Embrace the clunk

Technology promised to make things easier. An escalator to erase life’s tedious steps and free you from the supposed burden of collaboration; enabling the one to do what used to require the many. All it takes is removing a pesky human trait known as agency.

Seek not the seamless experience. Forget about finding the app that harmonizes everything in your life. There is no system to rule them all. Meaningful processes are clunky. So is life itself. Embrace the clunk.

You need a little friction. It helps to scribble the newsletter out in a notebook, revise it in a text editor, and shift that blob online to revise a final time. It’s not efficient.

The clunk is also known as “craft.”

You don’t learn anything from one-click experiences. Video games are all clunk: transport an ancient artifact from one castle to another, while fighting enemies along the way. It’s not the most direct path from A to B and that’s the point.

An escalator is just a set of stairs that refuses to teach you anything.