Interfrictions. Review of: Jakko Kemper, Frictionlessness: The Silicon Valley Philosophy of Seamless Technology and the Aesthetic Value of Imperfection

As the morning sun filters through my windows, I greet the day with a simple, “Alexa, good morning.” The Amazon Echo’s blue ring glows, and Alexa’s voice responds cheerfully, “Good morning! Here’s your daily briefing.” She provides the weather, the latest news, and my schedule for the day, embodying the idea that frictionless interactive elements that respond to the user’s action alleviate the user’s fears .¹

Frictionless is a pervasive design principle defined by user-friendliness, connectivity, and optimization, involving the infrastructural qualities of technologies. In this sense, it aims at a relational configuration in which objects – or their digital representations – do not resist our interaction but present themselves as entirely transparent and inert. Jakko Kemper’s inquiry revolves around the problem of friction and imperfection, their absence, and their temporality. Firmly anchored in Continental philosophy and a media-pharmacological approach, it draws from the work of Jacques Derrida², Bernard Stiegler³ and Martin Hägglund⁴ using imperfection as a means of both critical analysis and theoretical resolution, against the normalisation of frictionless. If I could describe where the theme of this book fits in, I would say that it is unequivocally a book about media temporality.
Technical objects materialize time in a particular fashion and thereby also impact and restrict one’s temporal perception⁵

In its pars construens, the book offers a pharmacological reading of technology that work to expose the structural conditions of production, inviting readers to engage with the socio-material processes obscured by seamless interfaces. User experience is presented as inseparable from systems of labour and exploitation. This implies the main premise from which the analysis starts: that any serious analysis of technology must confront the hidden infrastructures and lives shaped and often exploited by the processes that sustain it⁶. Emerging from this initial gesture, the argument turns to the temporal shaping of imperfection, seen as a fundamental part of existence. Here, the formal opposition between imperfection and frictionless is essentially paradoxical, as the pursuit of perfect smoothness renders the idea of perfection desirable and perpetually unattainable.

I understand imperfection as existentially primal insofar as it is descriptive of the a priori conditions of existence⁷

There is an aesthetic value of imperfection proposed by Kemper that rests on the recognition of the “existential primacy of imperfection, or the [onto]logical impossibility of perfection”⁷. In its aesthetic manifestation, imperfection makes visible the deeper ontological instability that dwells at the very heart of being[1, ibid.]. Intimately tied to our awareness of mortality and time, imperfection can also shape our capacity for care and desire, a view contained in Martin Hägglund’s notion of chronolibido⁹. Because we can recognise finitude, we are uniquely accountable for the material expressions of imperfection, autoimmunity, and spectrality, accepting life’s limits obliges us to answer for how these conditions surface in everyday life¹⁰.

An aesthetic of imperfection can heighten one’s sense that there is no escaping finitude, that fragility therefore describes a collective and ineradicable condition, and that perfect control can never be achieved.¹¹

Technologies, like all things, carry the potential for breakdown, malfunction, and eventual obsolescence. The Derridean category of autoimmunity helps to clarify that finitude should not be understood here as something imposed from without, but rather as an immanent necessity within the structures themselves. As the author puts it, autoimmunity speaks directly to the existential condition we must confront, and in fact, “Autoimmunity, in sum, reveals how a logic of finitude is not something imposed from the outside. It is, rather, always-already ‘requisite in the very structure that it solicits’”[1, p.21], acting as a resistance where “a claim of perfection would effectively amount to a declaration of the abolishment of time”¹².

Technology is a constitutive factor in how the temporal is perceived and aesthetically experienced, and that technologies preform pathways for the direction, intensification and diminution of care.¹³

It is through the “aestheticizations of temporality and finitude”¹⁴ that humans can confront the existential realities of perishing, suffering, and loss. These are modes of being that cultivate attunement to the fragile conditions of life, motivating a proactive resistance to the erasures and sufferings perpetuated by indifferent technological systems. Care emerges, at the end, as a counterpoint to the imperatives of non-frictional technological interactions, where technology, as Kemper sustain, is incapable of such attachments because it operates outside the temporal and affective registers that make care possible.

Because care and desire are informed by the anticipation of death, technologies can potentially deepen one’s investment in and relation to them by formalizing and aestheticizing the condition of their finitude.¹⁵

The chronolibidinal aesthesis follows from the recognition of a world in which the absence of friction is the condition of possibility for an endless cycle of consumption. New devices and updates are perpetually pursued, discouraging a sustained temporality of care, particularly care for technological objects. For the author, it would therefore be impossible think about an economy of care without referring to the idea of infinity, as this would ignore the fact that care can acquire meaning precisely because it arises under conditions of finitude, vulnerability, and imperfection¹⁶. Thus, in the technological and the existential realms, the acceptance of imperfection is the access to deeper emotional engagement and a more profound sense of responsibility.

To conclude, Kemper thoughtfully examines the temporal condition of a frictionless, fictional world. Nonetheless, there could have been room for further theoretical expansion on the hypotheses the author poses, particularly as these implications are left somewhat as labels for tangible results.¹⁷. I wonder if there is something that can be thought of starting from pharmacology and not about pharmacology, an idea explored substantially in other contexts of pharmacologies of media, a way to offer an escape from the philosophical deconstructions of binary oppositions crucial to western logocentric tradition. The argument appears to concentrate more on deconstruction, historically speaking, than on exploring what lies beyond it. While this is a necessary critique, it leaves the reader with an open question about what forms of thought or shared practice might emerge in its wake. That said, and ultimately, ‘Frictionlessness’ can challenge readers’ expectations of technology and invite reflection on how imperfections, far from being obstacles, can enrich our daily interaction with digital devices and platforms. The exploration of a cronolibidinal aesthetics offers a philosophical critique for the ideal of seamless technology. As Kemper suggests, imperfection is, and can be, a generative force, a source of affective density, and a mode of experience in which friction is existentially more significant than the sterile continuity of lessness.

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