Friction is Good For Us

Photo depicts a woman from Dimen Village of Wu in China making paper from mulberry bark. The entire sequence is documented in a photo gallery at https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/kam-pulp/. Creative Commons.

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Last year, I confided to a friend that I was using a food processor to finely chop onions and carrots for a recipe. My friend, who takes pride in his culinary skills, tut-tutted me.

"You shouldn't do that," he warned. "You'll lose your knife skills."

There are two ways to think about this statement: You can dismiss it as puritanism from a food snob, or you can take the critique seriously, as I did. My friend is right, the sharp knife in a skilled hand can dice, julienne, and batonnet. Each is a different cut, each has its place and purpose. The knife gives better control and precision, superior texture and presentation. The food processor is faster but far less discriminating. You lose something important along the way.

Around the same time, another friend recommended the YouTuber Li Ziqi to me. She is a Chinese woman who makes sumptuous, gorgeously produced videos about simple country life and traditional methods for making things—eye candy for DIY enthusiasts like me. She makes wine. She constructs furniture from bamboo she cuts herself in the forest. She builds her own trellises to grow cucumbers and gathers mushrooms in the forest with a basket she makes herself. Her videos led me down a rabbit hole of similar YouTube content. In one memorable video, another young woman single-handedly turns bundles of freshly cut bamboo into paper in a long, backbreaking process that involves a large pit filled with water and stamping bamboo pulp barefoot like winemakers of old.

The appeal of these videos is obvious. At first, we wonder, amazed, why anyone would take such laborious, time-consuming pathways to create things that we can otherwise purchase already made? Then we marvel at the artisan as she works. There is something both foreign and familiar about her labor—the sinewy, muscular exertion of force, the grasping, tugging and chopping, all purposeful and pregnant with forgotten knowledge. Each task, large or small, is a labor of love. Friction is the point.

It is easy to romanticize craft; YouTube and TikTok are playgrounds for this kind of nostalgia, and I am more susceptible to its pleasures than most. The simpler olden days implied by these videos are gone forever; it is a comforting illusion. Also, craftspeople do not always make a superior product. The factory-made paper in my printer is perfectly smooth and regular. Every sheet is exactly the same, unlike the handmade bamboo-based equivalent, which has a texture and thickness that would disqualify it for most modern uses.

This seemingly iron-clad argument for the superiority of my 8.5 X 11 HP printer paper begins to crumple, however, when I consider the hidden costs of this kind of paper production—the clear-cut forests, the air pollution and toxic chemicals associated with paper mills, the mountains of paper waste rotting in landfills—a legacy of environmental destruction. I was born into a system that had already normalized and buried these costs. The printers were always hungry, so we just kept feeding them. If your office runs out of paper, you order twenty more reams of it. Just like that.

No matter how many of Li Ziqi's videos I watch, my sense of awe remains intact. I marvel at the complexity and dexterity of her craft. My mind quietly acknowledges that something may have been lost when the industrial revolution disrupted essential aspects of the human experience that had remained constant for many thousands of years. I wonder, were humans better off, happier and more content, when our labor was more physical and directed by our needs for survival and simple human pleasures?

Craft is magical because it creates an opening in time and space that allows us to be human. When we are deep in its throes (as practitioners, not YouTube voyeurs), craft makes us feel like time is slowing down. That is a pleasant illusion, but in fact, we are returning to the most natural version of ourselves, touching the core humanity that was trained over hundreds of thousands of years before the industrial and digital revolutions upended our fundamental relationship with the material world. Humans are natural tool makers and tool users. For millennia, our problem-solving abilities were trained in the physical world, with our bodies on the front line. When we tend to a garden or build a jewelry box or stand at an easel painting, we are returning to something elemental in the human experience.

This is where my thoughts go as the long, loud AI bandwagon moves through my world, hawking what a century of consumer advertising has always promised, to do it faster and more efficiently. Because I am a writer and a teacher of writing, I am especially sensitive to the AI's hidden damage. The new AI revolution promises to remove the friction from writing and to do it with dizzying speed, but what will be lost? Just as the completely smooth, always perfect sheet of paper conceals the clear-cut forests, air pollution, and toxic chemicals that make paper production possible, AI’s utopian promises are undergirded by its destructive potential—the massive increase in power required to run LLMs, the large-scale copyright violations committed by their training, the coming disruptions to the labor force, the inevitability of model collapse.

Even more concerning is the erasure of craft implied in every AI-generated sentence, paragraph, or document. Writing is also craft, a process—laborious and sometimes difficult—that carries the writer along with it, literally changing our brain chemistry and allowing us to participate fully in our civilization. Writing is thinking. This is never more evident than when I watch one of my students struggle to convey an idea in a sentence and then finally get it right.

Friction is the point. Friction is good. Learning anything well requires friction. So does loving another person or preparing a memorable meal or handwashing your car or growing roses or any of the thousand other activities that could be done more efficiently—or not at all—but we nevertheless choose to do anyway because they make us feel fully human.

Speaking as a writer, I am wary of the promises of AI creating a newer, better world. How many more crappy blog posts, stupid listicles, eye-rolling clickbait pieces, and low quality "how to" articles does the world need? Yes, AI can create these items quickly, and often as well as humans can, but is anyone asking why we need more of this kind of content? Just as our landfills are choked with paper, the internet is a dead letter office for low-stakes content. In 2020, an SEO toolset company called Ahrefs studied 14 billion pages and discovered that 96.55% received no traffic at all. Chatbots threaten to flood an already flooded zone with writing that no one really cares about.

Knife skills matter.

I keep coming back to this. They matter because we care about what we're doing. We want to focus and get it right. We want to fully embody the experience, revel in its complexities and challenges. We created the space in our day for this, slowed down for it. The cuts are perfect. There is joy in this.