Sublime

Too often, legacy narratives serve only a small group of people who possess power or, at their most destructive, actively disempower certain groups, populations, or ways of being in the world. When social systems fail to truly serve vast numbers of people and communities, that is when we see challenger narratives begin to emerge.

Positive Friction encourages an alternative design practice in order to restore human agency within online spaces. We stand for a frictional digital experience in order to explore unprecedented creative routes to escape the flaws of standardized design.

This cult of distraction, as Rojek points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse, and politica

Call it the resilience principle: disrupt yourself instead of protecting yourself.

The term “disruption” makes a monolith of the particulars of the everyday, a leviathan out of structures and organizations that are old, have grown up organically, and are therefore pretty scattered and decentralized.

The idea is this: that connectivity—and the ideology of connectivity—is the elimination of the opposition, the friction, that has always characterized and defined human experience.

The new information and communication technologies are more subversive of the modern state than any political threat to its predominance since Columbus sailed. This is important because those in power have seldom reacted peacefully to developments that undermined their authority. They are not likely to now.

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: