Friction Built Better Music Than Algorithms Ever Will
Erick the Architect, producer for Flatbush Zombies, still misses his BlackBerry.
Not for nostalgia's sake — for the keyboard that required intention. The BlackBerry died in 2016, killed by touchscreens and the promise that removing friction from tools would free us to create more.
Erick didn't get the memo. He uses the device anyway, alongside modern phones, because something about the tactile demand of pressing actual keys changed what happened when he worked. The resistance forced deliberation. You couldn't scroll reflexively through eight hours of nothing while claiming productivity.
This is the exact moment when institutions begin their decline. They have optimized for speed instead of depth and mistake the two for the same thing. Marshall Berman called it the drive to eliminate "all the friction that makes us human". The result is always the same. You get faster access to shallower thinking. The container expands.
The constraint — the friction of limited distribution, of having to convince people your work mattered — was what had forced vision.
”The music industry did this in the 2010s. Streaming promised accessibility would create artists — instead it created playlist-placeholders. The algorithm rewarded consistency over vision, the three-minute dopamine hit over the album as argument. By 2024, the most celebrated producers were the ones who figured out how to make music that worked better as background than foreground.
Erick's BlackBerry preference reveals what we actually traded away. Not efficiency. Not democratization of tools. We traded away the conditions that made sustained focus possible, then called it progress.
The difference this time is clear. He knows what he lost. Most don't. They've never worked against the friction, so they can't feel the absence. They've only known the frictionless surface, which means they don't know what's missing from their own work. They just feel the ambient anxiety that they're not as good as the people who did.
