A Discipline of Discretion.

Watching agency leak away

A recent piece in The Economist (17th May 2026) reports that China is sliding into a third internet era, in which AI “super-apps” no longer merely recommend but choose, purchase and arrange delivery on the user’s behalf. More than 600 million Chinese are thought to have used some form of agentic app already. Alibaba has now fully integrated its Qwen chatbot with Taobao, ByteDance is binding Doubao to Douyin, and Tencent is weaving its new hy3 model into WeChat and the millions of mini-programs that live inside it. The piece notes, almost in passing, that the correspondent asked one such app for a “special coffee” and was duly sent a rose-petal-vinegar concoction — a comic illustration of how readily the act of choosing can now bypass us.

The striking thing is not the technology but the quiet transfer it depends on: each delegated decision is a small piece of agency stepping outside the person and taking up residence in the system.

I’ve been working with AI for about 18 months, not to understand the technology or build agentic systems, but to figure out how I can use it to do the things I don’t want to do. It has ceased to become a novelty and has just become a factor in the way that I can work. What it has emphasised to me, that this article reminded me of, is a discipline of discretion.

The qualities we have that make a difference that nobody else can; our craft, our dispositions, our mētis, are vital and under pressure, it’s easy to make one small decision after another that distances us from them in order to do the trivial short-term tasks we’re being measured on.

Before we know it, we’ve lost touch with what makes us different.