Well over a decade ago I gave my first talk on the idea that we need a right to be represented by what I called a bot.

At the time a lot of people simply shrugged off this idea. It seemed too outlandish. Of course now, we all see ads for Muse every day. We now call them agents and there are plenty of them, such as Instinct or Hermes.

With their swift adoption we are also seeing the inevitable counter reaction. Amazon has already blocked Muse and is also interfering with other agents. If it’s not obvious why let me spell it out. Amazon runs sophisticated algorithms that try to manipulate you to buy more or pay a higher price. Amazon is not alone in this. Almost every online interaction you are faced with adversarial algorithms. In one of the more extreme examples banks were running algorithms (designed by McKinsey) to reorder transactions so that they would maximize bounced check fees. But even social media sites are adversarial albeit in more subtle ways. They want more of your attention and so they surface content that accomplishes that even when that content is onesided, clouds your judgement or is downright bad for your mental health.

The fundamental principle is the same everywhere. Vendors employ algorithms running on a huge amount of compute with access to massive databases all to optimize their business. And we are limited to what our tiny brains can access at any given moment. But now agents give us superpowers also which is exactly why businesses are fighting them and will increasingly seek to block them.

Now here is the role for government: Give citizens a fundamental right to be represented by an agent in any and all interactions. In other words, make it illegal for Amazon to block people’s agents. Such regulation would in one fell swoop shift power away from the big centralizing players and hand it back to citizens. This is a much better approach than trying to use outdated industrial age antitrust laws (which at the moment aren’t being enforced at all).

I have written extensively about this since my original talk on both my blog Continuations and in my book The World After Capital. Now is the moment for people to really take up this cause and push for this right. 

Now it’s tempting to argue that we should just let competition handle this. Shopify stock is up 32% over the last month on the theory that commerce will migrate to venues that allow agents. And yes entrepreneurship will find ways. But the network effects of large digital players are formidable, other industries are heavily concentrated due to capital intensity, and the government holds a monopoly in many instances. So the right to be represented by an agent will be crucial for empowering citizens.