What did we trade for a frictionless life?
“Why I quit ____” is not a new genre, but its staying power is telling. In the early 2010s, when techno-optimism ran high and we were only just beginning to realize the scope of Silicon Valley’s destructive powers, these confessions felt vaguely counter-cultural.
Technology was a drug, and while we were all riding that high, some were beginning to notice the side effects. We see the costs much more clearly today, now that the euphoria has worn off.
Still, these takes can be useful—arguably more so since software has eaten the world. Back then, the warnings came mostly from millennials who knew—or at least felt, like a fresh itch—what might be lost. Like me, they grew up in an analog world. They spent their childhoods twirling phone cords around their fingers and lugging around a binder filled with 300 CDs everywhere they went.
As digital natives, Gen Z doesn’t have the luxury of that comparison. The algorithmic world is all they’ve ever known, so they’re mostly unaware that the water they swim in is tainted with the residue of dark patterns and surveillance capitalism and enshittification, like the microplastics that line our guts.
It’s with all this in mind that I read Kyle Chayka’s piece on why Spotify’s latest redesign pushed him over the edge:
A tweak to an app’s landing page may seem minor; what’s the big deal if it takes an extra click or two to get to your library of albums? But such inconveniences have rippling effects; if albums are harder to get to, then over time they become less important as units of online listening.
Music is often held up as the industry most thoroughly mutilated by software. Its ubiquity, its cultural impact, and its role in shaping our identities make it easy to see how changes to our listening habits are changes to us.
But I fear we risk losing sight of those changes, which is why I’m still grateful for takes like these. I still miss my CD binder, and I’m not the only one. Writing about the loss of the music store snob, Lisa Kholostenko describes how the physical nature of the CD binder impacted the way we moved through the world:
The physicality of that media felt crucial, like a talisman or a rib: a document of sonic runes to someone’s teenage psyche, where every small drama felt like a Greek tragedy. It wasn’t just music. It was a film score for the cinematic masterpiece of Being Sixteen and Misunderstood. You could flip through the binder like a priest reading entrails, divine the shape of someone’s desperate yearning to be both hidden and seen. Today, the equivalent would be asking to browse someone’s phone (a request so egregious it borders on social contract violation) or cyber-peeking at their Spotify, which I famously endorse.
The binder had pageantry. The binder bled.
The CD binder, the music store snob, the six-disc CD changer: The physical nature of music and how we interacted with it left an imprint in a way that no algorithm, no frictionless software experience can, the same way reading about how to swing a baseball bat and actually swinging a baseball bat are two entirely different experiences.
I suspect this is why concerts can feel like quasi-religious experiences today. That was always true to a degree, but it feels even more pronounced now, because we are desperate to feel our music in our bodies, for it to leave the digital realm and meet us in meatspace.
We need to be reminded of what we lost if we’re ever going to reclaim it. There’s no going back, of course, but the resurgence of vinyl record stores and physical book sales tell us something important: frictionless software is all well and good, but what we didn’t realize back then is that we need friction. We need experiences that remind us that we’re physical bodies moving through a physical world.
The same goes for all software. In another piece, Tara McMullin reminds us that the same flattening effect that erodes our relationship to music changes how we work, too:
Do you see your software? Do you see how it influences how you run meetings, brainstorm ideas, fulfill your responsibilities, and communicate with others? Do you see how its text boxes, radio buttons, tabs, search results, and menus train you to think?
There’s a world in which we learn this lesson, where we take the best digital has to offer and harmonize it with our physical needs. But first we have to be sufficiently aware—and sufficiently tired—of the tradeoffs that convenience and frictionlessness have demanded of us.