DL 401

Useful Friction

Published: August 30, 2025 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate 401. After nearly 400 issues of watching technology promise frictionless solutions, this issue explores why the smoothest path isn't always the smartest one. Sometimes the most valuable work happens in the spaces between automation and agency, where useful friction lives.

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🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 Recent Work

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🫧 Popping the AI Hype Bubble

Most AI conversations fall into three camps: Golden Age, End of Humanity, or Long Messy Transition. But they're all missing the real story: The AI Paradox. AI excels at complex tasks while failing at basic common sense.

Apple researchers' "The Illusion of Thinking" exposes this paradox. Today's "reasoning" isn't budding intelligence. It's sophisticated pattern matching that mimics human reasoning but lacks the robust, symbolic logic that underpins true intelligence.

This fragility shows up in boardrooms. MIT's NANDA Lab reports that 95% of AI pilots are failing despite high adoption rates. We're deploying a narrow tool while expecting sweeping transformation it can't deliver.

The paradox's most troubling effect may be on us. Research by Kosmyna et al. shows AI writing assistants decrease brain connectivity and homogenize language. Changes that persist even after we stop using these tools.

🎭 Convenient Illusions Over Difficult Truths

The AI Paradox reveals something deeper than technical limitations. It exposes our willingness to accept shortcuts over understanding. We know these systems are fragile mimics, yet we deploy them anyway. We know they're built for surveillance and profit, yet we hand over more cognitive work to them.

Not because AI isn't powerful, but because the people selling it don't care what it does, only what it can be sold as. What they're building isn't intelligence. It's a mirror, a mimic, a control system designed to monitor, monetize, and manipulate.

This pattern extends beyond AI. The internet, initially envisioned as a tool for connection, has instead fostered isolation and neuroticism among young people. We chose algorithmic feeds over intentional relationships, convenience over genuine connection.

🏋️ The Antidote: Useful Friction

The path forward requires embracing what Paul Jun calls deliberate practice. Resisting shortcuts and engaging in activities that build cognitive strength. As the world automates, conditioning fundamental capabilities like writing and critical thinking becomes more valuable, not less.

🤔 Consider

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.

If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none.

This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.

— Neil Postman

In an age of algorithmic shortcuts and AI assistance, the most radical act might be choosing the harder path. Not because difficulty is virtuous, but because some kinds of friction, the mental effort of writing, the cognitive work of reasoning, the social challenge of genuine connection, are what make us human.

The question isn't whether we'll use these tools, but whether we'll let them use us.

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