In Your Face, Behind Your Back

The two places technology goes without asking. Part 1 of 2.

You had a hundred things to do, and this one simple question for the company: Where’s my parcel? Why did I get double-billed? Is this thing covered by my insurance?

Half an hour later you’re still fighting with a chatbot called something friendly like Zoe, or Max , which has offered you stupid irrelevant options four times, the FAQ three times, misunderstood - deliberately, you are starting to suspect - “talk to a human“ twice, and just had the audacity to ask whether it has resolved your issue today.

It has not resolved your issue today.

Resolution was never really something it was made to do; the chatbot exists to stand between you and the payroll cost of a (now-fired) person who could have actually helped. You get the distinct feeling that it’s additional friction installed for the explicit hope you will give up because, remarkably, you have other things to do that day.

You didn’t ask for it to be there, but there it is, and you can’t get around it, and somewhere a middle manager is celebrating the high “deflection rate“ — the industry terminology for what just happened to you.

That’s mode one; technology in your face.

Mode two sneaks up from behind you.

While you were arguing with ‘Zoe’, your feeds were filling up with music by bands that don’t exist and posts and articles that nobody wrote. Last year an entirely AI-generated “band” called The Velvet Sundown (with songs, photos, backstory and all, all of it synthetic) reached a million monthly listeners on Spotify before anyone was told what it was that they were listening to.

Nobody had to tell them.

Deezer, one of the few platforms that actually measures this, disclosed in April that 44% of the music uploaded to it every day is AI-generated. That’s roughly 75,000 tracks. Per day.

On the text side, a study by Graphite found that over half of new articles published on the web are now AI-written, and no doubt you have been inundated by AI slop on literally any social media you might still be resilient enough to be hanging around.

The dead internet theory was a conspiracy theory five years ago; day by day, it is becoming the way things are. Nobody asked your permission for this either; it all happened behind your back.

Let’s take a step back in time.

In 1991, a Xerox PARC researcher named Mark Weiser wrote what remains one of the most-quoted sentence in the history of thinking about computers and technology:

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

This is the future we were promised; I would still prefer that, thank you very much. Technology that recedes and disappears. Technology that becomes infrastructure, like electricity, like (well-run) trains: just there, just working, requiring exactly none of my conscious attention.

But Weiser’s version had a feature we’ve neglected to implement. His “calm technology” moved between the centre of your attention and the periphery of it at your choosing. You could make it visible and legible when you needed it and it would retreat when you didn’t. The consent and control were in the spec.

What we got instead are vendors and profit-driven, attention-maximizing entities choosing for us, in both directions at once.

Microsoft is force-installing Copilot onto machines whose owners never asked for it (and often explicitly asked for it to be gone).

LG recently pushed a firmware update that pinned a non-removable Copilot app to its televisions. Was there ever an actual real human being who wanted Copilot on their TV? NO.

Meta banned rival chatbots from WhatsApp in January while embedding its own – another unremovable one. I’ve sometimes opened it accidentally, because it’s right there, and no doubt became a number on their DAU statistics against my will.

Carmakers moved the wipers and the hazard lights and, in one moronic case, the opening of a glove box compartment, into touchscreen menus. Again, nobody asked for this.

Smart glasses complete the trajectory: the screen finally in your face, literally, with a recording device pointed at other people’s faces – without their consent, because that’s how this gets rolled out now.

None of this is going to recede on its own.

Why? Money. Surprise.

Electricity doesn’t need your engagement to make money. A screen does. Your attention is the revenue, so the product climbs into your face like a Facehugger from Alien and stays there.

Meanwhile, the technology that did successfully disappear turns out to have disappeared wrong.

Two years ago, a security product most people had never heard of (running invisibly, by design, on machines all over the world) shipped one bad configuration file and took down 8.5 million computers in an afternoon. Hospitals cancelled surgeries. Over 5,000 flights canceled and 46,000 delayed. Emergency call centres that went dark.

The CrowdStrike outage cost Fortune 500 companies alone an estimated $5.4 billion.

(There is a rich aviation angle here. Regular readers know there is always an aviation angle. I am deliberately saving it for Part 2.)

So this is where we've landed: technology that should be invisible is instead shouting at us, and technology that is invisible fails in ways we can’t absorb.

Both problems come from the same place: none of this technology had to earn its place.

Electricity is invisible in your kitchen only because it spent a century becoming extremely visible everywhere else: to standards bodies, wiring codes, licensed electricians, building inspectors, insurers, and the occasional coroner. Every boring fuse box is artifact of hard lessons learned. Invisibility from your attention was purchased with visibility to oversight.

That’s the deal. That has always been the deal. That should still be the deal.

Disappearance is a privilege, and it has to be earned.

But is it too late? Does demanding that actually work?

It does. From January this year, Euro NCAP (the outfit whose safety stars sell cars across Europe and hence the world) stopped handing out five-star ratings to vehicles that bury basic controls in touchscreens. Indicators, wipers, horn, hazard lights: physical buttons, or you lose stars. Around 90% of European buyers check those ratings, so many are already putting the buttons back where they belong.

When someone with leverage gets hard on the system, the system rediscovers buttons remarkably fast.

How does a technology then earn the right to disappear? What does the justification look like for AI, for the platforms, for the chatbot standing between you and a human being?

One industry already answered that decades ago, expensively, in blood and regulation, and the answer fits in two words.

That’s in Part 2.