Hanif Abdurraqib's essay "Our Longing for Inconvenience" in the New Yorker lands the same week that the creative software industry collectively decided Adobe's time is up. The timing is not ironic. It's diagnostic. We are living through a moment when the tools that removed friction, the Creative Cloud subscription, the algorithmic recommendation, the vertical feed, have become the friction themselves. And the nostalgia for older, harder tools is cresting precisely as those tools start winning again.
Friction as Feature, Not Bug
Abdurraqib's argument is subtle: modern convenience has made us incapable of tolerating the inconveniences we claim to miss. The cassette tape is romantic until you actually need to rewind it. The darkroom is poetic until it's your Tuesday night. But the revolt against Adobe is something slightly different. Figma, Canva, Affinity, Procreate: these aren't deliberately inconvenient. They're just not Adobe. The creative community's rejection of Creative Cloud is less about nostalgia for older tools and more about rejecting a subscription to someone else's taste infrastructure. A 2024 paper in Information Systems Research by Jiang et al. found that platform lock-in fatigue accelerates when switching costs feel punitive rather than technical. Adobe's pricing made switching feel like punishment. That's a different kind of friction.
When Empires Fall, Watch the Margins
Rachel Youn's kinetic sculpture work, covered by The Verge this week, builds with discarded consumer technology: vacuum cleaners, massage devices, baby rockers. It's a practice that literalizes Abdurraqib's thesis. The objects we abandoned because they were inconvenient become art when someone finds the friction in them beautiful again. Adobe's competitors are doing the same thing. They're not building better software, necessarily. They're building software that doesn't make you feel trapped. The empire falls not to a better conqueror but to the accumulated weight of its own extraction. For founders watching incumbents stumble, TurboFund's fundraising pipeline guide is worth a read: the window when a dominant player loses goodwill is short.