The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction

we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn’t disappear; it just moves.

The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with tools that do the thinking for you.

friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.

The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future. The resulting prosperity has been very real, but it’s been built on the proverbial kicking the can down the road.

When Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta builds frictionless social interfaces, that cognitive smoothness is subsidized by somewhere, somehow, right? The same economy that produces simulated friends for the lonely American also produces understaffed air traffic control towers. The same investor class that funds “never think alone” startups also lobbies against infrastructure spending, or perhaps, housing.

Amazon’s one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

There’s nothing worse than being right and everyone agreeing with you. There’s no way to make any cash.

Compliance is the New American Dream

a world built on compliance might function for a while. But it will never lead. And right now, we really need people who can lead.

For the interview with Goldman I turned up in my hoodie and trainers and I told them that I definitely didn’t want the job. They put me through to the second round after that.

Stocks never go down. Stocks only go up. When the economy is good stocks go up, and when the economy is shit, they print so much money stocks go up even more. Same with fucking houses. Everything goes up. The asset holders never lose.

One hundred days

You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Why Labour and Trump will both fail

[Money is not a real resource like food or housing; it’s used to determining the allocation of real resources.]

there are too many problems i’ve solved with nail clippers

composing (to place/put together) becomes necessary when you don’t have everything

[The economy is people and their ability to live, not numbers. We didn’t need to make conversations with our cleaners to understand the lives of everyday people.]

[In the best trades, you use your nose to smell stupidity.]

Surviving Crappy Markets 101

[Market downturns are more the norm than exception, yet bull market gains often make up for them in multiples.]

This is another general rule of trading: you don’t necessarily make money by being right, but by being right when others are wrong.

Trevor Noah: My Depression Was Linked To ADHD! Why I Left The Daily Show!

[Growing up in abusive households make you sensitive to your environment to the point where I knew by the sound of his footsteps whether or not my stepfather was coming home drunk.]

[You’ll be surprised at how often your ‘screw them’ choice reflects something you perhaps need to be doing more of.]

[It’s easier to burn down a building than build one up.]

[‘Destroying’ someone will not convince them.]

The person who helped me shift never made me feel small. Minds change when they are made to feel large. When they are respected and gently challenged. When they are helped to stretch and make more room for another point of view.

The Technium: Better Than Free

[When copying makes things free and infinite, 8 ‘generative’ values that people might pay for include: immediacy; personalization; interpretation, support, or guidance; authentic versions; easy access on multiple devices, and backup; physical representations or in-person events; appreciation through patronage; discoverability and distribution.]

CONSPIRACY

[Nudging people towards your conclusion while making them think they arrived there themselves will keep them resistant to questioning their basis for belief.]

[Conspiracism is more invested in the issues of specific leaders (bad satan worshippers) than the structure of power itself.]

[The face of Jesus and Mary may be commonly found on toast and fruit in Christian nations, wheras the name of Allah might be found on cantaloupe skins in Indonesia.]

[‘Is it possible that…’ has a very low barrier for proof.]

[One function of the ‘satanic ritual abuse’ conspiracy is to deny that sexual violence is banal and that culture empowers men to do it.]

[A movie lets you spend time together without having to make lots of small talk; sports migut even let you root for the same team.]

a kenyan woman got out of her rickshaw as I walked past, looked at me and spoke in english, “hi jesus!”

Who do you trust (when you don’t trust the news)?

[If manufacturers of cars bear some responsibility for your private vehicle’s safety issues, as airplane manufacturers would if flights put people in danger, perhaps so should social media companies for presenting alternative realities that lead to real world catastrophes.]

Wanting & Capitalism

You don’t go to Satan’s Discounter for your golden lute. Don’t use our evil overlord to buy something (gasp) REAL—something you’ll use forever and that will become a part of you. That would be like using a dating app to find the love of your life…

I found a pen shop. A little hole-in-the-wall. The kind of place I’m surprised exists, glad too. It has probably been in the family for generations, passed from papa to son, while the neighborhood around them has slowly been turned into an outdoor luxury mall.

It doesn’t matter if you have 100 attachments or one attachment. You still have attachments. There’s no practical distance between one and 100.

Ideally we should try to notice and hold our attachments with an open hand. Ready to let them go when the time is right.

When you live out of a backpack, you can’t have favorites. You need to survive. If I weren’t walking all day, I could wear jeans, mosey around cafes, and twirl my mustache. Unfortunately, my current (self-assigned) profession involves walking seven days a week.

On Funding Agencies and the Third Sector

The gruelling applications, tens of pages long and unnecessarily complicated and repetitive, were clearly meant for insiders and I soon realised that this was precisely what was being assessed - how ‘insider’ I was.

When every project has some funding agency’s logo on the footer, this is what is communicated, there is an officialisation of a sector which is, by definition, unofficial, a sector which arose to bridge the gaps of officialism. That’s when I made the ‘NOT in partnership with’ banner.

[When funding is normalized as a kind of approval, the agencies become filters who thwart anything that challenges their preferred narratives, while simultaneously supporting those narratives through their agents.]

People on the inside of these organisations are just ordinary people - some with the strength to see but not the awareness, others with the awareness but not the strength, and fewer with both. Many begin with genuine dreams to change the world, others to be seen in the image of someone who is doing just that.