A few years ago, I worried about algorithms deciding what movie I should watch on Netflix.
Today, Silicon Valley apparently considers it too burdensome for humans to perform the ancient ritual of spending their own money.
In April, Stripe introduced a wallet that allows AI agents to make purchases on our behalf. Tickets, hotel bookings, online shopping—you authorize the agent, the agent authorizes the payment, the payment authorizes the consumption.
At this point, all we’re missing is an AI agent that goes on vacation for us, and the circle of efficiency will finally be complete.
The interesting part isn’t the technology.
That’s almost boring.
OAuth, tokens, virtual cards, spending controls.
Engineering problems, not philosophical ones.
The real question is anthropological.
For thirty years, the internet has been obsessed with reducing friction.
One click instead of a phone call.
An app instead of standing in line.
An algorithm instead of doing your own research.
Now we’ve entered the next stage: removing humans from their own purchasing decisions.
HOOtL: Human Out Of The Loop.
It reminds me of a passage from Jean Baudrillard, where the consumer ceases to be a subject and becomes a function of the system.
Except this time, the system is far more polite.
It sends you a notification.
“Would you like to approve this purchase?”
Click.
The end of free will in four words.
And yet I completely understand why this will succeed.
Booking a hotel, purchasing a train ticket, organizing a trip—these are activities nobody truly loves.
They’re logistics.
And logistics is usually the first casualty of every technological revolution.
The paradox is that the more decisions we delegate to machines, the more human value shifts elsewhere.
Perhaps the luxury of the future won’t be having an AI agent that buys things for you.
Perhaps it will be preserving the desire—as Italian musician Giovanni Lindo Ferretti once put it—”to neither buy nor be bought.”
See you next week,
SIMONE PUORTO
