Last week, because of a combination of bad planning (my bad) and endless delays (Deutsche Bahn’s bad), I arrive very late in a hotel in Berlin. I had to ring the doorbell. The guy at the reception started giggling the moment I came in, which irritated me at first (did my hair look so funny, after all these hours on the train?). But he quickly reassured me that it wasn’t about me. It was about the fact that he had pressed the button for the daily closing of the system about ten seconds before I rang the door bell (it was just after 3am). It meant that the computer was busy for a while and it would take a few minutes before he could check me in. He apologizes profusely – and we started chatting.
First, the obligatory complaints about the notorious lateness of German trains, then he told me about his job as stand-in nightporter, in which he often had to travel but travel time got counted as work time. He told me about his aunt in a village in Brandenburg and how the local train problems there had led to the installation of a permanent bus line, which the local inhabitants really appreciated. In between, he checked the status of the computer system, cursing it for its slowness, and then, when it worked again, telling me about the kinds of tricks and workarounds he had learned in the many years on his job. It was a far more pleasant and informative human interaction than so many check-ins I had had in the past months, when the system had not just been in shot-down mode.
Human beings talk to each other when things don’t work, or do not go as quickly and smoothly as they should – that’s what went through my mind when I finally got my key card and pulled my bag down the carpeted corridor. The next day, when waiting at the train station to catch my train back, something similar happened when a young woman – panting, mobile phone in hand – told the passengers waiting on the platform that she had just run up three stoors of stairs with her heavy backpack, because she wanted to catch a connecting train, and the app had not been updated to announced that it was delayed as well. She was so angry and amused at the same time that she had to get her emotions out. We all sympathized, some mentioned similar things that had happened to them. It was a kind of “we against the system”-moment of solidarity, before we jumped onto our different trains.
Little moments of interpersonal connection, happening when something doesn’t go according to plan. But of course, these kinds of failure are exactly what companies try to avoid. They want their customers’ life to go smoothly, fearing bad ratings and loss of sales. The smoother, the more convenient, to be sure – but what it takes away are those moments where one is forced to wait, or lacks information, and feels a victim of bad luck (of of the incompetence of the company in question), togehter with others. And because misery loves company, those are moments in which even in our smartphone-obsessed world, it becomes natural to talk to each other, no matter who it is who happens to stand next to you.
I am currently reading Tom Feiling’s Alone in Japan, a journalistic-sociological exploration of Japanese society. One thing that stands out – from the chapters I have read so far, which are all about city life – is the combination of comfort and loneliness. Life can be very smooth there, apparently, with lots of opportunities to cover all one’s daily needs without having to interact a lot with other human beings. And many people are, apparently, lonely, with rising numbers of singles and famously low birth rates. Feiling explores Japanese society because he sees these tendencies as something many other societies will also experience, sooner or later.
What I am trying to get at, I guess, is about how it is precisely the frictions of everyday life that can bring people together – whereas there is no need for communication or connection when things go smoothly. But in market societies, many companies try to earn money precisely by removing everyday friction: by delivering things to people’s doors so that they don’t need to leave the house, by taking over unpleasant logistical tasks; by offering digital solutions for all kinds of challenges. To be sure, not all of these things come at the costs of activities that would otherwise bring people together. And yet, there is a tension here, if only because it seems to become somehow less legitimate to ask others for help if one could just as well go for a paid solution. It’s just too weird to ask your neighbors to borrow some eggs if the supermarket around the corner is open 24/7.
I, too, value punctual public transport, believe me. And yet, I’ve had some conversations with strangers triggered by delayed trains or flights or busses that I really would not want to have missed. Maybe I just need to develop the guts to chat with people when things go according to schedule as well – but I’ve often gotten weird stares when trying, which did not at all happen in moments of friction. Maybe our social norms need to change as well, then? If one assumes that everyday social contact is, after all, good for the kinds of creatures we are,* and talking to each other outside of our little bubbles is something that helps keep society together, showing solidarity and helping each other out with a word of encouragement or a bit of information, then a society without any everyday friction is quite a dystopia.
* See also this recent study on remote work, which can have a negative impact on (mental) health, especially for those living alone.
{ 25 comments }
Neville Morley 06.08.26 at 8:29 am
I was going to make a snarky comment to the effect that, given the lamentable state of DB these days, perhaps this is secretly a country-wide ‘nudge’ programme to bolster social solidarity. But on reflection that would be a terrible idea; people being brought together to grumble about how nothing works properly any more, the country is going to the dogs etc. is one of the things fuelling the AfD, Nigel Farage etc. I see this in my own small town, where a long-standing road closure due to a collapsing culvert does drive conversation with complete strangers (especially people who’ve relied too much on satnav), but locally, especially but not only on social media, certain individuals are clearly trying to leverage this for political advantage, push conspiracy theories of why the council hasn’t sorted this out and so forth. Perhaps we need to differentiate between sources of friction?
Phil 06.08.26 at 9:34 am
This post reminds me weirdly of a blog I used to comment on, written by someone who was doing some work in (I think) an actor-network theory framework, on aspects of tools and tool use. Although it’s not my field at all, I became fascinated by what she was posting, and started leaving “this makes sense because…” and “perhaps you could also…” comments, which sparked off further discussions. Friction was key, IIRC; a tool that’s awkward and uncomfortable to use is a poor tool, but a tool exerting no friction on the user at all is also providing no feedback of its own, and as such is liable to disappear into the larger process it facilitates, losing any scope for creative repurposing. The idea of spaces for social interaction being created by unintended friction – happening in the seams of what were intended to be seamless processes – is a similar one.
I’m also thinking of the “brief but real connection with a stranger” element of your stories, which they share – not with my discussions of ANT, but – with those blog post comment section discussions. It’s a familiar fictional trope, of course, but in real life that kind of brief encounter (ho ho) is almost certain to stay brief – indeed, it’s worth remembering that Brief Encounter itself is the story of a chance meeting gone wrong, in which two people explore a wonderful world which does not and cannot exist. (“Brief Encounter, Donnie Darko, La Jetée: In this paper I will…”) Or maybe I’m just saying that because I had a chance to meet the ANT blogger IRL; I initially thought this was an excellent idea, but in the end not only declined but stopped commenting forthwith. Can’t be too careful, I guess.
notGoodenough 06.08.26 at 10:58 am
While I think this gets at something very real about how moments of shared inconvenience can briefly dissolve social barriers and create small solidarities between strangers, I can’t help but wonder whether the reason those moments feel so meaningful today is because so many other opportunities for unstructured social connection have disappeared.
In other words, perhaps there is a deeper issue: our lives are increasingly organised around productivity, efficiency, and individualised consumption in ways that leave little room for communal life elsewhere. Public spaces shrink, leisure time becomes scarce, and social interaction is increasingly mediated through work, consumption, or digital platforms. Under those conditions, the delayed train platform or broken hotel system becomes one of the few places where strangers are temporarily pulled into a shared experience and allowed to exist together outside of pure functionality.
In short, I’m not sure I would want more friction so much as a society in which people had enough time, security, and communal space for connection with strangers to emerge more organically – not primarily through shared frustration or infrastructural failure, but through a basic human desire for meaningful connection with those around us.
MisterMr 06.08.26 at 11:10 am
There is clearly some connection between social isolation, fascism, and trains arriving in time or not.
But more seriously, there is the question of social isolation, because we only want to interact with friends and people we already like, and paradoxically internet made this too easy and creates an increased level of social isolation (plus perhaps people moving more often to new places).
Well at least I think the problem is linked to internet, I m ight be wrong.
Maxlex 06.08.26 at 11:47 am
I never thought about it before, but working second-level IT support my workday was full of conversations where something had gone wrong and needed fixing. There was a fair amount of commiseration and the passing on of tips. I would say they were mostly human conversations, unlike the daily meetings.
engels 06.08.26 at 12:23 pm
It was a kind of “we against the system”-moment of solidarity, before we jumped onto our different trains.
I think this is key. Friction isn’t a good thing per se but in control societies like ours it makes people notice the snake wrapped around their face (if only momentarily).
SamChevre 06.08.26 at 1:46 pm
Yesterday, I was traveling by commuter train in to New York City, and there was a lot of chaos and delay. I ended up on a very crowded train, sitting with two elderly gentlemen speaking a language I didn’t recognize. After the severalth delay, I chatted with the one who was comfortable in English, who turned out to be one of those people with a fascinating history that I’m sure was much harder than it sounded when he told it – an Iraqi Kurd who was a civil engineer under Saddam, fled to Syria and from there to the US in the 1990’s. If the trains had run smoothly, I’d never have gotten the chance to talk to him.
J, not that one 06.08.26 at 1:46 pm
I think it’s worth noting that in totalitarian societies this dynamic is destroyed, because no one wants to be overheard badmouthing the regime or anything one is supposed to presume the regime to be responsible for, and no one wants to be perceived as encouraging such behavior by others.
I suspect things are also different where there’s a solidly defined division of roles, as when one or both parties are working or otherwise doing business, and the interaction grows out of that.
Kaarlo Mäkelä 06.08.26 at 5:13 pm
This post and specifically the Japan example made me think of a commonly used saying in Finland, describing its systems and customs as: “Everything works, but nothing will work out”. Other conventionally “less efficient” countries are described as the opposite.
engels 06.08.26 at 7:42 pm
Of course if friction with the system can benefit us, by bringing us together, it’s also true that friction between us can benefit the system, something our Silicon Valley overlords have understood for some time.
Matt 06.08.26 at 8:26 pm
on reflection that would be a terrible idea; people being brought together to grumble about how nothing works properly any more, the country is going to the dogs etc. is one of the things fuelling the AfD, Nigel Farage etc.
Joe Heath had a nice brief discussion of this the other day on his blog. I think it’s a huge mistake for people on “the left” to think that poorly provided public services don’t turn people against “the state” and in favour of people who will offer to “help” them by getting rid of such things.
There is clearly some connection between social isolation, fascism, and trains arriving in time or not.
I am not 100% sure of Mr.Mister’s point here, but there does seem to be some hint in the post, and some comments, that actually it’s a good thing in some ways if the trains are bad, you have to wait in line a long time for things, etc., but, really, no. It’s not good, and it doesn’t lead to good outcomes.
Kenny Easwaran 06.09.26 at 12:35 am
That footnote reminds me of this humor piece from the New Yorker nearly a decade ago about working from home: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from-home
D. S. Battistoli 06.09.26 at 5:48 am
This is true, but it may be downstream of the ultimate sufficient cause: that tech companies offer capital owners and their agents an opportunity to maximize capital returns by minimizing the largest cost category—labor.
When catering to the ultra-rich, this constraint goes away, because the rich have enough disposable money to make companies willing to devote to them as much labor as they may desire. This is why top-end hotels offer not just concierge service, but butler services to their patrons: you get a human being to speak to about any aspect of your daily affairs that you may wish to do, and that human being is at your beck and call.
Companies fear bad ratings, but they fear paying more than the absolute minimum in salaries even more (to head off a possible objection, I’d note that Deutsche Bahn is a state-owned corporation, and even full-fledged government departments use tech vendors to substitute product costs for labor costs).
MisterMr 06.09.26 at 9:49 am
@Matt 11
“I am not 100% sure of Mr.Mister’s point here”
It’s just a joke because a common pro-fascist refrain in Italy was that “at least with Mussolini trains arrive on time”, the logic being that Mussolini’s authoritarian methods were good for something, although in reality trains arriving comparatively on time was due to the fact that shortly before WW1 the government uniformed italian railways (that previously had different standards because were built before unification) and fascism basically reaped the benefits of the pre-war investiment.
Lisa Herzog 06.09.26 at 9:52 am
Thanks for all the comments and observations; I fully share the point by notGoodenough that we shouldn’t “need” such friction for moments of encounter in everyday life, and I also agree with the deeper problems having to do with efficiency, labor being seen only as a cost (except for the super-rich who always get personal service, as D.S. Battistoli points out – this will probably get more extreme with more AI, because “the masses” will only get digital interfaces in even more areas). What I do think is special about the encounters caused by friction, though, is that they often bring about the most unexpected encounters. Many more structured encounters in people’s lives do not cut across boundaries of class, job, origin, etc., and many activities that have been recommended in the literature (neighborhood activities, tidying up parks together, etc.) in practice reinforce segregation along various lines. The same is, of course, true for public transport in the sense that the most privileged parts of society would simply not use it…
engels 06.09.26 at 10:49 am
I’ve moderated my demands: I no longer want things to work again, I just want to be told “we apologise for the inconvenience” instead of “oops something were wrong” when they don’t.
Can Mussolini stop the buses terminating early? Asking for a passenger.
https://www.mylondon.news/lifestyle/travel/london-bus-driver-routes-stop-26501729
M Caswell 06.09.26 at 4:49 pm
A frictionless world would be an inhuman nightmare.
Matt 06.09.26 at 8:46 pm
Many more structured encounters in people’s lives do not cut across boundaries of class, job, origin, etc., and many activities that have been recommended in the literature … in practice reinforce segregation along various lines. The same is, of course, true for public transport in the sense that the most privileged parts of society would simply not use it…
One of the areas where I had the most frequent interactions with people from a wide variety of backgrounds was when I was part of a canoe and kayak club in Philadelphia. It was difficult to be very involved if one was very poor, because even though the club had equipment it let people use, it was hard to be fully involved unless you had at least some equipment and some sort of car, but membership ranged from lower middle class to quite wealthy, and people had wildly different types of jobs and backgrounds. (engineers seem, oddly, to be somewhat over-represented in kayaking, but otherwise there was a huge range of backgrounds.) While doing kayaking we’d also regularly meet all sorts of people “on the river”. This sort of experience makes me think that there’s a good chance that, when people have the opportunity to take part in activities that they enjoy, they can come together, and that this is likely to be more meaningful and have more impact that the sort of brief interactions seen here.
On transit, of course the worse transit works, the more that people who can avoid it will avoid it, so the sorts of “frictions” seen here seem to me to be likely to be counter-productive if you want to see different groups of people mix. I don’t really like driving, and when I’ve been able to do so, I’ve taken transit rather than drive, but only if I can depend on it being on time most all of the time, safe, and at least semi-comfortable most of the time. I don’t think that’s unusual, and I probably have more tolerance for some discomfort here than many people. But, the more that the “friction” goes up, the more that people who can avoid it will do so. So, it seems to me, the better option is to provide good, well-functioning services.
J, not that one 06.10.26 at 1:18 pm
Of course valuing “efficiency” over “normal social relations” is bad and wrong, and in-the-old-days people talked to each other and did things the way they had always done things, and didn’t disrupt their human need for socialization by trying to make things easier whenever they weren’t frictionless. But the idea that we should enjoy poor government service because then we’ll talk to the government employees and one another more strikes me as a kind of argument I’ve come to hate: this thing which is obviously bad is actually good because it serves some other extraneous purpose which a more sophisticated person would understand is quite important. To take Heath’s example, mentioned by Matt, would we say that food deserts (which are fairly common in poorer neighborhoods in New York) are actually good because they get poor people out of their neighborhoods and into the neighborhoods of the better-off, where they’ll be exposed to “a better class of people”? Obviously not. (At least I hope not.)
JPL 06.11.26 at 1:40 am
Communities are not (and never were) meant to be atomistic. That idea doesn’t work out. I would guess that it is a relatively recent development, but I don’t have any idea what the reason for that development might be. I engage in these kinds of interactions with strangers all the time, some extending into personal histories and aspirations, exploring mutual interests, etc., and I’m not an outgoing sort of person at all. Quite the opposite. I don’t think friction is a necessary condition. I always read people’s t- shirt messages and start an interchange with that, for example. Not because I think it is the thing to do, but just because it strikes a chord of possible common interest and I express a thought to the person. Always amiable, of course. And 99% of the time, people are amiable back. I don’t do it excessively, only when it’s natural. What I don’t understand is why are people walking around in public with headphones on and a sour face? I think most people like to have these conversations and they are actually open to the idea. When I’m in public, I’m always hoping someone will start a conversation, and often they do.
MisterMr 06.11.26 at 10:50 am
@engels 16
Only if you can prove that buses are a sign of nationalistic macho technological power.
Maybe if you tell Farage that trains are for continentals and buses are for true britons it will work out.
engels 06.11.26 at 10:58 am
Whatever doesn’t make us kill each other, brings us closer (probably sounds better in German…)
What I don’t understand is why are people walking around in public with headphones on and a sour face?
Idk but the Greeks had a word for them:
https://greekreporter.com/2025/06/03/word-idiot-ancient-greek/
A frictionless world would be an inhuman nightmare.
Great for ice hockey though!
ETB 06.11.26 at 4:45 pm
While I enjoyed the thoughtful examination of an interesting phenomenon, I can’t help but fear that AI-powered content mills will soon transmute it into “Frictional Friendships: Why the 5-Hour Commute Is Making a Comeback”, to sit proudly alongside “Meet the Workers Choosing to Stay Online After Midnight!”, “The Unexpected Health Benefits of the 50-Calorie Diet”, and “Coffinmaxxing: Why Gen Z Is Reconsidering the Burden of Excessive Mobility”…
engels 06.11.26 at 4:57 pm
Only if you can prove that buses are a sign of nationalistic macho technological power.
Just last week I got called a “leftie bastard” and told “fuck off” after I politely told a van driver who was blocking my car it wasn’t a great place to park (actually it was illegal).
I still don’t know if it was driving or wanting the law followed that seemed “left-wing” but either way: anything is possible!
somebody who remembers 06.13.26 at 3:36 pm
it’s just white supremacy (as it always is, in america) – the pleasant notion of talking to a friendly neighbor on the slightly delayed bus evaporates if you might accidentally be reminded that you have a black neighbor – better, after all, to eliminate all public transit, all those who support public transit, and their families.
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