Can we already grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing?

post-consumerism and AI agents

Open AI and Anthropic have recently announced or launched their versions of “AI agents”: pieces of software, often represented as assistants or servants, that use computers on your behalf to presumably free you for more important tasks. Often they are described as booking flights or restaurant reservations, as if these were profoundly onerous burdens from which everyone seeks relief.

One illustration of this is the deeply preposterous and widely despised Salesforce commercial in which Matthew McConaughey’s AI agent — because, of course, anyone important should be expected to be using them now — books him a table at a bistro that is unwilling to seat him inside during a rainstorm or show him a menu so he can order something he wants. Instead he sits outside, alone and wet with a sopping napkin in his lap, gesturing futilely at the plate of shrimp in front of him that the restaurant has apparently forced him to have.

“The basics of this premise — a restaurant, a table, food, even a booking app — are extremely relatable to almost everyone,” Alan Kluegel writes in a piece for Defector. “What makes this commercial an avant-garde experience is that at no point are the people on-screen relating to these perfectly ordinary things in a way that any human ever has.” It’s a weird window onto a world where consumerism has ceased to function. What kind of restaurant would refuse to seat a customer (a highly recognizable celebrity one, no less) inside an empty dining room during a downpour and then try to force them to eat food they didn’t order? What kind of customer would just passively submit to that treatment? Why doesn’t anyone exhibit a bare minimum amount of resourcefulness? McConaughey appears to have become alienated from his ability to do anything, and agency itself has become an occulted mystery.

It’s also curious that the ad shows us no relations with machines at all; perhaps showing someone consulting with a computer to help them manage their life appeared too pathetic. In a December piece for Wired, Kate Crawford described AI agents as “manipulation engines, marketed as seamless convenience,” but the Salesforce ad boldly shows instead how inconvenient they will be when they go wrong. Is this because the effort that AI agents can save consumers is too inconsequential and anticlimactic to portray positively? Crawford anticipates that AI agents will seem like helpful friends that we can talk to (or bark orders at), that will “support and charm us so that we fold them into every part of our lives, giving them deep access to our thoughts and actions.” But in the ad, McConaughey sits worthlessly alone, and who can say if the tears on his cheeks are from laughter?

The situation presented in the ad is so irreconcilable with the world we customarily experience that Kluegel concludes it must be an attempt to show us the future:

This ad is not a sales pitch; it is a vision of the dystopia to come. The world depicted in this commercial is one where AI has come to dominate our lives. AI will be what intermediates you and other human beings, it will direct you where to go and what to do, it will give you what it decides to give you, its decisions are binding on you and others, its judgment is irreversible, and you will have to sit there and take it.

That is, the Salesforce commercial is an ad for the control society. It isn’t really trying to persuade the audience so much as warn them that this will be implemented and it won’t be stopped, despite the obvious ways in which it deliberately fails people. Basic civilities and accommodations will be automated out of existence, so that they can be sold back to atomized individuals as perks or bonuses — a sort of Spirit or Ryanair approach applied to the entirety of socioeconomic life, necessarily administered by machines because most of us can’t be demoralized enough to consistently and reliably treat fellow humans beings with that kind of contempt. (This ambition animates the current campaign in the U.S. to fire civil servants and replace them with “AI,” as detailed here by Erik Salvaggio.)

So the ad’s pitch of an “inscrutable solution to a non-existent problem,” as Kluegel puts it, works as an alibi for its actual aim: presenting a world in which compulsory booking apps and other modulating meshes of dividuation and permissioning are a fait accompli and even the very rich and famous default to and proudly flaunt their learned helplessness. This is a post-consumerist world, in that we aren’t expected to shop our way toward having a recognizable personality. Instead identity is expressed by what the automated decision-making systems allow you or compel you to do in front of everyone else. It is the counterpart of the post-labor vision of the world where workers have no agency or bargaining power, and persist as superfluous appendages to a system that no longer needs them. That vision will never be achieved, but capital will never cease to aspire toward it: a fully automated system in which no needs are engendered or fulfilled and nothing at all happens except capital automatically and irresistibly reproducing and expanding itself. (An all-powerful AI god is a version of this fantasy too, capital uninhibited by human inhibition or even the limits of human greed.)

This is a slight departure from earlier AI ads. A Bluesky post from Kevin Kruse (which Kluegel cites) points out that “every commercial for AI is basically, ‘Look, you’re a fucking moron, but we’ll help you fake it!’” The pitch for AI agents must take this further, because the goal is not to dupe others but to fool yourself. You need to be convinced that it’s a luxury to have machines that you don’t understand, operated by companies that profit from your ignorance, make decisions for you about what you can and can’t do. If you’re not doing something moronic and humiliating because “AI” made you, do you even have a right to be here? Are you even trying to keep pace with our brave new world? Do you really think people like you, with your souls of brass and iron, will still be authorized to make decisions for yourselves anyway? The AI assistants the Salesforce ad presumes will be ubiquitous are better understood as automated minders, incontestable guardians who will tell you what to do, along with the necessary lies to keep you complacent about it.

But these may not be the ordinary sort of lies to which centuries of ads and propaganda have habituated us. Consumerism is premised on the idea that nothing is more gratifying than exercising choice in a robust marketplace of options, and then having the opportunity to display those choices and what they signify about you. The point is to impress other people with the choices you can show that you’ve made. But technology has been pushing people toward surrendering agency and self-expression in the name of a more solipsistic comfort. Ads for technology are meant to help with this transition away from conspicuous consumption toward conspicuous compliance.

“The emergence of personal AI agents represents a form of cognitive control that moves beyond blunt instruments of cookie tracking and behavioral advertising toward a more subtle form of power: the manipulation of perspective itself,” Crawford argues. An agent positioned to make decisions for us “infiltrates the core of our subjectivity, bending our internal landscape without us realizing it, all while maintaining the illusion of choice and freedom.” The more one cedes the capability to want things, to choose things, to evaluate things to forms of automation, the more one will become incapable of taking any sort of agency, even as that experience will be framed as liberation from the burden of having to have personal desires. Better to let a machine choose goals for you that it can also meet for you than to risk even a single moment of disappointment or nonfulfillment.

“Convenience is the site of our deepest alienation,” Crawford writes — a slogan fit for a Jenny Holzer–style projection on the side of a skyscraper — and this alienation appears as a diminished capacity to will anything. Convenience is another name for lost resolve; it’s a squeamish aversion to agency that frames surrender as satisfaction. The Salesforce commercial proceeds as though everyone’s already given up on agency and can only dither over which agent can produce for them the least miserable, least effortful life.

Kluegel wonders if the ad doesn’t deconstruct itself when it shows McConaughey being rescued from the AI world by Woody Harrelson, who invites him to come join him at a restaurant across the street. “Harrelson reaches out to him with love, beckoning him back to humanity. In doing so, Harrelson gives McConaughey that which had been taken from him, that what he could not see he needed: a choice.”

That seems too optimistic a reading. I think the ending mainly contributes to how the ad tries to pummel us with irrationality and maintain the suspension of parsable cause and effect. Audiences are supposed to register the “happy” conclusion and not worry about the means that support it, just like AI agents are supposed to save you from having to understand how any of life’s systems fit together. Choices aren’t part of the program. Tech companies are so confident of imposing AI on the world that they don’t believe that they have to bother with making a coherent case for its usefulness. The refusal of coherence is itself the central message. There are no more explanations, no more messages to send.