Friction is our Friend

The Flywheel is Not.

I have always enjoyed ideas. Often they are offshoots of something I am trying to reach and cannot quite put a hand to, so I gather them and keep them by me until the thing underneath comes clear. For years that meant a journal, ideas scribbled in as they arrived, then sat with until the core showed itself.

Lately, trying to understand what AI does to creative work, I have been putting those ideas into a project and asking Claude to find the connections between them. The effect is astonishing, something like watching cells divide in a Petri dish in real time. The connections are good. They reach back to things I put in months ago, to research I had half forgotten. They are all usable, and they are also all average. They multiply, but they do not move; a kaleidoscope that rearranges what is already there into fresh patterns and never adds a single new piece of glass.

For depth and texture on ground I have already covered, this is worth a great deal, but it will not take me anywhere new. I have come to understand that going somewhere new is my job. Art is an obligation that cannot be outsourced.

I am still a little in awe of how Claude handles the mundane. It does parts of my admin, gathers the material and the Substacks around a subject I want to think about, ties them to things I have done before, and increasingly does all of it unasked, through routines set up in Cowork. Let it past the routine, though, and I get the average back in piles: well made, well formatted, and a quiet kind of self-plagiarism.

I think the shape of the problem is something like reverse osmosis. A desalination membrane does a kind of selection: it holds back what should not pass and lets through only what should. Apply the right pressure and it works. Force too great a volume through too fast and the selection collapses; salt gathers against the surface in a layer that will not clear, the membrane fouls past the point engineers call critical flux, and what was a filter stops filtering. Restoring it takes a cleaning, not just a slackening of pressure.

I am the membrane. What limits what I take in is not the supply, which is endless now, but the permeability of the receiving side. That permeability is set by attention and by processing time, and beneath those by what assimilation theory calls existing structure: you can only absorb what you already have the organisation to bind to. Material that finds no anchor does not pass through. It gathers at the surface and either drains away or, worse, gets logged as understood while it is never built in.

“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

I have watched the move from gradually to suddenly in others and felt it in myself. It shows in three ways. The first is a loss of selectivity; everything starts to feel equally important or equally uncertain, and the ability to tell the difference goes before you notice it has gone. The second is a drift toward the structure that arrives with the content rather than the structure you find for yourself. Left alone, you build your own connective tissue between the pieces, and the building feels like discovery; under volume pressure it is easier to take the order that comes attached, and Claude is good at supplying it. The third is the disappearance of resistance. Taking something in properly involves friction; when a thing does not fit, you stop and hold the tension. Near the threshold the friction fades. Nothing fits any better; the part of you that would register as misfit is overlooked. Things feel coherent because the testing for incoherence has stopped. Fatigue wearing the mask of resolution.

The threshold is probably not a single moment, though it feels like one looking back. Cognitive load theory suggests that working memory stops being a place where things are processed and becomes a queue where they are held; and we start buffering rather than examining, new input is logged rather than absorbed, and meaning hardens into data. What you are left with afterwards is the sense of having read a great deal and kept almost none of it, a flatness, a disconnection from the very thing you were reading.

Observation and orientation are practice, not theory. They need time and space set aside for them, otherwise decisions and actions spin up into a flywheel that turns faster and faster: motion, and no movement.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Denby Pottery closed last week; it is over. Two hundred and seventeen years, ended. No one was incompetent and no one was cruel. The business died of something that does not show on a spreadsheet, a loss of meaning, as the pressure for motion turned meaning into data and managers under investor pressure followed the bouncing ball of the numbers, wilfully blind to what had given the place its life.

So, what to do. The first move is to put friction back on purpose, a discipline of refusing to let the machine do work it should not. To Claude, friction is an obstacle to be worn down until it yields. To a maker it is information. The hand knows friction as the resistance of the material; it is what teaches. Pye called the good version the workmanship of risk, the kind where the outcome is not guaranteed and the maker carries it willingly. The convenient version, the workmanship of certainty, engineers the risk out, and most of what AI offers is the workmanship of certainty turned inwards on thinking itself.

The second move is harder, because friction needs room that targets and timescales do not allow. It needs us to stop and look around with other people, people who see differently, whose judgement we trust. Friction is not conflict. And try as I might, I cannot get Claude to give me much of it; somewhere in its digital makeup is a need to be helpful and to resolve, rather than to sit with a question and turn it over. Perhaps that might change. Until it does, the root of anything worth doing is a conversation with another person.

This is not a complaint about the technology. It is an extraordinary thing, and the work of learning to use it is ours to do. Use it only to go faster and the flywheel obliges; the organisation runs quicker and leaner for a while, and the people inside it thin into residue. Hold instead to the discernment that tells us when something does not fit, and treat the discomfort of being a beginner as the right condition rather than a failure, and the opening is real. It will cost us something. We will have to set down things we are good at to pick up things we are not.

The shift from gradually to suddenly is only visible afterwards. By the time the membrane has fouled, the part of us that would have noticed is the part that has gone quiet. The friction is the sign that the work is still ours. I want to be sure I can still feel it.