Chapter 18 Silicon Valley’s Frictionless Future: The Design Philosophy of Frictionlessness
Jakko Kemper, Steve Jankowski · 2024
This chapter aims to problematise the seemingly benevolent philosophy of frictionlessness and to criticise the way in which this design philosophy is mobilised to serve Silicon Valley’s ideological and economic interests. In doing so, we reframe the notion of friction in order to envision a more (re-)humanised automated future. The chapter realises these aims by first providing a theoretical background in order to contextualise the relationship between frictionlessness and design. We do so by charting the industry’s abstract discourse around the notion of frictionlessness, in which friction is presented as an undesirable element in human-technology interactions that should be eliminated. Specifically, the meaning of friction is examined through a discourse analysis of over thirty years of trade publications, corporate materials, and news articles about Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (now Meta). With these statements in tow, we extrapolate the two principles of the design philosophy of frictionlessness: technological expansion and obfuscation. Keeping these principles in mind, we advance a critique of how the corporate discourse glosses over (or, worse, sanitises) a host of undesirable cognitive effects and ecologically toxic conditions. Overall, this chapter assembles the underlying values at the core of Silicon Valley’s automated future and, in elucidating the harmful centrality of frictionlessness to contemporary digital technologies, concludes by emphasising the need to reframe friction as a hopeful interaction that is necessary for human agency and planetary care.