Otherwise Known as the Resort Vacation Problem

On the internet, friction, and thinking about your experiences.

Friction, someone once told me, is the universe’s way of saying “think about it”. Two objects meet. They resist. There is heat. If you’re given to poetics, you could say the two objects were considering each other.

On the internet, we talk about friction as an inconvenience.1 Like, how hard it is for a user to do a thing. Download an app, for example, or play a song on Spotify. In this sense, “hard” doesn’t mean labor, as in “how much work”. Instead, “hard” means “how many clicks”. And since a click (or tap) is a zero-calorie, zero-second exercise, “how many clicks” is really just another way of saying “how long”.

Put another way: in a purely digital world, there is a 1:1 ratio between effort and time.2 There is very little friction. There is even less heat.

Example: consider the decision to watch a movie. A few years ago, this meant finding the theater listings. Getting in your car. Driving to the theater. Buying a ticket. Popcorn. Seats. Movie. Car again. Back home.3

Today: Netflix.

I guess you’d call this the transition from atoms to bits.4 Once, doing anything meant performing a geometric proof of physical activity. Today, doing some of those things is like writing the answers without showing our work. You didn’t even walk to your mailbox to open this letter.

Of course, this is neither good nor bad. But it does mean that decisions aren’t weighted the way they once were. An incremental amount of exertion takes less and less actual exertion. Playing a video game, for example, once meant an escape from the real into the virtual. Now it means escaping further into the virtual. Playing Crashlands is just another decision to make on your phone. VR games will just be games you play when you’re already in VR.

You could call this the Resort Vacation problem. The tostadas are paid for. The margaritas are free. The sun, it shines. And there is always a dry towel. Between you and what you want, there is no friction. But then, if you’re never forced to consider the effort, you’re never forced to care.

Originally published on Dicks & Betties: the soylent email made out of people.

1. “The internet will help achieve friction-free capitalism…” — Bill Gates, applying Ronald Coase’s economic theory of transaction costs.

2. “ugggggggh you mean I have to open another tab??”

3. Which involved temperature changes. Achy knees. Traffic. Stoplights. An unexpected song on the radio. A friend you hadn’t seen in a while standing in line.

4. Made popular by Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital. See also: “Software is eating the world.” Though “atoms to bits” originally referred to the digitization of media. Whether anybody figured we’d be digitizing physical experiences by erasing the need for them, that’s not as popular a topic.