Customer service is broken – and other news
It turns out there’s a word for the hassle forced on consumers by customer service departments. It’s called sludge. I learned this from an article by Chris Colin in the Atlantic (June 29, 2025). Here’s a gift link.
In the wake of a dangerous problem with his new Ford Focus, Colin tried contacting Ford customer service:
Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK . Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they’d somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one.
Colin asks a question that, in my opinion, applies much more broadly than automotive customer service:
Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?
Years ago I ran a site called This Is Broken, a compilation of poorly designed interfaces, objects, and places. (Recently I’ve brought it back as a series of posts on the Creative Good Forum, available to members.) But the brokenness we face today seems to be a much more entrenched, more insoluble problem.
I want to say more about customer service and AI, in particular, in an upcoming post. For now, a few other quick items – all of which I posted first on the Forum, which you’ll get access when you join.
In other news
In the wake of a lethal social media stunt, there’s now a lawsuit against TikTok and Instagram (Meta/Facebook). A mother grieves her son who died “subway surfing” – while the judge examines the (obvious, to me) culpability of Big Tech social media companies.
Privacy tip: If you use an Apple surveillance phone, TURN OFF the “Raise to Listen” feature, which can send audio recordings of you without your knowledge or consent. From Business Insider (July 5, 2025):
When you have iMessage open and put the phone up to your ear, it can trigger the audio recording.
Finally, a couple of other posts...
LLMs are not minds
From a fabulous new essay (July 1, 2025) by David Bentley Hart:
There have been many and various attempts made to force AIs to ‘tell the truth’, but none of them has achieved even the most minimal success. And, as the coders behind these auto-regressive processes admit, they have no idea why this is so. And yet the answer seems obvious to me, at least if one does not mistake the cunning simulacrum of mental agency produced by AI with the actual workings of a mind. To put the matter very simply, LLMs are forms of goētia while thought is pure mageia.
“Goetia” is better known as witchcraft.
Hart goes on to explain that there’s no way an AI can “know” anything. Moreover –
Nor can any computational platform be awakened to an anamnesis of the supercelestial forms, as Plato (correctly) describes the process of learning.
There’s Plato again. From this newsletter in March: I read all of Plato. Here's what I learned.
From AI videos, the “prompt theory” conspiracy
A new conspiracy theory online involves AI-generated videos. Some people are suggesting - half-jokingly? - that the characters in the AI videos are sentient beings that know that they’re being controlled by “the prompter,” that they have no free will, and so on.
The suggestion underlying all this is, of course, that we in the real world are also just figments of a higher-level digital imagination. This is a crackpot idea put forward by some of the tech billionaires - Musk and others - who claim to believe that we’re “living in a simulation.”
Now that genAI platforms are extruding realistic-enough video content, we get AI-generated video clips of realistic-looking (simulated) people talking about being in a simulation.
The Prompt Theory website has a few sample video clips to view. In one, shown below, a young woman says:
Honestly the biggest red flag is when the guy believes in the prompt theory. Like, really? We came from prompts? Wake up, man!
Here’s another compilation of clips and yet another. Watch in the DuckDuckGo browser to evade Google surveillance.
. . .
Finally, a fun item: Frame of preference, an interactive walkthrough of Mac control-panel interface designs over the years. This is an impressive piece of work.
P.S. I hope you’ll join Creative Good to get posts like these every day! https://creativegood.com/membership/
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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