Friction

or, a working theory - part one

When I go into my backyard, I experience a cavalry of flying insects targeting my face. My sons seem to be short enough that the frenzy of flying fiends don’t take notice of them. Or perhaps my body buzzes at a frequency they find enticing.

This reminded me of something from a conversation I had with

J David Osborne

probably four years ago. He was telling me about Byung Chul Han because I was, as usual, thinking about the ways technological progress has dehumanized us.

Ever since that conversation, I’ve been meaning to write about this but the concept is really too big to fit into a single essay so I keep putting it off, but today is as good a day as any to start laying down some breadcrumbs as a foundation for this working theory.

Why a gnat flying into my eyeball reminded me of a Korean philosopher is anyone’s guess. Usually it’s thinking about Mario that brings me back to this idea.

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I remember the feel of videogame manuals. Those simple pages full of instructions and artwork. The hours I spent inside them, tracing or drawing the characters. The dreams instilled inside me, burgeoning out of my chest like some horrifying tree branching down into my bones and meat, rooting me to earth but stretching me towards stars.

Would I be who I now am without those videogame manuals and all the shrapnel of oneiric inspiration lodged inside my eyes, rattling around in my chest?

I remember the feel of cheap but sturdy plastic holding albums that would shape me. I remember how difficult it was to pry off the tape suturing them shut and the flimsy way they finally opened to reveal nothing but a CD and a few thin pieces of paper holding all those words that would fill my lungs.

The click of the CD locking into the portable CD player. The satisfying clack of the CD player closing, locking into place. The cheap headphones that seemed so expensive when I was fifteen, the kind that wrapped round my head and slid over my ears. They were uncomfortable to wear for longer than an hour, the plastic of the ear stabilizers rubbing strangely against that stretch of skin where ear meets head, but I wore them for entire afternoons while I lay in bed.

I remember the first chord of certain albums. I still know every single word to songs I haven’t heard in twenty years.

I lay there, those thin papers between my teenage fingers, and read the lyrics to songs I already knew while subvocally singing along.

There were nights that never seemed to end. Albums that looped and echoed in my skull while I stared out the window at a moon that wasn’t mine no matter how much I longed for it. An inexplicable, unexplainable kind of longing. Perhaps comparable to the longing for god or beauty, for transcendence, for meaning, for anything to fill our chests and hearts with.

I didn’t have the words back then but I came to feel music differently. As I longed, I created. Music stopped being a guide or a path but the end itself. Music was not an eye opening to transcendence but transcendence itself.

When I went to college, I stopped even listening to music with lyrics. Instead I found textures and sounds that vibrated through me. They lived inside me, crawling beneath my skin, burrowing into my bones with a painful ecstasy.

And I chased this everywhere. I chased it through operas and ballets, through Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed! You Black Emperor and A Silver Mt Zion and Sigur Ros where a voice stopped using lyrics but became its own instrument, its own vehicle, and there was Penderecki and Messiaen and Bartok and every famous composer you can think of and a whole lot you can’t and then while in Korea, at the dissolution of my own self, I stumbled across something so gorgeous and haunting that I still feel it when I wake up at 5am and can’t catch my breath, when my body seems to vibrate in ways brutal and beautiful, as if echoing with my own life, my heart and what you may call a soul thrumming along to the strings of some great heart, some great inhalation, where all of life is one great exhale.

And I walked those Korean streets without music because my iPod broke after a few weeks and I began to feel the texture of music in every thing, in every moment, and I remember the summer cicadas shrieking in trees so loud that I covered my ears and the time they dopplered round me on a sacred mountain outside Kyoto where I lost myself but also found myself, where I began to become a person who could stand without fracturing, who could walk without dissolving.

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I was reading this interview with Beck yesterday. It’s great. But they come across a very interesting concept that I’d like to talk about right now.

What’s one way that’s played out in music?
I have a theory: There’s a certain point where we crossed this digital threshold, which means the thing that kids will remember the strongest — the way we remember radios and television with eight channels — is the iPhone. And the iPhone, it’s very sleek and minimalist. They see the world through that prism, so I think music has evolved to sound like something that should be coming out of that object. And rock music doesn’t sound great coming through those little speakers. But pop and electronic music sound great. It’s like how music in the ’60s sounded like what should be coming out of a transistor radio.

I feel that I have rarely read something that rings so true. And I gasped because of what that means, the way it staggered me.

And I saw plastic. I saw beaches of plastic rather than sand. I saw the horrifying plastic coverings of a certain type of person’s robotic dreams of the future.

And I dreamt of a demiurge cackling for all that we willingly gave away, threw away, filled the earth with. All the millions of tons of garbage buried, poisoning the soil and water and skies.

And I understand that many of the things I fear are what people would classify as old man yelling at clouds or that it’s the children who are wrong, but I do think the measurable and intangible quality of our world is degrading piece by piece in the cascading tidal wave of convenience innovation.

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We are told over and over that our lives have more conveniences than ever before. And, yes, it’s true that washing your clothes is now a passive activity that takes maybe two hours whereas it once took a day of vigorous work to get your clothes clean. We can toss ready-made meals in the microwave or oven and have them come out ready to eat without any preparation or even handling. I can swap and tap on my phone a few times and have a meal delivered to me in under an hour. I can send this sentence to every single person I know and thousands of people I’ll never know without having to buy postage or even leave the toilet. I can watch any movie or TV show or listen to any album ever produced with just a bit of digging and often with nothing more than another few taps on my phone.

The innovations in convenience are staggering¹.

However, I do believe it’s worth reckoning with what is lost through this convenience.

And this is where my concept of Friction comes in.

Quite simply, we don’t value what’s simple. If something’s convenient and easy, it becomes discardable.

Last week as a thank you to my mother in law, I made her a 10lb brisket. Now, I could have ordered one from the local barbecue and, objectively, it may have been better. Tasted better, maybe. Certainly it would have been more convenient and arrived at my house in under an hour, rather than the 10 hours it took to arrive at my table.

I wouldn’t have had to go buy meat, trim it, season it, and then spend an entire day smoking it.

I could’ve remained on my couch and just tapped at my phone for less than a minute.

But, in a way, the brisket was so much better because I used my own hands. Because I trimmed it somewhat inexpertly. Because I seasoned it with my own mix of salt and pepper and garlic and onion and paprika. Because of the way I wrapped it after the stall was finished. Because of the way I let it rest. Because of the way I cut it, served it, the barbecue sauces I picked to accompany it.

All these things I did that I may have done in ways that are less than the ideal, that took time and attention and menial work, are what gave the brisket a certain kind of indescribable value.

Meaning.

Something more than substance. More than just meat and salt and smoke.

And I remember the cost of an album. I remember the thousands of hours I spent in my backyard working on my swing, on my pitching accuracy. I remember kicking a soccer ball at a wall over and over again. I remember weighing the cost of a videogame against the number of hours I’d spend serving people ice cream to meet the balance. I remember the many hours spent playing games because they were the only ones I had. I remember looping albums rather than switching to the radio because these albums were mine.

I paid for them.

I carried them with me.

I still carry them with me.

They belong to me.

And I have sometimes thought that I don’t love music the way I once did. That it has become, quite often, just background noise to accompany the tedium of my workday. That songs no longer live inside me, screaming, the way they always used to. That new music especially seems to drift by me, slipping through my fingers before I can even attach memories to the songs that sound so good for a moment, a day, a week.

But I think it’s the loss of Friction.

1. Of course, David Graeber talks a bit about this in the Utopia of Rules as well, where sometimes the convenience is that we no longer have to deal with a third party. He uses travel as an example. Now you don’t need to deal with a fussy travel agent because you can find your own flights, hotels, transportation, etc. Never mind that all of that requires work, whereas you could have just hired the travel agent to do all of that for you.