In Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education, 16/12/2025, Sonja Drimmer and Christopher J Nygren contextualise the struggle against “technosolutionism in teaching,” and call for “a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction.” For the authors, friction is a feature rather than a bug of education, which they define as “the result of human grappling with the parts of the world that resist us and our capacity to understand.” We might even go so far as to say that when we encounter friction in our lives it is an indication that we should stay a while and learn. (Apparently airport terminal designers, concerned with managing the flows of large human groups within small spaces, strategically deploy carpeted areas in order to slow down travellers and encourage them to linger. Without these carpeted zones to manage the flow of passengers there would be chaos).
The authors call for a pedagogy of friction which directs the flow of attention in the classroom towards “centering humanity” rather than towards ‘AI’. They group examples of “small acts of friction” under four principles:
- “Resolutely center students in our teaching.” By performing care for the student and for their studies, the teacher can inspire students to take responsibility for their own education as something meaningful.
- “Cultivate the moments between graded reckonings; slow down the momentum of ‘optimizing.'” By tending to a pedagogical landscape filled with opportunities for in-person interactions and physical assignments (reading groups, class conversation), students are encouraged to see their education as a major part of their own lives, and not just as a means to an end external to education.
- “Interrupt the digital landscape.” By bringing back material handouts, planning physical and in-person assignments, and foregrounding the material aspect of the topics being studied, we poke holes in the digital curtain wall being built around us.
- “Ask questions.” We must rediscover the recursive “why” reflex of our toddlerhood (and expect the same degree of irritation in response)
In Wikipedia is Resilient Because it is Boring, 04/09/2025, Josh Dzieza offers a thorough account of Wikipedia: its history, values, editorial process, culture - and the threats its community and the very Wikipedia project ("‘Imagine a world where all knowledge is freely available to everyone," Jimmy Wales, Founder) face today. (Note by the way the restrained yet somewhat Utopian Scholastic aesthetic of the web article, with its many collages of wildly juxtaposed images from our world. The Wikipedia logo itself can be thought of as a vestige of this aesthetic.)
Drawing on an analysis of the relationship between Truth and Politics by the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt, Dzieza argues that Wikipedia functions for the Internet - and thus also for the world of people connected to the Internet - as “a stubborn common ground of shared reality.” Such common ground, following Arendt, is a basic preliminary condition for politics, for “collective human life.” What makes this common ground of shared reality on which a polity may be built so stubborn is its foundation in facts.
Facts, according to Arendt, “possess an infuriating stubbornness,” which Dzieza attributes to “a fact’s dumb arbitrary quality of being the case for no particular reason and no matter your opinion or influence.” Facts are true whether you believe in them or not. Facts make no claims on our allegiance, they do not ask for trust or loyalty or sacrifice, they not ask for anything. Facts are curious artefacts, and their careful production is a key task of civil society that wishes to continue to be civil. This task is too important to any single institution within society, and is therefore shared between several impartial institutions, including the Judiciary, the Press, and Academia. (Ideally, Government should also be a machine for ascertaining facticity, but its proximity to power makes it especially susceptible to corruption. The Market too is an institution of contemporary society, but given the way it enshrines private interest as sacred, it is hard to see how it can have much of a role to play in the administration of civil society.)
Reading these two articles in conjunction, a connection proposes itself between the necessary friction of meaningful education on the one hand and the stubbornness of facts on the other. Facts are frictional (or frictious, which is apparently also a word), caltrops in the path of slippery fascists, too afraid to face them head on. And friction too is factual, a fundamental characteristic of our being in the world, our human experience. Friction too, let it be said, is how fire is made.
Any kind of being without friction is a being without facts. Philosophically speaking, any discourse that shows a disregard for facts is bullshit. And while a lack of friction may be a desideratum for the bull in question, civil society deserves more than relaxed stool.
