The maelstrom of companies that want to run your life

It’s land-grab time. The land in question is your digital experience — your productivity, your messages, your to-do list, your social media and of course, your identity.

Every app or piece of software that you interact with is escaping its box. Every one has its own messaging system, its own hooks into your life, and most importantly, its own AI agentic capabilities that enable it to front-end every other activity you do.

The prize in this insane contest is you. Whichever tool becomes the primary tool you use to organize and accomplish everything is the winner, because it’s what you think of first when you’re trying to get things done. That tool becomes essential and inescapable, and will eventually make all the other tools into “utilities” that you don’t think much about.

Who is trying to win this land grab?

Adobe
Anthropic
Apple
Atlassian
Google
Meta
Microsoft
OpenAI
Oracle
Perplexity
Salesforce/Slack
Superman/Grammarly
X/Grok
Zoom

I’m sure there are others. This list keeps growing weekly.

The rules

You may think there are no rules in this free-for-all. But there are. These are the incontrovertible principles that guide the companies this contest for control of your life:

• First-movers win. Invest to win as soon as possible at all costs.
• Expand at will. You win by taking over more of people’s lives. Assert control over tasks that used to be ruled by others. Reduce your opponents to features in your product.
• Blur boundaries. Stop thinking of different tasks as different. They’re all aspects of “getting things done.” Once the user starts thinking that way, your tool will hold dominion over all the other single-purpose tools.
• Throw spaghetti, dump what doesn’t stick. Go ahead, add a dozen features and products. Build on the ones that get traction. Retire the rest. If they didn’t work, then not that many people will care that you deprecated them.
• Identity rules. Whoever controls the user’s identity has a strategic advantage over all the others.
• Grow now, profit later. There’s an infinite supply of capital. Spend now, win now, then leverage your position to generate income later.
• AI can do anything. The challenge isn’t what it can do, it’s figuring out how to convince users that using it is better for everything.
• Don’t worry about security. Agentic AI tools can control anything your machine can do. This comes with great risk. But the key question is whether you can do something powerful, not what might go wrong.
• Screw the environment. It’s not just electricity, water, and pollution that you can ignore. It’s the confusion in the user’s experience. You can clean it all up later — if you survive.

What will happen now

Here’s what to expect.

First, mergers will be rampant. Anyone who isn’t winning will become prey for a player that’s gaining share.

Second, regulators and governments will be at a disadvantage. This activity moves two or three orders of magnitude faster than regulation can. Any regulations that do pass will be out of date months before they go into effect. Companies that flout them won’t be punished for years as cases drag through the courts — or will gladly pay fines in billions of dollars rather than slow down.

Third, the user experience will continue to suck. The interface is English (or any natural language), so it will remain “stable,” but what those English commands are doing behind the scenes will shift without notice. Things will move faster than users can comprehend, leaving people bewildered.

Fourth, slop will overflow. AI tools are great at creation — much better than people are at consuming what they create.

Fifth, there will be a premium on humanity. Human connections that rise above the maelstrom will attract attention. People will value other people, because those other people will embody all the creative human qualities that the maddening carousel of AI lacks.

Endgame

In the endgame that these companies imagine, two or three companies rule your experience, and everything else is just an accessory. They are angling to be one of those few companies.

The world could devolve into incompatible camps. Maybe I’m an OpenAI guy and you’re a Grokster and our friend is an Apple fiend. We’ll coexist warily, but never really trust each other, because underneath it all our powerful allies will be constantly testing each other for weaknesses.

An endgame presumes convergence. But it’s just as possible that this turmoil continues for a very long time — until capital and resources run out, if ever.

One thing is clear. This game is not being run for your benefit. You are the prize, not the customer. You will end up powerless. And once you’re captured, the enshittification will begin.

Sure, it will be hell. But imagine how much more productive we’re going to be!