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friction, frictionlessness... appears a lot in critical logistics and i think nothing of seeing it there, so this probably is not remarkable, compared to the other spaces where it's appearing
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01622439261422214
"which frictions stand in the way of more prosperity and a more equitable distribution"
The fundamental tension between the appeal to frictionlessness and Tsing's friction is that the latter is (re)productive, where the former is merely redistributive.
This is what we see highlighted in Kingett's non-fiction. Frictionlessness is the pitch of the salesman of automated writing tools: to smooth out the voice of the author.
The frictionless privileges flow, in the sense of affluence but also of effluent (à la DeLanda), over foment.
i was about to write something *perhaps* more erudite but then i saw this post and now... well... (added a space for friction purposes again)
https://universeodon.com/ @AnneTheWriter1/116565154204790836
Will note that you anticipated this... slip:
lol! it's too easy. one might say frictionless (but i wouldn't)
i'm now annoying myself by trying to recall what castells and appadurai said about flows... wondering whether tsing was rejoindering either of them
In preface, she thanks Appadurai as a chapter reader. Otherwise only names him in two footnotes, as one of five examples of "Left theories of globalization" and as one of three "positions in the debate on the fate of the nation [of Indonesia]", both of these citing to _Modernity_at_Large_.
Not so much a rejoinder, as a tangential situating of her work within a broader context.
No mention of Castells.
Given her chapters opening with "Frontiers of Capitalism" only coming to "Movements" toward the end, my sense is that her object of analysis was not a logistical one.
yeah, she gets to logistics in the essay Supply Chains and the Human Condition which i've read more recently and more times
i'm now starting to feel quite bedeviled! reading a dissertation for a defense in a couple days and this is in the footnotes:
Jakko Kemper (2022: 57-58) defines frictionlessness as a digital design philosophy that seeks to “technologically rid perception of all possible forms of friction...which requires a constantly expanding infrastructure of extraction that it inherently must endeavor to conceal.”
it's not a project where i'd necessarily have expected to bump into it at all
This would seem, to my recollection, to be more the sentiment that Tsing was rebutting, albeit at a time when the Web was still finding its footing as an "application" space, the friction of Berners-Lee's very intentionally stateless architecture only beginning to give way O'Reilly's era of interactivity. (The first Web 2.0 conference was the year prior to Tsing publishing.)
Which is to say, Kemper's observations are situated within an era of digital design that itself arose response to friction (statelessness) that had itself been introduced in to resolve a prior friction of client-server architectures ("We're waiting for our systems to update", says the telephone customer support person at the bank, as they wait for what amounts to a dumb terminal screen to refresh.)
Granted, Tsing was doing environmental ethnography (rain forests), not digital ethnography (such as web sites named after rain forests), but the urge to eliminate friction vs. the celebration of friction would perhaps be said to have a long history.
Swing of a pendulum, or sumfin'.
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