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Social networks like Facebook seem impelled by a similar aspiration. Through the statistical "discovery" of potential friends, the provision of "Like" buttons and other clickable tokens of affection, and the automated management of many of the time-consuming aspects of personal relations, they seek to streamline the messy process of affiliation. Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates all of this as "frictionless sharing"--the removal of conscious effort from socializing. But there's something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren't forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data. People aren't notes on a network grid. The bonds require trust and courtesy and sacrifice, all of which, at least to a technocrat's mind, are sources of inefficiency and inconvenience. Removing the friction from social attachments doesn't strengthen them; it weakens them. It makes them more like the attachments between consumers and products--easily formed and just as easily broken.
Like meddlesome parents who never let their kids do anything on their own, Google, Facebook, and other makers of personal software end up demeaning and diminishing qualities of character that, at least in the past, have been seen as essential to a full and vigorous life: ingenuity, curiosity, independence, perseverance, daring. It may be that in the future we'll only experience such virtues vicariously, though the exploits of action figures like John Marston in the fantasy worlds we enter through screens.
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