Against Convenience
Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease
by Gabe Bullard (Harlequin Trade Publishing)
This book is a polemic that suggests the problem with our current society is that we have made it too convenient. Enabled, but not created, by contemporary technology, society chooses designs that provide, or aim to provide, solutions for ‘pain points.’ But doing this leaves us worse off and less happy.
It references Bullshit Jobs more than once, , and feels like a spiritual successor. It is unapologetic. The idea is ‘truthy,’ something generally acknowledged that is accurate but also hard to define. It is a solid essay that an author extended to book length, occasionally suffering for it.
The biggest Bullshit Jobs connection amounts to the future not being what it was made out to be. Technology continues to improve, but it feels like there was some broken promise. The conditions that did not improve feel material and the ones that it did feel fleeting. What happened?
For me, the answer is expressed the best by XKCD. Rephrased, I am sorry that cannot give you a flying car. I am too busy flying a manned mission around the moon.
In Bullshit Jobs, the act is the creation of the eponymous jobs in some sort of pseduo-sinecure or moral justification. In this book, it is the catalog of changes that are labeled as improvements, but create wholly different problems: Time Square Red, Time Square Blue, but like for groceries.
There are a few things that elevate this book other “X is leading us astray” books.
The first is that it is scrumptiously sourced. The evidence may not line up, but the data is there for you to compare.
The second is its sense of humility. An easy solution would contravene the message of the book against easy solutions. The author is expert in refuting his own arguments, and routinely would address my compliant about some point in the text, usually to realize the problems of the observation. This works well because the reader gets both the polemical argument and the drawing of the sting from it.
There are points where the author loses the thread, mostly in the more filler-like sections. There are some odd targets at points (lofi hip-hop radio: beats to relax/study to is a moral failing?). There is a deep myopia to the book, almost an ego-centrism. Nostalgia is a slippery slope, and you can always allow for a further step back as when the real good times were, where as this book tends to take it to somewhere around 1980 and let it stand. There is a singularly bad section at the end where the author slips into an Atlantic article, a Brooksian fugue of the amazing experience that he has when he eschews convenience. I will spare the specifics here, but my first thought about his story of was “this is a man who has never ended up on the smoking car on the L.”
I was leading into a criticism of the book based on the distinction between some convenience not being present and someone not using some convenience that is there. I think about it as the BookTok argument. I am content with my social media usage, because I avoid some and others I highly curate, so my experience is pretty delightful. I know what I get something from and what I do not. People forget you need to put in the work.
But that criticism is as much where the book shines, because this is not, for instance, a moral panic book. The internet is not uniquely brain breaking. Rather it enables a set of preexisting tendencies. The answer is not to revert to the past, however recent, but to consider.
It is the best book I have read this year so far. It has answers, but it knows the limits of those answers. Even where I think it gets it wrong, I find myself still thinking about it, to the point of changing my behavior. That is meaningful.
I think that there is a growing consensus around…something. It amounts to what I wrote above: you have to do the work. But I think about this book, and The Boring Internet, and Chokepoint Capitalism, and Despotification. It is one of the reflections of that XKCD comment, where something about the ease or lack of novelty makes us lose track of the incredible effort involved, or what even takes effort. And of all possible tangents, I think about Jimmy Carter.
If I did put in the work, I think that I would come to that grander synthesis there about taking back agency. I think that the author is wrong to label this convenience. Convenience as a concept picks up too many errant pieces and makes contentious things that ought not to be. But this book remains one of the better aggregations of that something, full of useful provocations that can help you as part of your daily experience.
My thanks to the author, Gabe Bullard, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Harlequin Trade Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 
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