What Friction Is For

On texting, AI, and the friction that makes other people real.

Photo by Ian Talmacs on Unsplash

When I was writing The Missive, I was thinking about my relationship with my sisters. Specifically, about trying to build an adult relationship with them from a different country. There is also a gap in years (my youngest sister is 12 years younger than me). The different time zones meant texts made the most sense. Having my sisters on WhatsApp meant I could text them whenever I wanted to tell them something, without worrying about where or when they were. I would complain about the snow when they were experiencing a heatwave. Often, texting with them felt like we were talking past each other on parallel planes.

Communicating through written text isn't a new technology. People have been writing letters and leaving notes to each other for a minute now. Asynchronous communication fits around our busy lives and lets us draft and polish what we want to say in ways that real-time calls or conversations don't. It means we can respond rather than react, and that's usually a good thing for relationships.

But when we only present people with our polished, edited selves, our true selves remain hidden even if we are completely honest with the other person and ourselves when we write. Something in what surprises us, or the first word we think of, reveals our prejudices and how we see the world in a way that is uniquely us. Polishing ourselves--and answering when we have time--makes communication smoother and, in doing so, takes away friction.

Working on The Missive, a story about what communicating via text messages does to a sisters' relationship, I started noticing the same tradeoffs when collaborating first with Claude, Anthropic's AI, and then with Hannah Barr, the actor who read Shannon's voice notes for me.

Collaborating with Claude was frictionless. The Missive had been lying in my proverbial drawer for years because I couldn't get it to be exactly what I wanted it to be. Working with Claude helped me transmit my creative vision in a way I couldn't before. It helped me bring readers into Shannon and Becca's experience as it unfolds.

But collaborating with Hannah (and with other voice actors) is different. It's not just that humans go on holidays and take time to respond. Voice actors, I've found, read my words in a way that isn't wrong, but wasn't how I heard them in my head. And that gap is both what creates friction and what makes the characters become actual people rather than just words in my head, or even on the page.

Polished, frictionless relationships are easier. It's much nicer if we can always be calm and collected, and always be there when the other person needs us, no matter the hour. AI chatbots are designed to be frictionless. This is why they are so alluring. We get real value from collaborating with Claude: it builds what we ask for without complaining, without offering opinions about it, without sleeping. Relationships with sisters are easier when they fit around my schedule, when we never annoy each other because we took the time to consider our response. But as Kirsten Bell puts it, annoyance is the price we pay for community. Smoothing out the other person might make the relationship easier, but it replaces them with a version of them I have in my head.