/reader

On the other hand, there's nothing that can replace the feel of writing with a nice fountain pen in a paper notebook. Real paper is permanent and immutable. Put it in a box and it'll last (effectively) forever. No battery to worry about. Flipping through pages is a joy. I can paste small photos or tickets or quotes onto pages. Real notebooks are infinitely cooler.

So here I am, confused about which approach makes more sense for me. My head says to use the reMarkable for everything. My heart says to ink up my favorite fountain pen and set to writing.

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The modern web—and society to a certain extent—is built on this idea that we should remove friction as much as possible. Everything has to be optimised, smoothed out, and made as easy and convenient as possible. The embodiment of this idea to me was the Amazon Dash. This idea of being able to simply push a button and have something show up at your door is the perfect representation of the capitalistic goal applied to the web. The only improvement from there is to read your mind and skip the button step altogether. Imagine how much value for the shareholders we can create if something shows up at your door every time you simply think about wanting—or needing—something.

I, on the other hand, enjoy friction. I also enjoy limitations. When I set up my site, years ago, I made it insanely simple on purpose. As a developer, the only limit to what my site can do is basically my imagination and yet I decided to stick with just one layout, in a single column, with no navigation. There is no automation going on, in order to publish something I have to log in and manually copy-paste my content. I could improve that, I could set up a custom API and do all sorts of stuff but I decided not to because I enjoy the added friction.

The same thing happens with the email version of my content. I could set it up so that everything is automated but I decided against it because doing everything by hand gives me the time to reflect on what I’m doing rather than letting everything go on autopilot.

Friction, in the digital world, is important. Everything is already moving at a pace that’s not really compatible with the way humans work. We need a way to slow down, we need digital speed bumps to remind us that going slow sometimes is preferable.

If I can offer you my advice—and this is my blog, you can’t stop me from doing it—it would be to insert some friction here and there. Doesn’t have to be anything massive or terribly disruptive. It just needs to make things slightly less immediate. I think you’ll find this experiment quite revealing.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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The modern web—and society to a certain extent—is built on this idea that we should remove friction as much as possible. Everything has to be optimised, smoothed out, and made as easy and convenient as possible. The embodiment of this idea to me was the Amazon Dash. This idea of being able to simply push a button and have something show up at your door is the perfect representation of the capitalistic goal applied to the web. The only improvement from there is to read your mind and skip the button step altogether. Imagine how much value for the shareholders we can create if something shows up at your door every time you simply think about wanting—or needing—something.

I, on the other hand, enjoy friction. I also enjoy limitations. When I set up my site, years ago, I made it insanely simple on purpose. As a developer, the only limit to what my site can do is basically my imagination and yet I decided to stick with just one layout, in a single column, with no navigation. There is no automation going on, in order to publish something I have to log in and manually copy-paste my content. I could improve that, I could set up a custom API and do all sorts of stuff but I decided not to because I enjoy the added friction.

The same thing happens with the email version of my content. I could set it up so that everything is automated but I decided against it because doing everything by hand gives me the time to reflect on what I’m doing rather than letting everything go on autopilot.

Friction, in the digital world, is important. Everything is already moving at a pace that’s not really compatible with the way humans work. We need a way to slow down, we need digital speed bumps to remind us that going slow sometimes is preferable.

If I can offer you my advice—and this is my blog, you can’t stop me from doing it—it would be to insert some friction here and there. Doesn’t have to be anything massive or terribly disruptive. It just needs to make things slightly less immediate. I think you’ll find this experiment quite revealing.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

• I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.#
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