by There’s a small rebellion happening. Nothing loud — no marches, no manifestos. It shows up in quiet ways: someone pulls out a fountain pen at a coffee shop, a friend mentions they just picked up a film camera, another posts a photo of a half-knitted scarf with the caption “third attempt, still wonky.”
On the surface, these look like nostalgia. Retro aesthetics. But I think there’s something else going on — something about the friction itself.
Modern tools are incredibly good at removing friction. Editing tools fix your mistakes before you make them. AI suggests your next sentence. Apps streamline every process to the point where the process itself becomes invisible. We can do more with less effort than ever before. And yet, there’s this pull in the opposite direction. Toward things you can’t undo with a keystroke.
Film photography forces you to wait. You can’t chimp the LCD after every shot. You frame, you guess, you move on. The gap between pressing the shutter and seeing the result is wide open, and something lives in that gap — anticipation, uncertainty, a small leap of faith.
Handwriting has no undo button. Every crossed-out word is permanent. You can see the path of the thought: where it stumbled, where it changed direction. A page of handwriting is a fossil of attention — every tremor and pause preserved.
Knitting is about the slowness of accumulation. Row by row, hours turned into something you can hold. The mistakes aren’t imperfections to be smoothed away; they’re the record of a human paying attention, lost in rhythm, making something one loop at a time.
I don’t think this is about rejecting technology. I think it’s about remembering that friction has value too. The hard way leaves marks. It shows you where you’ve been. There’s something about a process where you can’t fake the result — where the time you invested is written directly into the thing you made. That’s worth keeping around.
— Teganna