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The programmers of the commercial web have always seen their goal as the elimination of distance and friction from transactions, and that objective has, not surprisingly, come to shape online social networks. But, when carried too far, the minimization of transaction costs in personal relations ends up having the effect of reducing those relationships to mere transactions. Intimacy without distance is not intimacy, and sharing without friction is not sharing. Qualities of tenderness become, in the end, forms of commerce. “The straight line,” Adorno went on to say, as if he were explaining, sixty years before the fact, Facebook’s social graph, “is now regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
