Today I walked through Starbucks and a bot was winking from every single laptop. I wasn't snooping. I wasn't sitting next to anybody. I was just walking by, and there it was on every screen: a ChatGPT pop-up, a Claude window, a little agent working away in a corner, people alt-tabbing between their Zoom call and their email and their bot, copying out of one tab and pasting into another. Nobody in the whole place was working alone. Central casting had dressed the set for an episode of Black Mirror, and every extra in the room had a bot.
I've been using bots for years. ChatGPT the longest, Claude for years now too. Using them never felt strange. Seeing everybody else using them, all at once, in the most ordinary room in America, felt very strange. Today I turned a corner. It's ubiquitous now.
The second chair is empty
Remember pair programming? Two people at one screen working on one page of code. One types, the driver. One watches and steers, the navigator. It was the big thing in the agile and extreme programming days, about fifteen years ago.
Every café table is a pair-programming station now. The second chair is empty because the navigator lives in a tab. Whether the code is their life, their calendar, their business, their work, their process, or actual programming, everybody at Starbucks is pairing.
I talked to the guy to my right about it. He agreed right away: totally Black Mirror, we completely live in the future.
Black Mirror is never all upside
To make an episode of Black Mirror you need the dread, and the dread is all over the place. The neo-Luddites carrying giant green lasers to fight CCTV and Flock cameras. The people fighting the big data centers because the water is being drunk by computer robots. The doom clocks: thirty years left, thirty days left, a sentient world of robots killing people. Everybody on UBI. Nobody with a job anymore.
Here's what I told the guy next to me. The people who are anti this are going to lose their jobs even faster than the people who are having fun with it, the ones speeding up enough to merge into the highway. You merge at highway speed. The people idling at the bottom of the on-ramp, refusing on principle, are the first ones traffic leaves behind.
One must pedal
It's exactly like the people on their Colnagos who hate e-bikes. E-bikes are an amazing thing, and the Colnago crowd says no, one must pedal. You can't get people onto motorcycles. E-bikes are a trick: they get people onto motorcycles without them feeling like they're on motorcycles. And the roadies hate it, the same way they hate cars, the same way I hated cagers back when I was a motorcycle guy.
The only people who have Colnagos are already super rich. Their lifestyle isn't going to change at all. They can keep splitting timber with an axe at their cabin. Everybody else either gets the motor or gets left behind.
Then there are the trails. You can't use that e-bike on the bike trail, this is for bicycles. The people on their feet say you can't take that bicycle on here, this is for walking and running. And on the other trails, you can't bring your mountain bike here, this is only for horse riders, really, really rich people with horses they ride around on trails. Every tier guards the trail against the tier below it, and the morally correct amount of effort always lands exactly where they already are. It's turtles all the way up, and it's turtles all the way down, brother.
The anti-bot crowd is defending their spot on the trail.
Black Black Mirror
Here's what makes it Black Black Mirror. If I were that kind of thing, I'd make all my competitors not want to compete anymore. If you can convince all your competitors not to go to college, there are more places at college for you. If you can convince everybody not to take jobs, there are more jobs for you. UBI so you don't compete with me for work. UBI so you don't compete with me for mansions. UBI so you don't compete with me for that black-label Range Rover.
The doom could be intentional. Talk everybody off the on-ramp and the highway is yours.
Then nobody competes for resources, for educations, for being competitive at all. They just want to get. They feel entitled to being fed pablum like babies in a sanitarium. Or prison: in prison you get three warm meals every day and a cot to lie on. It's self-empowerment by opting into a prison lifestyle, walking in voluntarily, and calling the comfortable cage liberation.
Most of the people taking that deal have been told the race is already lost, so why run. Ask who keeps telling them. The people selling the doom are still running.
The engine room
And I'm watching all of this from the engine room. I live in South Arlington, and Arlington and Northern Virginia are completely sold in. This is the epicenter. For thirty years the data centers have been going up out the Dulles Corridor, and the bots winking from those laptops at Starbucks may well be thinking a few miles up the road.
It goes back further than that. At Penrose Square, near the Giant, there's a sculpture called Echo by Richard Deutsch: two striped stone monoliths with curved hollows carved into them, so that words spoken into one stone are heard by someone standing at the other. It honors the Three Sisters radio towers, which the Navy built near Columbia Pike and Courthouse Road in 1913. In 1915 they broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal and connected Arlington with the Eiffel Tower. They came down when National Airport opened in 1941, because they were an aviation hazard.
So this neighborhood has been talking across the ocean through machines for more than a hundred years. Today every table at Starbucks had a navigator whispering back. I'm speeding up and merging.