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.
We spent twenty years trying to kill friction. One-click buying. Instant streaming. Same-day delivery. Autofill, auto-play, auto-everything. The entire trajectory of consumer technology has been a single, relentless campaign to remove the space between wanting something and having it.
It worked. You can generate a logo in four seconds. Rewrite an email in one. Produce a song without playing an instrument, build a website without writing a line of code, draft a legal contract without calling a lawyer. The friction that used to gate these activities is gone. Convenience isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s the default.
And when everything is frictionless, the thing that’s scarce is the opposite of what we spent two decades eliminating. Attention. Deliberateness. Time spent. Evidence of care.
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 are growing while Amazon dominates retail. Film photography is having a renaissance while phone cameras have never been better. Theaters are charging premium prices for the same movies you can stream at home. People are paying more to do things the hard way. Not despite the friction. Because of it.
There’s an important distinction here, and it’s the one that keeps this from being generic nostalgia. Not all friction is good.
Paperwork is friction. Buggy checkout flows are friction. Unclear interfaces, pointless admin, waiting on hold for forty minutes to cancel a subscription you signed up for in ten seconds. That friction has no value. Kill it. Automate it. Let AI handle it. Nobody misses it.
But there’s another kind. The kind that makes you pay attention. The kind that slows consumption into experience. The kind that creates commitment, filters impulse, and leaves evidence that someone was here and they gave a damn.
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.
The tools we use in production are getting more powerful every day. AI can draft briefs, generate concept art, write scripts, cut rough edits. The friction that used to slow down creative production is evaporating.
But the work that lands, the work that 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.
The ARRI Alexa dominates cinema not because it has the most features, but because it was designed to support intentional decisions rather than overwhelm you with options. The best cinematographers choose it because it adds just enough friction to keep the work honest. That’s not a limitation. That’s the product.
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 good 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.
In a frictionless world, friction is how you prove something mattered.