The Efficiency Delusion
Optimizing how we live, work, and play is embedded deep in the psyche of coders and American culture. But how much efficiency is too much?
Co-authored with Clive Thompson
This year began with the writer David Pogue identifying six important lessons that he’s learned from observing how tech companies behave. One of them is this: “Frictionless always wins.”
“If you want to place bets on the success of new technologies, examine how much ‘friction’ they eliminate: effort, steps and hassle,” Pogue wrote in Scientific American. “The remote control; microwave meals; e-mail; text messages; the iPod; Google Maps; Amazon.com; Siri and Alexa; and, yeah, self-driving cars — each, in its way, introduced a new way to let us be lazier.”
The drive to remove friction in the digital technology space permeates everything from social interactions to business transactions, from Facebook bombarding us with notifications about what our friends are saying and doing to millions of people around the world ordering Uber rides on their phones instead of standing on street corners to hail cabs.
It’s not hard to see why removing friction works as a business model. Reducing transaction costs has regularly proven to be a powerful way to…
