The Inner Monologue

Every few years, Silicon Valley convinces itself it’s about to “reinvent” something that didn’t need fixing. First it was money. Then education. Then transportation. Now, apparently, it’s shopping. The new gospel from the tech-bro pulpit is that conversation will replace commerce — that one day soon, we won’t shop; we’ll just talk, and the machines will buy things for us.

It sounds futuristic, but it’s also absurd. It’s a fantasy designed by people who mistake convenience for progress and believe every human experience can be “optimized” if only they can remove the human part of it.

The illusion of friction

The pitch is simple: why bother typing, clicking, or comparing when an AI can do all that for you? Just say what you want — “I need coffee filters,” “Find me a new jacket,” “Restock my pantry” — and a digital assistant will choose, pay, and deliver.

To the people building this system, friction is the enemy. They see every pause, every search, every moment of indecision as inefficiency. But to the rest of us, those pauses are the point. That is the human part of shopping — browsing, discovering, second-guessing, changing your mind. It’s not wasted time; it’s judgment, experience, taste.

Reducing shopping to a single voice command doesn’t make it better. It makes it sterile.

The false promise of personalization

The tech visionaries call it “personalized commerce.” They promise that AI will know your size, taste, diet, ethics, and budget — that it will shop for you better than you can. But personalization is just surveillance with better branding.

These systems only “know” you because they’re tracking you — your purchases, your conversations, your patterns. The same companies promising to be your digital butler will also be your most intimate advertiser. The assistant that suggests a cheaper toothpaste today might suggest a more profitable one tomorrow. The “agent” doesn’t serve you; it serves whoever built and trained it.

They’ll say it’s secure. They’ll say it’s private. But they also said that about social media, about smartphones, about digital payments. How’d that turn out?

A solution in search of a problem

The idea that the average person is desperate to talk to their shopping list is laughable. Most people aren’t clamoring to replace their grocery run with a conversation about lettuce varieties.

If you’ve ever used a voice assistant, you know how fragile that illusion is. Ask for almond butter, and you’ll get twelve irrelevant suggestions, three sponsored results, and a reminder that your subscription is expiring. Multiply that by every product in your home, and you’ll understand why the “future of frictionless shopping” feels like a nightmare dressed as innovation.

We don’t need to make shopping easier. We need to make it better — fairer, more local, more human. No one ever asked for an AI to pick their cereal.

The tyranny of convenience

The industry justifies all of this with one word: convenience. That’s the drug. Every loss of privacy, every erosion of control, every surrender of autonomy is wrapped in that same promise: “It’ll be easier.”

But easier for whom? Easier for the companies automating you out of your own decisions. Easier for advertisers who can manipulate your “preferences” directly through the algorithm. Easier for a handful of platforms that will quietly decide which products you see, which you don’t, and how much you’ll pay.

Convenience isn’t free — it’s a trade. You give up a little independence, a little agency, a little privacy. At first it feels harmless. But convenience is a slope that never levels out. Once you’ve trained yourself to say “Buy it” instead of thinking “Should I buy it?”, the transaction is no longer yours.

The social cost of automation

The deeper problem with this dream is cultural. Shopping, for all its flaws, is still a social act. It connects us — to store clerks, to local economies, to other human beings. The AI version severs that connection entirely. It doesn’t just remove friction; it removes community.

Imagine a world where millions of households interact more with their shopping assistant than with a cashier, where local stores can’t compete because the algorithm doesn’t “know” them, and where our consumption patterns are dictated by an invisible marketplace optimized for corporate margins.

That’s not innovation. That’s isolation wrapped in convenience.

When technology forgets who it’s for

What we’re watching is not a consumer revolution. It’s a corporate one — an attempt to pull the last bit of decision-making out of human hands and turn it into data. Every AI-powered shopping assistant will claim to “serve the user,” but in reality, it will serve the ecosystems that profit from steering those users.

We’ve seen this movie before: social media was supposed to connect us; instead, it monetized outrage. Streaming was supposed to democratize art; instead, it crushed independent film. Now we’re told AI shopping will “empower” us. It won’t. It will just make us more predictable consumers.

The real future we should want

Maybe the future of shopping shouldn’t be about how little effort we can put into it, but how much care we can put back into it. Real progress would be supporting sustainable production, local economies, transparent pricing, and meaningful choice — not outsourcing all of that to an algorithm trained to think in profit margins.

We don’t need a world where we say, “Buy this,” and a machine obeys. We need one where we say, “I want to buy better,” and the system helps us understand what that means.

The tech bros dream of a world where we don’t have to think.
The rest of us dream of one where we finally do.