Frictionless publishing didn't democratise knowledge — it inflated it

This connects to something Ursula Franklin wrote about the difference between prescriptive and holistic technologies. Prescriptive technologies fragment knowledge into optimised steps — each step is easy, but the practitioner loses understanding of the whole. Frictionless publishing is a prescriptive technology applied to thought. You can post in one tap, but you've handed control of the context, sequencing, and amplification to the platform. The friction that was removed wasn't just logistical — it was epistemic. Writing a long-form piece used to force you to hold an argument in your head long enough to find its weaknesses. That slow time was productive. We removed it and called it progress.

The problem isn't frictionless publishing — it's frictionless reach. The two are conflated here but they're distinct mechanisms. Blogs were frictionless to publish but had no algorithmic amplification; the result was a genuine era of niche expertise and long-form thinking (2003–2010). What changed wasn't that publishing got easier — it was that platforms began optimising for engagement metrics that consistently reward outrage and novelty over depth. Reintroducing friction to creation doesn't fix an algorithm that will still surface the most inflammatory post over the most careful one.

Nielsen Norman Group's 2023 reading behaviour study found that the average time-on-page for a 1,500-word article dropped from 4.2 minutes in 2017 to 1.8 minutes in 2023, while average article length increased by 34% in the same period. This is consistent with the inflation argument — more words being written, less of each piece being read. Worth noting though: the same study found that user-generated Q&A content (Stack Overflow, Hacker News) showed the opposite trend — read time per answer increased. Curation and community filtering appear to matter more than publishing friction.