By accepted gospel of product management, my experience in part II of this trilogy should have warded me off analogue photography and the search for friction forever. I should have retreated into contactless, algorithmic comfort. Instead, I went out looking for more.

It’s just before two in the afternoon. I’m sat in the back room of a pub in Liverpool, John Lennon staring down at me from the wall, expression equal parts disinterest and derision. Unsurprising, given I’ve just placed a Kodak from 1996 on the saloon bar table. There’s no point taking any pictures in here, it’s too dark and I’m using a roll of Fujifilm that expired 20 years ago. Old film stock is unpredictable, so better not waste the shots in badly lit rooms.

On Side 1 of Television’s 1977 LP ‘Marquee Moon’, you’ll hear Tom Verlaine sneer: “How does a snake get out its skin? Here's a depiction…” The answer is of course ‘Friction’, as the song title has already given away. Use that F word in a tech environment though and people recoil in horror. There are very few concepts more repulsive to a UX designer or Product manager than that of friction. Metrics are dedicated to the elimination of friction in all its unseemly forms.

For decades the businesses of expertise, craftsmanship and luxury have run on a simple exchange: you paid for authority because authority was grounded in the living presence of a specific person. A marketer. A strategist. A lawyer. Someone who could sit across from you, who had walked through the problem themselves, whose judgement was embodied in a living mind that you could hire and pay. Presence became the marker of truth. Not the accuracy of what they said, but the fact t