To be human is to live with friction. That’s something AI boosters will never understand

Alexander Hurst

The Guardian: 23 Apr 2026

We’re being sold a world where there’s no room for reflection or spontaneity. This is the Black Mirror stage of capitalism.

For the better part of two decades, Silicon Valley has been selling us seamlessness in place of friction, and we’ve become enthusiastic buyers. A few months ago, I felt a slight pulse of revulsion at a LinkedIn post whose author described how much she preferred Amazon’s recommendation algorithm to bookstores. The algorithm, she wrote, knew her and so it was efficient: with the implication that getting lost in a labyrinth of authors and covers one might or might not connect with was a waste of time – was friction.

Life happens in the slowed down space of possibility that friction creates. AI, on the other hand, is a luge of endless acceleration that turns reflection, which requires time, into certain defeat.

Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest financiers, such as Marc Andreessen, boast of their own lack of introspection, seeing it as a waste of time. This is the spirit of AI, fuelling the unexamined life, and I can’t help seeing an epochal spiritual crisis emerging from the wreckage. A social emptiness, a desiccation left in place of what the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector alludes to when she writes about “the force of body in the waters of the world”, and how it “captures that other thing that I’m really saying because I myself cannot”.

Boy, the love affair the left had with Silicone Valley sure ended fast.

I wonder what happened....