Kurt Vonnegut was the original friction-maxxer.
In an interview with CBS given shortly before his death in 2007, Vonnegut recounted the following anecdote: “I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ And so I pretended not to hear her. And went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.”
In the few months since Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined the term “friction-maxxing,” many a Substack think-piece (both pro- and anti-) has examined the value of resisting the proliferation of both generative artificial intelligence and modern technology more broadly. As a gen-Zer, I am a member of the first generation to have grown up with the level of technologically-enabled convenience that Vonnegut and Jezer-Morton critique. So, it seems only natural that I should ask myself what I want my relationship with technology to look like throughout the rest of my lifetime.
Forced Reliance and Learned Helplessness
Concerns about the economic implications of corporate and governmental actors’ adoption of generative and agentic AI systems are widespread. While these impending effects appear likely to cause great issues, I believe they will be just the first small step towards a future in which human connection is eroded to a degree even greater than what we see now. Without interjection, the proliferation of this technology will continue to steal not only our jobs and our attention, but ultimately, our humanity.
This issue took root long before the AI boom of late 2022. Modern western society is chock-full of external stimuli, so much so that some are turning to GLP-1s to mitigate the noise. Narratives about the need for abundance, optimization, and streamlining are present in conversations about seemingly every aspect of life. Members of the upper-middle class barely even have to leave their houses anymore: order your food on Uber Eats and your toilet paper on Amazon, work from home, get paid and do your taxes digitally. Not getting enough exercise? Order a standing desk and a mini-treadmill and take a walk while you’re on Zoom with your boss. Want somebody else to be recluses with? Download Hinge and rid yourself of the need to venture into the wild to meet anybody new. Errand culture is dead; your delivery workers are reduced down to their profile photos and ratings; you never need to touch cash again. You get my point. So what do we sacrifice when we outsource every inconvenience? A lot, I say. Most essentially, you miss out on being around other people.
All of this streamlining affects the human psyche. In another article, which nods to Vonnegut’s envelope quote, Matt Ziegler describes a depressive episode which was exacerbated by the level of convenience available to him: “Part of my depression included shrinking my surface area. The less of the world I interacted with, the less stress I had to feel. Costco, which is just a stand-in for buying anything in bulk or impersonally (hey Amazon, I see you too), was a great excuse to stay small.” Towards the same idea, Roger Rosenblatt wrote recently about “The Bigness of Small Talk” for The New York Times: “People with whom you make small talk are made aware that for at least one moment in their lives, they have a safe home with you, a place where they are welcome just as they are.”
The challenge then presents itself, do we want to become post-grad hermits? Amazon’s and Costco’s best bulk-customers? Or do we want to engage with the world on a deeper level like Vonnegut, Jezer-Morton, and half of Substack’s users might suggest?
Opting Out
It’s no wonder anti-technology movements (if you can even call them that) have arisen over the past few years. The first time I heard about young people going out of their way to resist dependence on modern technology was just after the public release of ChatGPT. The New York Times published an article about the Luddite Club — “a high school group that promotes a lifestyle of self-liberation from social media and technology.” The Luddite Club has since grown to 32-chapters-strong across the country. Swarthmore students, too, have challenged their reliance on technology with the no-phone challenge. The Spring 2025 winners lasted 54 days, and the Fall 2025 winners lasted 79; both groups were cut short of their endeavor by the end of the semester.
Once you notice your reliance on the technology around you, it’s hard not to find it debilitating. You certainly don’t have to be in love with an AI chatbot for this to be your case: it is increasingly difficult to navigate modern society without a smartphone. In December of 2024, my phone broke and I was left unable to tap into academic buildings or my own dorm room for a weekend, transfer money between my bank accounts, activate my Swarthmore VPN, or leave campus due to my underdeveloped sense of direction. I’m currently studying abroad at the University of St Andrews, where this forced reliance is at an even greater extreme than at Swarthmore: I need apps to access my bus and train passes, to purchase tickets to university events, and even to do my laundry. Even when alternatives are available, long-term exposure to this level of convenience has caused a level of learned helplessness that is hard to return from.
Why It’s Different This Time
While many arguments have been made comparing our growing reliance on smart devices and AI to our once-novel reliance on steam engines, cars, and so on, I can’t help but find this more intimidating and all-encompassing than technological advancements of yore. Requiring people to understand and possess this technology in order to function and to carry out essential daily tasks will widen the already-problematic technology gap, further endangering the homeless, elderly, poor, or those who otherwise face barriers to access.
The technology giants who make these products are looking less like simple corporations and moreso like political and economic empires. The American middle class is eroding, a trend which will likely be quickened as many of the first jobs to be automated are expected to be traditional lower and middle-mangagement white-collar jobs. So here’s my question: what happens when there is no middle class to contribute to America’s economy — when big-tech companies have impoverished their primary customers? I believe they will be willing to temporarily compromise on profits in order to gain greater control over society. Palantir’s collaboration with the American government and the release of Apple’s new Macbook Neo, the company’s cheapest laptop yet, both signal that both companies feel secure in their control over their respective niches in the technology sector.
AI and Education
The question of what we sacrifice in the name of convenience becomes even more urgent when we apply it to education. Those of us currently in college are among the last students to have graduated middle school prior to the AI boom; the class of 2026 is the last to have graduated high school without having free access to generative AI. We simply do not yet know what growing up on ChatGPT will mean for children in ensuing generations.
Over 80% of American high school students report using generative AI in their schoolwork. Government approaches to AI use in the classroom are largely concerned with how to teach students to work with AI in the name of preparing them for “the real world.” They’ve also emphasized how AI tools might be used to enhance student “learning,” which too often really means student performance on things like state-mandated exams. Melania Trump, along with her freaky humanoid robot, hails “AI literacy” as the ultimate preparation for the job market. Given the fact that literacy rates are declining, I believe that U.S. public schools should focus on making sure students are regular-literate before moving onto AI literacy and “prompt engineering.”
Various guidelines focus on ways in which AI might reduce face-to-face learning hours and teachers’ workloads alike. Even before the AI boom, many teachers began migrating towards working virtually on a full-time basis in the interest of preserving some level of work-life balance post-pandemic. What once caused deep worry for parents who were concerned about their children’s social development being impacted by remote learning circa 2020 is now being hailed as the future of education by the First Lady of the United States.
This integration of generative AI technology, oft-framed as “empowerment,” is a dangerous step towards the children of America being brought up in a friction-less world, all while shielding them from the same degree of human connection the generations above them were granted in the classroom.
This is indicative of the devaluation of education for education’s sake. Virtual schooling is justified on the basis of freeing up young people to work, develop vague “job skills,” and to prepare for a supposedly inevitable AI-driven and fully virtual corporate world. There is something deeply dispiriting about the idea that we are streamlining adolescence away in the interest of readiness for a job market that is disappearing in real time. Maybe high school can just be high school— but this framing is losing, and it’s losing because it is neither efficient nor practical. It’s losing because there is too much friction involved.
The New Luxury
The technological divide plays a role in all of this. In the current state of affairs, luxury is having access to this technology and information about how to use it most effectively. However, a counter-luxury seems to be forming. Being actively anti-technology — choosing to opt out by tossing your iPhone, buying one envelope at a time — is the new luxury good. Big-tech billionaires themselves admit to limiting their own children’s access to the very products that made them wealthy. The Luddite Club began as a self-aware rich kid club — “I think the club’s nice, because I get a break from my phone, but I get [why people see the club as classist]. Some of us need technology to be included in society. Some of us need a phone.” Swarthmore students might forgo their iPhones for a month, but they can get them back any time while having free access to iMacs in every library on campus (and likely their own laptop). These acts of resistance are made from positions of security and thus function as symbols of status. “Friction-maxxing” requires that your basic needs are already met; you can only afford the inefficiency that going analog brings if you have time.
This is all somewhat contradictory, of course. I am writing this article on a laptop which my parents bought for me upon my acceptance to Swarthmore, from a restaurant in the Dublin airport, where I was just served a meal delivered by a weird server-robot. I am thoroughly aware of how this looks and sounds. My argument is not to embrace a full-force “friction-maxxing” lifestyle as a method of an individualistic counter-cultural soul search. Rather, I argue that we should embrace friction where possible because these choices, as small as they might seem, add up. I argue this because, although this is a luxury endeavor to some degree, the streamlined alternatives aren’t neutral. When we prioritize ease and cheapness over humanity, we support poor treatment of Amazon delivery drivers, endorse unethical working conditions for South Asian textile workers, and invest in the construction of ever-gluttonous and thirsty data-centers in rural America. When we outsource our inconveniences away, we abandon the texture of our daily lives.
So It Goes
The ease of living on a one-square-mile college campus will not follow us into our lives post-grad, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe a full life is supposed to have some degree of resistance to it. Vonnegut knew this, of course. He wasn’t just being precious about his envelopes. He was insisting on his right to be human. He finishes recounting his journey for an envelope: “I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around. Of course, the computers will do us out of that. But what the computer people don’t realise, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore. Let’s all get up and move around a bit right now … or at least dance.”
P.S. The logo for claude.ai is almost identical to Vonnegut’s drawing of a butthole from Breakfast of Champions.
