Frictionless is Missionless
The Mess of Human Interaction is the Point / No Pain No Gain
Excerpted from a ZINE post by MATT KLEIN & RUBY JUSTICE THELOT Dec 09, 2025
Our current reality can be described by our experience of Waymo.
The white Jaguar moves with the elegance of a prima ballerina, but with none of the emotion. All control. Perfect precision. No mistakes. Ambient lo-fi music eases you in.
The whole affair reeks of violent convenience.
Convenience is the mind killer.
The guiding problem statement always seems to be the eradication of friction.
There’s no shared environment. Only a troubling silence smothers the car.
The designer’s premise tacitly becomes:
Life would be perfect if only you could remove the human being who stands between you and what you want.
Like Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people.’
Many think pieces have been written about echo chambers and their consequential radicalizations but, more importantly, our digital polarization has made it nearly impossible for us to share any common ground.
This common ground, while sticky, uncomfortable and human, is where friction lives. It’s this friction that’s necessary for shared experience, discrepancy, negotiation, and ultimately social progress.
The dream sold by human-AI interaction…or really much of our consumer technology…is that of perfect communication.
(Since the beginning, Silicon Valley is selling) the perfect communication…think texting…where you can perfectly craft and then have time to reply again whenever you want.
And now they are extending that perfect communication to an experience of endless frictionlessness.
The abolition of friction is the abolition of life itself.
Stripping friction strips a shared reality. For us to maintain consensus, we need to acknowledge one another, not eliminate any opportunity for a crash.
Overcoming barriers is the point. Not eliminating them.
Today, the perfect experience, based on the logic of friction-free existence, is one where we are alone and speaking to a digital mirror.
Because to crash is to be alive, it is to be human.
Right now history is pointing to us all to:
Build a better reality, then charge admission.
Fund your preferred future…no design experience required…just the will to make something real.
Read entire post: Alone in Self-Driving Cars: How Convenience Dissolves Consensus
I am a cultural researcher, foresight practitioner, and strategist helping brands, investors, orgs, and philanthropies make sense of social change, explain the emergent, and author their tomorrow.