Interface frictions: (In)tolerances and the extractive labour of repair in airport digital infrastructures

Abstract

Contemporary public and corporate discourses frequently celebrate advanced automation as a seamless portal to frictionless, touchless mobility. Critical human geography, however, has long demonstrated that these computational networks remain deeply enmeshed in messy physical procedures and human agencies. This paper introduces the concept of interface friction—defined as the minor, quotidian slowdowns and subtle miscomputations that emerge where rigid software logic collides with the fluid variability of human life—to diagnose the unrecognised labour that sustains technically intolerant systems. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 88 airport frontline workers and managers at Beijing's Capital and Daxing International Airports, we trace how interface frictions systematically manifest across three relational registers of human difference: the corporeal, the procedural, and the affective. Rather than cascading into spectacular ruptures that trigger engineering overhauls or technological overhauls, these routine micro-stalls are normalised and tolerated with the help of often-unseen human efforts. We argue that the automated terminal functions by establishing an asymmetrical, extractive choreography of tolerance. When the technical boundaries of software code are reached, the system offloads the material drag of its own computational stiffness onto the stretched corporeal and affective capacities of staff (and sometimes users), who are enrolled to perform an uncompensated labour of repair.