man

If we are not going to take responsibility for our behaviour online, then it needs to become harder to publish information there. In short: there needs to be more friction to post online.

Imagine if it took just 30 additional seconds to make an online post or comment. Every time you hit submit your phone froze for 30 seconds whilst it processed putting the comment on the web. Nobody would be bothered with throw away comments. Comments that are often upsetting and harmful to the recipient. Comments that can literally reach billions of users in no time and for free.

Before social media, indeed before the web in general, the effort and costs to get anything published for a wider audience was prohibitive for most people. Only publishing houses and newspapers could afford the sort of equipment needed to print a book, newspaper or pamphlet. Not only did you need the infrastructure, you also needed the networks and logistics to get your printed material into the shops, so people could see, buy and hopefully read it. Publishing something for free was more or less unheard of as you had to recuperate your costs if you didn't want to go bankrupt. So you had to publish quality in order to convince people to buy it. Alternatively you needed good marketing or propaganda.

Even further back in time, stone and chisel were used to write messages. Given the effort involved in this, you would not bother unless it was really worth your time. So you made an effort to be thoughtful. Or maybe you were conveying a message from the gods. What you didn't do was anonymously dump your unfiltered thoughts on others in a quick fire set of 120 character brain farts. In fact you would have no reason for doing so because no one else would be doing this either. If you wanted to exchange tweets you had to do this in person with the people in your immediate vicinity, probably at the village square or down the pub. And no one took that stuff seriously anyway, so it was OK.

Of course those who had the means of publication, also controlled what was published. More often than not this would be the government or other authority, usually unelected. They could control what you thought. They could control what whole populations thought. And whilst this meant those with the means could easily incite a population to go to war against another population, at least it meant that within populations the people might think along similar lines leading to less antagonism. So long as physical needs were met and their was a sense of fairness. This mind control is similar to censorship, a lack of freedom of speech.

Top down censorship is clearly a bad thing. Being willing to censor ourselves at least some of the time is perhaps not, if we want to live at peace with each other. In the pre-internet age, self-censoring was not a choice but a consequence of the fact that publishing anything involved a lot of friction.

Social media is linked to, but not proven to have caused, a significant increase in mental health issues. We're all obsessing on other people's brain farts. Worse, we think they are real. We think it's really what that person believes, that this is what defines them. Yet we don't know them, we will never meet them. Perhaps that's the problem. If we actually met them, would we care what they thought, what they said? Because, like, who are they anyway?

For most of human existence, people worried about food and shelter. These are real basic physical necessities that our body needs. We need to worry about them, because our body is telling us to eat, else it will wither away. We need shelter to not freeze to death or be eaten by a sabre toothed tiger. These worries don't cause mental health issues. It's our bodies which are the cause of the problem. The body is making the mind worry to ensure the body's needs are met. If they are not met the body will ensure the mind keeps worrying until they are met. Of course if this results in a constant state of stress for the mind, it will eventually break. That is not good, but without the body's needs being met, the mind will not last long anyway.

Nowadays, especially in the west, food and shelter are not such an issue. Instead we engage in social media and start worrying about what others are saying about us, how popular we are amongst complete strangers. This causes us to worry, but the source of the worry is not our body. Our bodies are not affected. The source is external, the cause of the worry is not physical and real, but abstract. Perhaps our mind can't deal with this because the impulse for the worry is not a signal from the body and there is therefore no physical solution. Rather the source of the worry is a signal from the abstract void. How do we deal with that, if not by disconnecting from the void, the internet?

Meditation and psychology, tell us "you are not your thoughts". Our thoughts are not who we are. But if we believe this, we need to also acknowledge that other people's thoughts, in the form of their crappy social media tweets and reeking brain farts are not who they are either. Ideally we would learn to ignore all this. Sadly, we are addicted, so we can't. How do you overcome an addiction? Make it harder obtain the thing you are addicted to. Introduce some friction.

An increase in the price of cigarettes reduces the number of people smoking. Imagine how much less nonsense there would be online if each post, each tweet, cost 5 cents, 50 cents or even a euro. At what point would you refrain from posting at all. For tweets I imagine it would be at the 1 cent level, or lower, for most people. For blog posts it might be considerably higher.

This leads to the question of value. The more effort you put into something, the more you will value it and the more you might be willing to pay for it to be published. Friction can help create that value.

If there was more friction when posting on the web there would be more warmth and the web would be a warmer, friendlier place.

Update 09/02/2025

V.H. Belvadi has posted the round up of the January 2025 Indie Web Carnival on his website.

Disclaimer

These are thoughts. Thoughts which don't necessarily define me. Tomorrow these thoughts of mine might be different. Next week I might well be thinking that's not what I meant. Next month I could be thinking "why would I say that". Next year I will have forgotten about this post! I am not an expert on any of this, it's just words on a page. Enjoy. Perhaps with a little friction.