Let’s talk about the night you got locked out of your own life — and the fact that nobody had to give you a reason.
Picture a woman. Not a specific one. The shape of a few I’ve watched do this dance. Small business, forty-something, everything she owns running through a phone: invoices, payroll, her ID, the number clients actually call. Eleven at night she tries to cover a supplier and the account freezes. No warning. A small grey box that says a review is in progress.
Payroll runs Friday.
She taps contact support. A chat window opens, welcomes her warmly, and informs her it’s an automated assistant.
Nobody has to explain what happened. Nobody has to say when it ends. Nobody is accountable for either one, and the reason for all of it is a word she scrolled past in 2019 without reading.
User.
She is not a citizen of that system. She’s a user of it. Those are not the same animal.
A citizen has standing. That’s what the word is for. If something gets decided about you, you’re told. You’re given a reason. You get to argue, and the argument goes to someone who isn’t the person who decided, and when everything else fails there’s a court that can be made to care. Messy, slow, occasionally stupid — and it means the decision has to answer to you.
A user has an account. A dashboard. A rate limit. A suspension policy. Terms that update while you sleep, and a support flow designed to make asking a second time feel unreasonable.
For a photo app, who cares.
Then the account stopped being a photo app. It became the door to your money, your medical file, your kid’s school, your ability to work, your ability to travel. Somewhere in there, without a vote and without anyone announcing it, most of the practical surface of civic life got rebuilt as private platform infrastructure. And the person standing on the other side of it got quietly reclassified.
You went from being someone the system had to answer to, to being someone the system has to process.
Think about the old way for a second. You walked into a bank and there was a person. Maybe not a nice person. But they had a name, a manager, a rulebook, and a branch you could stand in while you disagreed with them. Slow. Annoying. Embarrassing, some days.
It carried one property worth more than all the speed we traded it for: when it was wrong, a human had to look you in the face and say so.
Now the decision arrives from nowhere. A model scored you, a queue reordered you, a policy applied, an automated review started. The system isn’t cruel — it doesn’t know you well enough for that. It assigned you a status, and it’s waiting for you to get tired.
Here’s what I think we’ve been getting wrong.
We’ve spent ten years arguing about data. Privacy, tracking, the strange feeling of discussing a kettle and then being shown kettles. All of it real. All of it worth the fight. None of it the deepest thing.
Standing is the word that went missing.
We keep calling it consent while dropping everything that made the word mean something: the ability to withdraw it, the ability to reach the other party, the ability to see how the decision got made, and the standing to have it changed. What’s left is a costume. A yes you can’t take back, given to a party you can’t reach, measured by a system you can’t inspect, challenged through a form the same party runs. That’s not an agreement between two people. That’s an agreement between a person and a policy.
And it never gets fixed case by case, which is the part nobody says out loud. At a billion accounts, an individual injustice is statistically invisible. Your case, handled properly by a human who genuinely cares, still changes nothing — because the machine only ever feels the aggregate. Rights are individual by design. We’ve just built the first systems in history where the individual case can’t register.
So what do you actually do with that.
If you build anything people depend on, stop handing out accounts and calling it a relationship. Name a human. Publish the reason behind a decision, not just the outcome. Give the appeal to someone who wasn’t in the room for the original call, and give them real authority to reverse it. Make leaving survivable — no hostage data, no broken invoices, no week-long extraction. None of that is charity. It’s the only moat still standing, because every other part of what you sell is about to get commoditised by something cheaper and faster than you.
If you’re the person on the outside, stop being single-threaded. Keep a second path to your money. Own your own keys. Hold your own copies of the records that decide things about you — the ones no platform can claw back. Know the name of one human at the three places that matter most: bank, doctor, biggest client.
Two doors. Always two doors.
A bank that can lock you out at eleven at night and then go quiet has leverage over you, and has stopped pretending otherwise. Leverage dressed up as convenience is what most of this decade has quietly been about.
You are not a user. You’re a person with standing — and any system that touches your life should have to answer to you in a way you can hold on to.
The machine can process you. It does not get to own you.
You’ve got this.