If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting patiently. If something is not a tool, it’s demanding things from you. It’s seducing you. It’s manipulating you. It wants things from you. We’ve moved from a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation-based technology environment. Tristan Harris1
there’s a kirana shop near my place. same guy for fifteen years. you walk in, say what you need, he gets it. sometimes he remembers your preferred brand. transaction done, you leave. nobody sends a follow-up survey. nobody asks how your shopping experience was.
that shop knows its place.
i’ve been thinking about why that feels rare now.
when software stayed still
software used to feel like an object you owned.
it shipped on disks. sometimes with a spiral-bound manual. you bought it, installed it, used it. when something broke, you heard about it the hard way… angry users on message forums, support calls, word of mouth that spread slow and hit hard. feedback was expensive. you had to earn it and actually interpret it.
that friction wasn’t all bad.
the product shipped and then stayed still. when you were using it, you were alone with it. the software couldn’t initiate. it couldn’t tap you on the shoulder. it waited.
the internet changed the physics
then software got connected to the internet. genuinely good… bugs got fixed, updates came through. then it started watching/logging. crash reports, usage patterns. still fine. understandable.
but then came the moment nobody announced… the software realized it could talk back. and once it realized that, it never stopped!
tools used to know what they were. a hammer doesn’t check in with you. your old nokia… you picked it up, called someone, put it down. the phone wasn’t waiting for you to re-engage. it wasn’t sad when you ignored it for three days.
when the metric ate the mission
here’s where it actually broke though. the question shifted.
used to be: is this genuinely working for people? became: is this keeping people on the screen?
sounds similar. not the same question. one leads toward something useful. the other leads toward hacking the part of your brain that can’t look away from a notification badge.
the vocabulary shifts quietly. dau. mau. retention. stickiness. funnels. cohorts. conversion. gamification. et cetra…
i have this friend who joined an mlm thing. before that, hanging out was just… hanging out. after, every conversation had this undertone. you’d be mid-sentence about your week and he’d find a pivot somewhere in there. “oh you’re stressed? actually that’s why i wanted to tell you about…”
same person. same face. but the relationship had been repurposed. you were in a funnel now.
that’s what modern software feels like. it didn’t stop being useful.
gmail still sends email. maps still navigates. but underneath every interaction there’s an agenda that isn’t yours. a metric somewhere needs to move. and you are the raw material for that.
poking with push notifications
push notifications is when it really crossed a line… software no longer had to wait for you. it could reach into your pocket. tap your shoulder. bring you back. “we miss you 🥺”
i’m sorry. you miss me? you’re a grocery list app. you don’t have feelings. what you have is a retention metric that’s dipping and a growth manager who set up an automated push notification sequence. let’s not confuse the two.
the weird part is the people building these systems hate them too. ask any product designer if they enjoy getting interrupted mid-task by an app they’re using. ask any growth engineer how they feel when another app announces a new feature while they’re trying to do something else entirely. the answer is always the same shade of annoyed.
but inside the company, the incentives are clear and the measurements are easy. you can track whether someone clicked the prompt. you can’t track the moment they thought, i used to like this product but it’s desperate now.
so the popup stays & the resentment doesn’t have a dashboard column.
the drill doesn’t ask for feedback
tools are supposed to disappear.
people don’t want a drill. they want a hole. and they don’t really want the hole either. they want what comes after it… photos on the wall, a shelf that holds things, a room that feels like home. the drill and the hole are both just steps.
the further a tool is from the actual human outcome, the more invisible it should be.
now it’s in the walls
the pattern is spreading because “smart” is spreading.
smart tvs. smart thermostats. smart appliances. anything that joins your wifi can update itself, collect usage data, and interrupt you. the same economics that shaped software now apply to objects with power cords.
some smart tvs use automatic content recognition to fingerprint anything on screen… streamed, broadcast, local playback, it doesn’t matter. once you can observe behavior at that resolution, the next question is always the same: “what can we do with this?“
quiet is still possible
if your software can’t stand on its own without constantly poking the user, that’s a signal.
not the signal you want, but a signal… something that has its own agenda, its own voice, its own needs.
i don’t want to go back to floppy disks. i like fast updates and crash reports and sync. genuinely.
what i actually want is simple… the kirana shop relationship. i show up when i need something, you help me get it, i leave. we both feel fine about it. you don’t call me at 9pm asking how my shopping was.
great software feels just like it… you open them, do the thing, close them. no applause. no survey. just… done! that’s not nostalgia. that’s just the way it is.
the best ones are already quiet.
the rest are still figuring out that they don’t have to shout.
Footnotes
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i listened to this episode while walking through a park, ironically checking my phone every few minutes. Tristan Harris on The Social Dilemma captures exactly when our tools turned into traps.