How a little “productive friction” protects human agency

Earlier this week, Tom and I ran the first session of the TechFreedom pilot cohort. Sometimes when you run these things, it's the things you don't plan that have the biggest impact. At the end of the session, when we were reflecting on what we'd learned, participants focused on things that Tom and I had said in passing between activities – and it's one of these lines that I want to focus on in this post. What did I say? That the “frictionless” experiences promised by Big Tech companies are sometimes at odds with what we need. Sometimes we need a bit of friction to give us time to reflect and consider things.“Smooth” can become numbingBack when I worked at Mozilla, my work on web literacy underpinned the foundation's work on Webmaker. As Karen and I wrote in a Webmaker whitepaper, polished experiences often leave people as passive users rather than active participants. Another force attacking the Open Web is that of elegant consumption. Well-designed interfaces that delight and…