Legendary London restaurateur Jeremy King often tells a striking story about a speech he once delivered to his employees. Standing before his staff, he posed a hypothetical scenario that cuts to the heart of modern commerce. “I could replace you all with robots,” he told them. “They’re never late, they’re not constantly surreptitiously looking at their phones, they don’t forget anything, they don’t call in hungover.”
After letting the weight of the statement settle over the room, he delivered the crucial caveat. “But I’m not going to,” he continued. “Because they also have no empathy, no instinct, no intuition, and they can’t love.”
For decades, the overarching promise of the technology sector has been the systematic removal of human friction. Software developers, app designers, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists have relentlessly pitched a world where every minor annoyance, delay, and personal interaction is smoothed over by automation. Yet, for the global elite and the high-end luxury market, friction is frequently the entire point of the experience. It is the person who remembers your favorite table without consulting a database, the tailor who insists on three exhaustive fittings rather than a digital scan, the hotel manager who knows your mother’s name, or the unexpected arrival of a handwritten note. Platforms and consumer apps were originally designed to make everyday life seamless, but in doing so, they have often rendered it anonymous, sterile, and deeply lonely.
This growing cultural pushback has even captured the public imagination. Writing in The Cut, journalist Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined the term “friction-maxxing” in an article that went viral. The concept describes the deliberate choice to do things the old-fashioned way, actively resisting the endless proliferation of time-saving digital tools in order to preserve genuine, meaningful human experiences.
For twenty years, Silicon Valley has sold the exact opposite premise: that the ultimate service is one requiring almost no personal attention whatsoever. The modern consumer journey has been standardized into a series of isolated actions. Tap the screen. Swipe your card. Check yourself in at a kiosk. Order your meal from a QR code pasted to the table. Let an anonymous algorithm track and remember your preferences.
And yet, at the very highest tiers of the global market, this trajectory is increasingly beginning to reverse itself.
If the fundamental purpose of eating dinner at a restaurant were simply to ingest calories, the most efficient establishment would be the one that got you in and out the fastest. If the primary purpose of purchasing a bespoke suit were merely obtaining raw fabric to cover your body, insisting on three separate fittings would represent terrible, inefficient service. True luxury deliberately and defiantly refuses that logic. It banks on the deliberate inclusion of time, attention, and human effort.
Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. professor and the author of Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, views the gradual return of human friction not as a passing fad, but as an inevitable economic and psychological correction.
“Wealth searches out scarcity,” Turkle observes, explaining how high-end consumption habits evolve alongside technological breakthroughs. When extreme wealth first associated high technology with a novel form of elite attention, people dreamed of robotic assistants that would answer their every whim and remove them entirely from the world of needing a lower class of caregivers. It was designed to be friction-free, ensuring you would never have to rub shoulders or interact with strangers. Now, as nearly every consumer on the planet carries a 24-hour helper in their pocket—a chatbot programmed to simulate care—our collective dreams have shifted toward what is now truly scarce: human beings who genuinely care.
At the upper echelon of the market, human interaction itself has transformed into an ultimate luxury good.
Rory Sutherland, author and president emeritus of Ogilvy Consulting, often illustrates this phenomenon through what he calls “the doorman fallacy.” He describes a hypothetical management consultant tasked with optimizing hotel operations who defines the role of a traditional doorman purely as someone who opens a heavy door. Viewing this as an inefficiency, the consultant replaces the human employee with an automated, cost-saving sliding door mechanism.
“The only problem with this is that doormen, in reality, create value in all manner of different ways,” Sutherland explains. They hail taxis in downpours, they recognize frequent guests by sight, they perform an invaluable, unwritten measure of physical security, and they discreetly exchange critical information with other doormen regarding potentially dangerous or criminal guests. Consequently, the management consultants frequently take credit for the upfront cost savings when they install the automatic door, but they are never around to suffer the long-term, compounding consequences of that loss in service quality.
What societies have witnessed over the past few years is a quiet systemic replacement of what sociologists call “weak ties”—the casual acquaintances, friendly neighborhood shop assistants, chatty local vendors, and loose professional networks that provide low-stakes, everyday social contact. The modern realization is that these seemingly trivial interactions are actually incredibly important, and perhaps invaluable, to overall human happiness and mental well-being. The market is slowly waking up to the fact that these touchpoints, far from being economically inefficient waste, are precisely what deliver genuine luxury and emotional comfort.
Marie-Louise Sciò, the creative director and chief executive of Pellicano Hotels, acknowledges that technology has played a vital and necessary role in hospitality over the past decade, helping to streamline operations and make the guest experience more efficient behind the scenes.
“Digital tools have transformed the way we book, communicate, and manage hotels, and they continue to be incredibly valuable—especially behind the scenes,” Sciò notes. However, she points out that the very proliferation of these digital tools has served as a stark reminder of why preserving the human element of hospitality is paramount. Technology can support operators, she stresses, but it can never replace intuition, genuine empathy, or the comforting feeling of being authentically looked after by another human being.
In a world defined by relentless and dizzying technical advancement, few would have predicted that the greatest and most coveted luxury of all would simply be a pleasant, unhurried conversation with another person. Perhaps the world isn’t going entirely mad after all.
