As I write, Apple and Meta are rolling out their latest gadgets: intrusive glasses that allow anyone to film you without your knowledge, and a watch with a permanent listening mode, recording all your conversations and interactions with your environment.
They use the same arguments. They promise convenience, efficiency. No need to recall every detail of a conversation—it’s transcribed in real time. No need to remember your schedule, appointments, tasks, or ideas. Everything is recorded, analyzed, and summarized for you. No need to think, no need to remember. You won’t make mistakes anymore because you won’t make any effort.
But I don’t think this is about progress. I believe it’s about control.
Contrary to what the tech giants claim, these devices are not tools to enrich life; they are replacements for it.
Why bother listening to someone’s words, understanding their identity, the way they express themselves, their hesitations, their contradictions… when an AI can summarize it all for you? Why reflect on how you emotionally engage in a conversation, how you mobilize your attention and memories to understand the other person, when an AI can do it for you?
Why engage in the messy, unpredictable, and emotionally challenging yet rewarding work of human connection when you can retreat into a bubble?
In my view, that’s not empowerment. That’s surrender.
I read Shoshana Zuboff a few years ago, and I remember her stance, which at the time seemed quite science-fiction-like to many: algorithms do not merely know us; they shape us.
With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal is to automate us. […] do not merely know our behavior but also in different ways try to modify and shape that behavior toward profitable outcomes.
Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”.
Even today, we collectively struggle to understand what this means. Just look at the debates about banning social media for children under 15—it reveals how little we’ve considered the implications of algorithms. We ask whether children are mature enough to use these tools, but we don’t ask whether these tools are mature enough to be used by children. In fact, we don’t even ask whether these tools are mature enough to be used by adults…
We all know very well what these tools create: isolation. Loneliness. Passivity. Docility. Predictability.
Paul Klotz’s Solitude Capitalism (a concept I discovered thanks to Tristan Nitot) frames this perfectly. We are not just consuming technology; we are collaborating in our own isolation.
The more isolated we are, the more predictable we become. The more predictable we are, the easier it is to sell us things, ideas, products, even versions of reality. The more isolated we are, the easier it is to sell us services that keep us in that isolation, including by creating an impenetrable interface between us and the real world.
I define “Solitude Capitalism” as an economic system in which loneliness has shifted from being an unintentional phenomenon to a resource that is deliberately sought out and exploited.
Paul Klotz, Interviewed by Le Monde on August 26, 2026
This is not innovation. This is not progress.
Our hegemonic culture is one of performance. We must perform everything: our studies, our skills, our relationships, our parenting, the way we exist for others, the way we perceive ourselves. We have tools to measure, quantify, and optimize everything. But to what end? Consumption.
It’s not about maximizing our well-being, but our subjugation to a system where consumption is the only goal. These gadgets are performative: they describe a hostile world to be dominated by technology. They warn us against the chaos of the outside world and promise to act as a secure, protective interface. And this can only work if we adhere to the idea (I first wrote “buy into the idea”, and that says a lot) that the world is fundamentally unfit for our needs, and that we must consume products and services to protect ourselves from it.
It’s a vicious cycle: the more we consume, the more isolated we become, and the more isolated we are, the more we consume.
Everything is designed so that no one reminds us that what is lost is not just serendipity, privacy, or the ability to focus: it is the ability to think critically, to engage deeply, to resist, to create, to feel.
The legacies we fail to pass on are not just material. They are the very things that make us human: effort, friction, the unpredictable beauty of real connection, disorder, boredom, suffering, but also the joy of being alive.