“We have: Self-checkout. Self-check-in. Self-booking. Self-bag-drop. Self-triage. Self-diagnosis. Self-testing. Self-discharge. Soon... self-operation. Pick up the scalpel. Follow the on-screen instructions. Absurd, obviously. But only just. 𝗔 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿.The company removes the employee, redesigns the process around a machine, and asks the customer to complete the service themselves. Scan the items. Enter the data. Print the label. Troubleshoot the error. Prove your identity. Train the chatbot. Try again. When it works, this can be faster and more convenient. When it does not, the consumer absorbs the time, the frustration and the risk. The brand counts the labour it gets rid of, but not the labour it transfers. It talks about lower staffing costs and higher productivity, but doesn’t mention the customer's time and repeated attempts, anxiety, error correction, or the consequences when the system fails. Perhaps the final stage of the self-service economy is not empowerment. It is this: 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹.”
The above passage by Dr Laura Weis nails the core friction of the current era: what corporate balance sheets celebrate as “digital efficiency” is frequently just shadow work offloaded onto the customer. Companies strip out overhead, call it digital transformation, and leave consumers to troubleshoot, input, and navigate buggy interfaces under the guise of “empowerment.”
Beyond Shadow Work: From the Self-Service Trap to the Age of Entanglement
The post captures a quiet crisis in modern commerce: the conversion of the consumer into an unpaid employee.
Here’s the thing: when a company replaces a trained worker with a touchscreen, it doesn’t just reduce labour but also shifts the cognitive load, time loss, and operational risk onto the person holding the credit card. As access to human assistance becomes a luxury tier - gated behind business-class tickets and premium subscriptions - ordinary consumers are left performing the labour required to keep corporate operating models running.
But this friction is also a transitional phase of a much bigger shift.
For two decades, organisations sold self-service as “convenience.” In reality, it created an exhausting regime of manual digital management. We were forced to become our own travel agent, bank teller, cashier, and tech support rep - navigating a fragmented ecosystem of app portals, password resets, and rigid decision trees.
This isn’t true automation. It’s interface fatigue.
[ Traditional Service ] ---> Human handles process for customer.
[ The Self-Service Trap ] ---> Customer manually operates company's software.
[ Intelligent Interfaces ] ---> AI Agents negotiate & execute on consumer's behalf.
This is where the paradigm will break. If the self-service economy forced humans to adapt to machines, Intelligent Interfaces will invert the dynamic.
We’re moving past the era where consumers are forced to act as software operators.
In the emerging landscape, agentic systems and intelligent mediation take over the heavy lifting of navigation, negotiation, and execution:
From “Do It Yourself” to “Done For You”: Instead of forcing a customer to stand at a kiosk, scan barcodes, or fight an unresponsive chatbot, AI agents act as personal proxies. They handle the administrative burden, interface with corporate protocols, and resolve exceptions without consuming human time.
Decoupling Access from Privileged Tiering: Human support shouldn’t be the only escape hatch from broken automation. Intelligent interfaces level the playing field by giving every user an autonomous delegate capable of enforcing their intent against rigid corporate software.
This shift fundamentally changes the nature of customer experience, ushering in the Age of Entanglement.
We are no longer just “using tools” or “browsing platforms.” Our identity, preferences, daily routines, and decision-making processes are deeply interwoven with intelligent systems that act on our behalf.
The Shift in Corporate Responsibility: Brands can no longer hide behind hidden operational costs or friction masked as “user autonomy.” When autonomous software acts on behalf of the consumer, bad design, broken systems, and forced friction aren’t just frustrating—they cause system-level failures that agents will bypass entirely.
Redefining Value: If a brand asks the customer (or their agent) to do the work, the value proposition vanishes. In an entangled economy, value is derived from frictionless resolution, proactive utility, and true respect for human attention.
The pasted passage asks a vital question: If you do all the work, what are you actually paying for?
The answer is that the current self-service model is an evolutionary dead end. The future belongs not to systems that demand consumer labor, but to Intelligent Interfaces that quietly handle complexity in the background—restoring agency to the user and forcing brands to deliver genuine value once again.
AI giants are buying up rare physical books to scan them nd improve AI training data, then chopping off their spines and then shredding the pages to exploit a legal loophole. It’s the ultimate, glorious zenith of modern innovation: destroying rarity but making sure to log the proofs for tax purposes.
Their motivation: buying and destroying physical books comes down to a distinction in U.S. copyright law established in ongoing AI copyright litigation:
Pirated Datasets Are Illegal: Downloading scraped shadow-library databases exposed AI companies to catastrophic legal liability. For instance, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement for its historical use of pirated text repositories.
Destructive Scanning Is Protected: Under the First-Sale Doctrine and the concept of “format-shifting,” if a buyer lawfully purchases a physical book, converts it into a digital copy for internal analysis, and destroys the original so that no duplicate copies enter circulation, the process qualifies as fair use.
The paradox: Buying, scanning, and shredding physical books became the legally cautious option for AI labs to acquire data without getting sued for piracy.
There’s an exquisite irony in watching billion-dollar artificial intelligence companies reduce centuries of human thought, rare prose, and irreplaceable cultural history to paper pulp to feed an algorithm. Or to improve how they wrte an email.
Doesn’t that feel soul-crushing to you as it does to me?
We call it progress. Copyright law is preserved, the corporate legal team sleeps in their beds at night, and we improve a chatbot to write a mediocre LinkedIn post in the style of an author whose physical legacy we just recycled to make cardboard boxes.
Congratulations world! We haven’t just automated creation: we’ve turned cultural destruction into a scalable business model.
In physics, the three-body problem is about how three objects under gravity interact, leading to unpredictable behaviour. Each object influences the others, creating feedback loops that can’t be solved with simple math.
Brand relationships operate the same way now.
Body One: The human. Shifting modes, juggling identities, being at different moments.
Body Two: The brand. Building relationships, creating meaning, delivering value. Operating with legacy assumptions about how humans make decisions and form attachments.
Body Three: Our interfaces. The algorithmic system that mediates the interaction. The feed that decides what you see. The agent that filters your options. The recommendation engine that shapes your desire. The AI assistant that makes decisions on your behalf.
These three bodies don’t operate independently. They entangle.
Our behaviour trains the algorithm. The algorithm shapes what we experience. The brand responds to signals from both. We internalise what the system amplifies. The brand adapts to what the algorithm rewards. The algorithm learns from how the brain works. This cycle keeps repeating, and no one is fully in control.
This is Entanglement. Today’s operating system for the modern consumer.
And the infrastructure of most modern commercial AI.
On July 8th, something changed in your inbox.
If you ordered something from Amazon, you’ll notice that the receipt looked a little sparse. The important details of your purchase - the item name, the spec, the itemised breakdown - were gone from both the HTML body and the plaintext.
To see what you actually bought, Amazon now asks you to click a link, navigate to a browser, and log into your account.
Nobody at Amazon sat in a room and said, “Let’s make the customer’s expense report harder to file.”
But they did sit in a room and think, “How do we stop Google Gemini, Anthropic, and competitive scraping bots from parsing purchase panels out of our customers’ inboxes?”
You aren’t the target. You’re just the collateral damage.
For the last decade, Customer Experience (CX) strategy was anchored in a singular gospel: eliminate friction. We built single-click checkouts, instant order updates, and portable digital artifacts. The inbox receipt was one of those rare, perfectly functional touchpoints—a portable, user-owned, Ctrl+F-able proof of purchase that lived in your domain, not the brand’s.
By stripping that text, Amazon unilaterally broke a decade-old trust contract.
When a brand forces a customer back inside its app just to view basic transactional facts, it isn’t serving the customer. It is re-asserting territory. It reveals a fundamental shift in platform priorities: The primary design constraint is no longer human convenience; it is corporate defense.
It fundamentally alters the consumer-brand dynamic. When the touchpoints designed for us are deliberately degraded to starve an algorithm, the feeling is subtle, systemic disempowerment…….
Full implications and a deeper tracking of the impacts of these changes on autonomy and more will be in my midweek deep dive for subscribers.
I’m Michael Cooper, and I think about the impact of our entanglement within Ai, Intelligent Interfaces, Agents, and culture on our autonomy, our identity, our behaviours, and our choice- making, to help us see our and our lives in new ways.
If you like this and want more:
I share original thinking with brands, strategists, and futurists, with provocative conversations.
My LinkedIn, where I post my ideas.
I speak at conferences, company events, or to leadership teams - anywhere I’m allowed to ‘think aloud’ about my ideas to audiences curious about the entanglement of our humanity, culture, strategy, tech, brands and the future.
I’m currently taking bookings for late November and December.
Thanks for reading,
Michael
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