Prof Fineberg presented this at a meeting I (and others) organized last month. His powerpoint should be visible at the link, third down on the presentations page.

We've known for decades that friction is controlled by contact areas much smaller and strong than the average across the fault surface area. There have also been experiments rubbing big rocks together to study friction for decades. Noone has seen slow fault motion that is demonstrably the kind of slip Fineberg sees, nor do current theories predict that we should, although sometimes faults do move slowly. Many people have postulated highly variable stress accumulations.

So maybe useful understanding of faulting might come from this line of inquiry, but the article is overstated, as Chris guesses.

• Spectrum of faulting workshop