Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Notwithstanding the pretensions of certain well-paid economists, political economy is not a "physics of human behavior," through which human interactions and outcomes can be quantized and precisely captured through mathematical models.
For one thing, in physics, it's possible to reduce friction, whereas in political economy, friction isn't something you reduce, it's something you redistribute, typically downward, to people with less political power than you.
Think about your job. If you are on a salary, your boss has to pay you even when there's no work to be done, which means that during times where there's no income, your boss still has to pay your wages, meaning that a long slow patch could kill the business.
But if your boss can eliminate or reduce your wages when there's no work, the friction of figuring out how to keep your boss's business a going concern is shifted to you.
Take the "tipped minimum wage," which is the minimum that a restaurateur can pay a server. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.15/hour, which is substantially less than you can survive on. If your boss fucks up and can't fill the tables in his restaurant, he has to pay you $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage). But if you get just one table in eight hours, where you bust your hump and earn a $41 tip, your boss gets to keep $40.90 of that money and pay you the grand sum of $58.
That certainly relieves some of your boss's friction – but now you have to endure the friction of figuring out how to survive on $58. Maybe you don't fix your car and instead spend an extra hour at the start and end of your shift on a city bus. That's a lot of friction, but it's your friction. Same for the time you spend lining up at the food bank, the sleepless nights you endure because you can't see a dentist about your rotten tooth, the diabetes test-strips you do without.
Of course, there's plenty of workers who don't even get the tipped minimum wage: in most of the country, "gig economy" workers aren't guaranteed any wages. If your boss – the company that made your app – fucked up by charging too much or skimping on ads or having piss-poor customer service, you can clock on for an eight-hour shift and get zero dollars, all the while being available to your boss, just in case they do get a customer. If you're a driver, you only get paid for the time when you're on a delivery or have a passenger, and you bear the expense of the rest of the hours you spend prowling the streets, waiting for a call-out. This allows gig companies to build up a giant workforce that can absorb orders when they come in, while shifting the friction of living on half-wages to the workers who only get paid on the way out to a delivery, but not on the way back.
Return to office? An exercise in pure friction-shifting. The friction your boss experiences from furiously fantasizing about how lazy you're being at home is swapped for the friction of your commute, the friction of having to reschedule deliveries that you weren't home to sign for, the friction of having to eat a packed lunch or waste your pay on overpriced, additive/grease/salt/sugar-laden quick-service food.
The airline that fires most of its customer service staff shifts operational frictions passengers, from the friction of arriving two hours early to see one of the few check-in clerks to the friction of waiting for three hours on hold to rebook a canceled flight or find a lost bag.
Southwest really takes the cake here. Remember a couple years ago when Southwest stranded one million passengers over Christmas week because its computers had all crashed? Turns out that the main thing SWA was doing with those computers was running a friction-shifting shell-game with its airplanes, pilots, flight attendants and passengers. SWA would sell tickets for more flights than it had planes, and then cancel the flights that had sold the fewest tickets:
That's quite a magnificent piece of friction-shifting. SWA is relieved of the friction of buying and maintaining a fleet of planes. The don't have to bear the friction of guessing which planes will and won't be full in advance. But SWA passengers get all the friction and more, when their flight is cancelled because other people – whom they have no control over – failed to buy enough tickets for it.
Southwest "reduced friction" for its shareholders at the expense of its employees and customers. Other businesses "reduce friction" for one favored group at the expense of another, like Google, whose Youtube Content ID system makes it trivial to file a copyright takedown notice but hard-to-impossible to get your work reinstated when you are falsely accused:
That's shifting friction from large rightsholders (who can get infringing work removed without a trial) to creators (who don't get a day in court before their work is censored).
Meanwhile, food delivery platforms shift friction onto restaurants, conscripting them into delivery services without their permission:
And onto drivers, who don't even rate the tipped minimum wage. For all that these companies come up with names for themselves like "Seamless," they are 100 percent seam, but those seams are shifted onto people without political or economic power.
The MBA mind-virus turns its victims into "optimization"-obsessed zombies, but what they mean by "optimization" is that you will optimize your life to their benefit. HP uses software locks to "optimize" its printer business, forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon:
A better world is one in which the people optimize corporations and billionaires – by cutting them down to size and shattering their power. It's a world in which amassing obscene amounts of money and market power creates friction, in the form of endless regulatory and tax scrutiny. It's a world where public transit has priority and private cars are taxed for slowing the rest of us down as we go about our days. It's a world where workers are frictionless: protected from noncompete agreements and baroque wage theft schemes like those used to impoverish service and gig workers. It's a world where bosses experience friction, in the form of obligations to the workers whose labor generates their wealth.
I really believe that – politically speaking – friction can't be destroyed, only redistributed. And I'm fine with that, really – provided we're redistributing it upwards.
