I’ve bought more vinyl records, physical books, and 4K Blu-rays in the past year than in the previous decade combined. Not because the content is different. Because the format imposes a rhythm. A vinyl record takes twenty minutes a side. A book requires hours. A disc means committing to a movie from opening titles to end credits. These objects have a fixed pace I can’t accelerate, and that’s the entire point.
That can sound like nostalgia if you let it. It isn’t. I do not want worse tools, slower software, or some artisanal checkout form that asks for my billing address three times. Bad friction wastes time. Useful friction protects judgment. The problem is that software usually cannot tell the difference.
For years, the entire direction of software has been to remove the space between wanting something and having it. One-click buying. Instant streaming. Same-day delivery. Autofill, auto-play, auto-complete, auto-generate, auto-summarize. Fewer steps. Fewer questions. Fewer places where a human has to stop and decide.
Much of that was good. Broken forms should die. Pointless approvals should die. Duplicated data entry should die. Bad search, missing files, platform lock-in, unclear ownership, and bureaucracy that protects nobody should all be treated as bugs.
But when friction disappears everywhere, other things disappear with it: review, deliberation, ownership, memory, source checking, taste, consent, privacy, accountability, and the moment where someone in the room asks, “Should we?”
That is why friction is about to become a luxury. Not because slow is noble. Because the useful kind requires taste, discipline, and someone willing to own the consequence.
Bad friction and useful friction
Bad friction is re-entering the same production data into five systems.
Useful friction is having one person verify the call sheet before it goes out.
Bad friction is waiting three days because nobody knows who approves the deck.
Useful friction is making the approval owner explicit before the client sees it.
Bad friction is manually hunting through old folders because search is broken.
Useful friction is keeping source files and version history so the team can prove what changed.
Bad friction is adding legal review to everything by default because nobody wants to think.
Useful friction is adding legal review when rights, likeness, confidential material, or client exposure are involved.
That distinction matters. Without it, the argument collapses into crankiness. Nobody should romanticize the wasted afternoon, the mystery approver, the broken archive, the form that eats your work, or the meeting whose only purpose is proving that everyone is afraid to make a decision.
Useful friction does something. It protects quality, safety, rights, privacy, accountability, or memory. It creates a deliberate pause before risk. It gives the work an owner. It leaves evidence.
The bad kind should be automated out of existence. The useful kind should be designed on purpose.
AI makes the distinction unavoidable
AI removes friction from generating, summarizing, searching, drafting, editing, coding, and publishing. That is useful. I use it. I want the machine to handle the boring connective tissue where it can: first drafts, cleanup passes, search, comparison, transcription, formatting, rough code, alternate phrasing, early concept work, and the small bits of production sludge that quietly eat a day.
The mistake is treating every removed step as progress.
AI makes it easier to publish without understanding, summarize without reading, generate without sourcing, imitate without permission, decide without context, accept confident wrong answers, and skip the human who owns the consequence. The tool can sound finished before the thinking is finished. It can make a deck look client-ready before the plan has survived production. It can make a legal-looking paragraph before anyone has checked whether the claim is true. It can make an image look usable before anyone has asked who owns the style, likeness, reference, or source.
That does not mean “do not use AI.” That is lazy advice.
It means add the right review layer back in.
If AI drafts the brief, a human still owns the promise. If AI summarizes the research, a human still checks the source. If AI generates the image, a human still clears the rights. If AI writes the code, a human still tests the behavior. If AI produces the answer, a human still has to decide whether the answer belongs anywhere near the real world.
The value is not in preserving every manual step. The value is in knowing which step was carrying judgment.
Platforms remove friction too
Platforms remove friction from distribution. That is also useful. A producer can find a director on Instagram. A VFX supervisor can discover an artist on Vimeo. A writer can test an idea on LinkedIn. A small tool can find its first users because a post traveled farther than the homepage ever would have.
Use that. There is no prize for making the work harder to find.
But platforms also remove friction from dependence. They make it easy to publish instantly somewhere you do not control, build an audience you cannot move, accept default formats, let the feed decide what gets remembered, and trade ownership for convenience.
I wrote the longer version of this in Build on Your Own Land: use platforms for reach, but keep the canonical work, archive, URLs, and audience somewhere you control. That is another version of useful friction. Owning the domain, keeping the markdown file, backing up the media, saving the source, maintaining redirects, and preserving an exportable list all add steps.
They are not glamorous steps. They are not the fun part. They are the reason the work survives when a platform changes rules, search gets worse, an API shuts down, or a company decides your archive is not worth maintaining.
The friction is the ownership.
Production already knows this
Production people understand useful friction because the job is full of real-world consequences. A shoot day is expensive. A rights problem can poison a campaign. A bad handoff can turn one skipped conversation into a week of post panic. A beautiful mockup can become a budget problem if nobody asked how it gets made.
AI can make a deck fast. That does not mean pre-production happened.
AI can make a reference image convincing. That does not mean the image is cleared.
AI can mock up a VFX shot. That does not mean the supervisor, editor, production designer, DP, line producer, and post team agree on what the shot requires.
AI can keep the latest version “in the thread.” That does not mean the team has version control.
AI can produce a confident answer. That does not mean the person approving it understands the exposure.
Good production is full of useful friction: call sheets, approvals, sign-offs, versioning, reviews, safety checks, budget checks, legal checks, rights checks, and people arguing about whether the thing on the screen can actually be made with the time and money available.
Some of that friction is annoying because reality is annoying. But annoyance is not the same as waste. A call sheet is friction. It is also memory, accountability, safety, and coordination compressed into a document. Versioning is friction. It is also the difference between “I think this is the latest” and “we can prove what changed.” A client approval is friction. It is also the line between shared decision and expensive surprise.
The work that lands, the work clients remember and audiences feel, still has friction in it. It has disagreements that got resolved instead of avoided. Revisions that happened because someone cared enough to push back. Choices that were made deliberately instead of accepted by default. That friction is the craft. Remove it and you get something that’s fast, cheap, and forgettable.
Cameras like the ARRI Alexa became production standards partly because they make the right decisions easier and the wrong ones harder. They do not win by chasing every possible feature. They win by supporting intentional decisions under real production pressure. That’s not a limitation. That’s the product.
The signal changes
When anyone can produce anything instantly, the act of taking longer becomes a signal. Not a signal of incompetence. A signal of intention. You chose to spend time on this. You chose the harder path. That choice, in a world optimized for the easy path, starts to mean something.
I’m not the only one noticing. Bookstores have value even while Amazon dominates retail. Film photography keeps finding people while phone cameras have never been better. Theaters charge premium prices for movies that will eventually stream at home. People pay more to do certain things the hard way. Not despite the friction. Because of it.
A handwritten note in a world of AI-generated messages. A meal cooked from scratch when delivery is fifteen minutes away. A photograph composed on film when you could spray a hundred digital frames. A website you built yourself when a template would have been faster. These choices cost something, and the cost is what makes them register.
This is not about purity. A website built with AI can still carry judgment. A film photo can still be lazy. A handwritten note can still be manipulative. A long process can still produce mediocre work. Friction is not magic.
It is only valuable when it makes the work better, clearer, safer, more accountable, or more yours.
The friction test
Before removing a step, ask:
- Does this step protect quality, safety, rights, privacy, or accountability?
- Does it make someone think before creating risk?
- Does it preserve memory or evidence?
- Does it clarify who owns the decision?
- Does removing it save time without creating hidden cost?
- Is this friction serving the work, or only protecting a habit?
- What breaks if we remove it?
- Who pays when it breaks?
If the step protects nobody, kill it. If it only exists because a tool is bad, fix the tool. If it hides ownership, redesign the process. If it turns one person’s fear into everyone else’s delay, name the decision owner and move on.
But if the step is where the source gets checked, the client approves, the rights get cleared, the version is saved, the safety issue is caught, the editor pushes back, the producer asks what this costs, or someone finally says “wait, should we?” then be careful.
That may be the step doing the work.
The luxury is judgment
We used to pay to remove friction. Soon we’ll pay to put some of it back. Not all of it. The bad friction stays dead. But the useful friction, the kind that proves something was made with care and time, is about to become one of the most valuable signals in a world where everything else is instant.
The premium behavior is not slowness for its own sake. It is knowing when to pause, verify, own, and decide.
Friction is not the enemy. Unexamined friction is. The useful kind is about to get expensive because it requires taste, discipline, and someone willing to be responsible.
The point is not to make everything slow. The point is to stop pretending faster is the same as better.