A corrosive vanity rots the modern data economy. It assumes human desire can be captured. That biological mess can be catalogued. Replicated by integers.
Technocrats call this “Data”. They are wrong. They possess no data. They possess Capta. That which they seized. A record of what their instruments could measure at a specific time. To confuse this biased scrap with reality is not science. It is superstition.
Now they call this swamp “Agentic Commerce”.
Software agents acting as proxies will scour the market. They will negotiate price and logistics in milliseconds. The pitch promises friction-free utopia. What they sell is automated hallucination in a closed loop.
These agents serve not you. They serve your “Digital Twin”. A probability model scraped from your browsing history. The algorithm possesses no intelligence. Only probability vectors.
Take the man who ordered an enema kit for pain relief. The system ignores biological distress. It consults a dataset where such purchases correlate with specific sexual practices. It reclassifies him. For months he is hunted across the web. Not by doctors. By sex toy merchants.
The agent does not optimise for your happiness. It optimises for the coherence of its own flawed model. It reduces the complexity of a human life to a vector. Fitting neatly into a JSON file.
Agent interaction creates predation.
Agent A must secure a flight ticket. It is programmed to avoid scarcity. It polls the airline’s API every millisecond. Agent B observes this traffic. It sees no nervous script. It sees a surge in aggregate demand. Following its own logic, Agent B raises the price. Agent A registers the hike. Sees no feedback loop. Only validation. Seats are scarce. It panics. It raises its bid limit.
Two insensate loops scream at each other in a vacuum. They drive the price of a seat from $200 to $800 in the seconds between page loads. No human entered the room. No physical demand changed. The market price is merely a measure of panic. How badly two algorithms scared one another.
The system perpetrates a final fraud on the macroeconomy.
Conventional economics relies on the Equation of Exchange. MV=PTMV = PT MV=PT. Transaction velocity multiplies the money supply. In a sane world, velocity represents human dynamism. I pay the baker. The baker pays the miller. Value is added at every step.
Agentic commerce games the velocity variable. It replaces human trade with high-frequency algorithmic churn. If two bots trade a digital asset a million times a second, they generate massive transaction velocity. To the GDP metric, this mimics a booming economy.
GDP on steroids. The muscles are water retention.
The numbers are swollen by wash trading and arbitrage. Politicians claim growth. The engine sits on bricks. Kinetic activity without productive output. The speedometer reads 100mph. The car has not moved an inch.
To maintain this velocity, the architects must remove the one obstacle remaining: human hesitation. They view it as inefficiency. They call it “friction”. Friction is your only salvage. The moment of hesitation before clicking “buy”. That is where judgement lives. Stop. Think.
Their goal is to prevent thought. To end your choice. Delegate the decision to a bot, and you surrender the ability to say no. You replace “demand”, a conscious human act, with “replenishment”. A logistical forecast managed by vendors.
Cloud providers bill for compute cycles. Bots haggle with bots. Platforms take a percentage of transaction velocity. Advertisers no longer need to persuade a thinking human. They merely need to game a predictable algorithm.
You pay the premium. You pay for the privilege of absence. You are removed from the decision loop. You are no longer the customer. Your cognition has been rented. You are the wallet attached to a runaway script. You subsidise a fantasy of efficiency that serves everyone but the user.