Sam Hogg

Artificial Friction

Humans are inherently a pattern-recognising and pattern-seeking species. We seek circles in time. We crave the ability to insert a level of routine into our lives, which in turn brings a sense of comfort and security, a sense of belonging. Our bodies are predisposed to this, built on circadian rhythms. We give ourselves to circularity, and in turn, we allow the circularity of life to soothe us. Circles persist in the mythology, religion and stories we tell ourselves, from seasons coming and going to comets soaring through the deep blue ceiling thousands of miles and years beyond us.

When we attempt to learn new ideas, motions, languages, concepts, we seek to go through the process over and over again until what was new feels old. We build a circularity into this journey. We intuit that this approach builds a learning we can use for other efforts. When we learn one, we can use the circularity to learn others. But this process, while essential, delivers a sense that is often misconstrued for comfort, but in reality, is a dulling of our ability to learn new things. You can settle into the circle, and it will numb you over time.

This comfort, this circularity. The constant balance and tension between pattern-seeking, which brings mastery and efficiency, and pattern-breaking, which enables discovery and innovation. How do we seek to break and then rebuild this cycle?

Building on few original insights and many cumulative mistakes, I want to share what I have termed the ‘Artificial Friction’ Framework in my own life and efforts.

On The Roots

At the turn of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt set out his framework for a ‘strenuous life’ to an audience of wealthy businessmen. The core of his argument was that a life of ease and comfort, what he termed “the doctrine of ignoble ease”, found by “shrink[ing] from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil,” was corrosive to both individual character and national greatness. The good life was not a pleasant one found in ease, but one chiselled and carved from effort, from strain. Brought together, individuals who shied away from hard work, from risk, from the discomfort of striving, from the essence of what it means to push forward, would ultimately produce a nation unfit to meet its moment.

We see this argument repeatedly in antiquity. In Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, Cato the Younger delivers a speech to the Senate that set out the roots of Roosevelt’s argument two millennia later: a republic of rot, grown fat and arrogant on its conquests and achievements, its citizens softened by luxury, with leaders distracted by pleasure. The same thread runs through the Stoics - through Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius - and into the angst of Western elites in the centuries that followed.

Inserting Artificial Friction

If these statesmen argued that a life of hardship, deliberate or not, leads to a better life and therefore a better state, I offer ‘Artificial Friction’, which seeks to hyper-personalise this framework into a more personal and contemporary context.

The premise is as follows: now more than ever, comfort is available to us once we begin a circular path of learning or development. The digital economy has industrialised the circle. Algorithms learn your taste and then feed it back to you, narrowing your curiosity over time until your platform of choice is a mirror. Fast food apps have removed the friction of cooking, which was also the friction of improvisation and improvement, of stumbling across a new ingredient, of the minor creative act embedded in feeding yourself. Social media collapsed the friction between thought and publication, which also collapsed the friction between thought, articulation, editing, pondering and refinement. LLMs will allow humans to subcontract much of their critical thinking and curiosity to our entire species’ archived history: insights that previously took generations to arrive at can be reached in three dotted seconds. In each case, a genuine inconvenience was removed, but with it too a source of unplanned discovery.

These innovations have solved real problems, and each ironically is the end result of strain and effort. But the cumulative effect is an environment in which the path of least resistance has been engineered and normalised to a degree that no other existing generation of humans has ever experienced. On a less granular scale, the private and public sector too often mirrors this. Corporate career structures, particularly in large organisations, reward the deepening of a single groove: the same meetings, the same frameworks, the same internal language, the same peer group, the same analysis, the same cycles.

The Creative Case For Friction

History offers us several examples of people who have put into practice the framing ideas that form Artificial Friction. My favourite is the Australian electronic musician Flume, aka Harley Streten.

It was almost impossible to exist on the internet around 2012 to 2013 without coming into contact with Flume’s music. The Australian producer released his self-titled debut album in 2012 at the young age of 21, where it went platinum, redefining electronic music in a new direction around the world, spread by music blogs and YouTube playlists from ear to ear and club to club. A global tour: festival headliners across the United States and much of Europe, and then a Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album.

The pressure to release a second album to follow a successful debut has long haunted musicians. In Flume’s case, the circle of what he knew how to do began to suffocate him. Streten described the experience of preparing his second album, ‘Skin,’ as a psychological battle to be creative, noting he had never previously felt pressure around his work, that it had always just been a fun endeavour, and then suddenly it was his job. He moved to Los Angeles, adopted a workhorse mentality, more hours in the studio, more grinding, more disciplined repetition of the process that had produced his first record. It didn’t work; Flume had become trapped in his circle.

What eventually broke the pattern was a series of deliberate, artificial disruptions. He fled Los Angeles, despite it being the industry’s centre of gravity, the place where the circle was most reinforced, where he could rub shoulders with other creatives, actors, musicians, people who understood him, and flew south to Mexico. He slept on friends’ sofas, produced records in the back of cars and vans between gigs. Flume clawed himself through a landscape that bore no resemblance to a recording studio, and as a result, ‘Skin’ is an album defined by the change of scenery, of space, and the absence of pressure that came with his relocation. It was incredibly successful.

This, to me, is what Artificial Friction looks like when it works. It is absolutely not the abandonment of discipline, but critically the strategic disruption of the patterns that discipline creates. Flume’s experience is not unique, but rather reflects a general principle. The circle must be broken in order to be renewed.

A Framework for Friction

To try and snap out of these circles, one must introduce Artificial Friction. Sometimes this can be done for us: a collapsed relationship, a death, a traumatic experience, a change of country or career. Yet other times we must create points, indicators, anti-patterns, that generate reasons to tug on small threads, to create a roughness that challenges the default in our thinking and our lives.

To this end, I think Artificial Friction operates across three distinct registers, and the most effective disruptions tend to combine more than one.

• Environmental friction. This means changing the physical or social context in which you operate, understanding the basis that our environment shapes us in ways we cannot always articulate fully. Flume's relocation to Mexico is one example, his recordings in the back of vans another. But you could choose any of the hundreds of stories told to us of when creatives do the same thing.
• Cognitive friction. Here we build structures that force one to confront assumptions you would otherwise overlook. This might be a colleague specifically tasked with challenging your reasoning, or red teaming and stress testing. It might be a reading list compiled entirely of perspectives you largely agree with, prompting and poking at your own existing frameworks and conceptions.
• Temporal friction. This means disrupting the pace at which you operate, because pace itself becomes a pattern. If your default is rapid iteration, shipping fast, deciding fast, moving on, the friction is to slow down: to ponder at length, to ruminate on ideas and strategies you would usually fire out in a matter of hours. If your default is caution and deliberation - the entirety of academia for example - the friction runs the other way: force a decision in a set amount of hours and observe what your intuition can throw up. This, to me, represents one of the biggest conflict areas between the public and private sector, academia and technologists.

A Final View

The circle is a gift that must be earned through the fire of friction, broken periodically, and rebuilt with whatever the breaking revealed. The goal is not to live in permanent disruption, for that is merely chaos and rubs down the soul like water on rock - but to develop the instinct for knowing when the circle is comforting rather than critically aiding.