An Article from our Founder, Matt Randerson - Why the future may belong to places that help us feel human

A few weeks ago, I drove to a coffee shop to work for the morning. That detail feels small, but I do not think it is meaningless. I could have worked from home. I had the tools, the Wi-Fi, the quiet, and the convenience. But there are mornings when efficiency is not the thing you are actually looking for. Sometimes you want the low hum of other people nearby. You want to be around the ordinary evidence of life: cups on tables, doors opening, people coming and going, someone making a drink by hand. You want to be alone, but not isolated.

I worked there for a few hours, and as I was leaving, I noticed a small bookstore next door. I had not planned to go in. I was not looking for a specific book. But I remember thinking, almost with a little surprise, that it had been years since I had walked into an independent bookstore without being on vacation or passing through some romantic little street in a city that made the whole thing feel picturesque. Outside of those moments, books had become something I searched for, clicked on, shipped, downloaded, summarized, or saved for later.

Something was compelling me to go in. It was the same pull that I felt when I decided to work from a coffee shop that morning.

Part of me wanted to experience the analog nature of it. I wanted to step into a place that was not big-box, not algorithmically optimized, not immediately transactional, and not built around the assumption that every desire should be fulfilled as quickly as possible. In a cultural moment where artificial intelligence is making so much of life faster, smoother, and more frictionless, I think I wanted, even briefly, to be reminded of a simpler kind of human experience.

Not simpler as in less intelligent or less modern. Simpler as in more embodied. More local. More personal. More connected to the physical world.

Almost immediately, I started talking with the owner. The conversation was easy and unforced. At some point, I mentioned that my two-and-a-half-year-old loves books, and she walked me over to the children’s section. She began pulling titles from the shelves, telling me what children tend to love, what parents come back for and what might hold a toddler’s attention.

It was a small thing, but it felt noticeably different from being recommended something by an algorithmically driven platform. The recommendations were not just accurate; they were relational. They came from someone standing beside me, in a room she had shaped, with books she had chosen, for a child she would never meet but could somehow still imagine.

A few minutes later, another woman walked in. You could tell right away that she was a regular. The owner knew her by name, and their conversation picked up with the ease of people who had shared versions of the same exchange many times before. The woman mentioned a book she had been looking for and asked whether the owner could order it for her. I do not remember the title. What I remember is stopping where I was, holding whatever book I had picked up, and feeling like I had just witnessed something quietly remarkable.

Here we are, living in a world where almost anything can be found, ordered, delivered, and consumed with astonishing speed. That woman could almost certainly have searched for the book on Amazon in less than a minute and had it on her doorstep by the end of the day. Instead, she got in her car, drove to a local bookstore, walked through the door, talked to a person who knew her name, asked for the book, and accepted the fact that it might take days or even weeks to arrive.

Then, when the book comes in, the owner will likely call her. The woman will get back in her car. She will return to the store. They will talk again. She will pay for the book, maybe browse for another one, and walk back out into her day.

From the standpoint of pure efficiency, the whole process makes almost no sense.

But that is exactly what made it so interesting.

The entire exchange was filled with friction. There was driving, waiting, asking, remembering, returning, and depending on another person. It was everything modern technology often tries to remove. And yet the friction did not seem like a burden. It seemed like part of the value. That moment stayed with me because it revealed something I think we often overlook.

We have come to treat the elimination of friction as one of the great prizes of modern life.

In many cases, it is. Bad friction can make life harder, less accessible, less fair, and less humane. No one needs more bureaucracy, confusion, delay, or unnecessary effort. But not all friction is bad friction.

Some friction is what allows relationships and authentic human connection to happen. Some friction gives us a reason to leave the house, walk into a room, speak to another person, ask for help, be recognized, and participate in a local place. Some friction slows us down enough to notice where we are and who is with us. Some friction reminds us that we are not only consumers trying to complete tasks as quickly as possible. We are physical, social, meaning-making human beings. Watching this whole exchange unfold I couldn’t help but think about how contrasting an experience all of this was to the inescapable pursuit of efficiency and frictionless experiences that artificial intelligence promises to bring us.

The return of independent bookstores feels so culturally important right now.

Independent bookstores were supposed to be one of the obvious casualties of the digital age. If the purpose of a bookstore were simply to move books from inventory into a customer’s hands, then the story should have ended years ago. Books can be searched, sorted, reviewed, recommended, purchased, downloaded, summarized, and delivered with extraordinary efficiency.

And yet the story did not end.

Independent bookstores are growing again, and the more interesting question is not simply why people are buying books in person. An article written by Gene Marks for The Guardian aptly points out the resurgence of bookstores - It’s estimated 422 new indie bookshops opened in 2025, according to the American Booksellers Association, a 31% rise from 2024.

This is good news and there’s also a deeper observation tied in here. People are choosing choosing the slower path with more friction.

They are not choosing bookstores because bookstores are more efficient than Amazon. They are choosing them because a bookstore offers something different altogether: atmosphere, curation, human taste, neighborhood belonging, physical presence, and the quiet pleasure of being inside a place designed for thought.

The bookstore was never just about books. It was about the human conditions that make books matter.

And in an AI-shaped world, that distinction may become more important, not less.

Artificial intelligence will make information more abundant, immediate, personalized, and accessible than ever before. It will recommend what to read, summarize what we missed, generate what we ask for, and organize knowledge at a scale no bookstore could ever match. That will be useful. But the bookstore reminds us that access is not the same thing as encounter. Recommendation is not the same thing as discovery. Content is not the same thing as place.

In a frictionless world, the places that help us feel human may become more valuable precisely because they ask something of us. They ask us to show up. To slow down. To be present. To trust another person’s taste. To allow discovery to happen in a way that is not fully predicted.

That is not nostalgia. It is a signal.

It’s a signal that suggests as life becomes more automated, more optimized, and more mediated by intelligent systems, human beings may continue seeking out spaces where the physical, relational, aesthetic, and local dimensions of life are not treated as inefficiencies to be solved, but as gifts to be protected.

Maybe that is what I saw in the bookstore that day. Not a rejection of technology, and not a sentimental return to the past, but a small human refusal to let convenience become the only measure of value.

A woman walked into a bookstore and asked another person to help her find a book.

In the world we are building, that may seem inefficient.

It may also be exactly the kind of thing that keeps us human.