I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t really have a newsletter strategy. This is both a very unfashionable thing to admit in 2026 and patently obvious to any long-term subscribers. However, in case it’s not clear, this is a longer one (maybe a 10-minute read). You might want to read it over lunch, as you’re travelling home tonight, or perhaps save it for a nice long bath. It’s about forms, the ever-present workhorse of the data-driven economy.

Like it or not, the increased use of AI in all kinds of service delivery means we’re all going to be filling out a lot more forms. And while forms might be great for capturing structured information, they have lots of limits, get in the way of relationships, and - eventually - make everything really tiring. As a very form-forward person, I’m not sure if what follows is a personal reflection on the hard limits of data-driven services, a contemplation on the societal difficulties of Peak AI, or an extravagant public breakdown about the impacts of the extractive digital society. You decide. But if you don’t want to read 3000 words about the forms, the tl;dr is that people are better than forms, and forms definitely do NOT love you back. 

I’ve been thinking about forms a lot lately, initially sparked by this excellent paper on how French nannies work with their friends to deal with the bureaucracy of finding childcare work on digital platforms. The mix of the transactional (form filling) and the relational (helping your friends) got me thinking about what shifts when business processes turn up in our domestic and caring spheres. 

I also, on my fifth or sixth attempt, managed to digitally verify my identity with Companies House, a new mandatory process for all UK company directors. I’m a digitally literate person, but this still took two hours (including one web chat and a phone call), and along the way I had to update the app, delete the app, then redownload it. The whole experience felt a bit more like “forms gone wild” than the promised digital simplicity, leaving me — a certified form lover – feeling bored and frustrated. 

This slightly non-plussed feeling will be familiar to anyone who’s done online dating, used a Google calendar to track a health issue or manage family life, sold things on Vinted, or filled out a job application form. The information boxes on structured forms offer a very partial view of what is important and how things should be described, but they can quickly become authoritative,  definitive, and normalised. As AI-enabled services trickle into more and more of life, these kind of data-driven boundaries are becoming more routine, and more of our selves is expected to fit inside boxes defined by invisible business logic.

My experience with Companies House was a straightforward case of “computer says no”, but both of the people I spoke with to solve the problem assumed that the issue was me — that my ID was the wrong sort or I’d typed my email address incorrectly — rather than a technical fault. There is obviously a terrible recent precedent for this in the Post Office Scandal, but it doesn’t seem to be a lesson that is being absorbed into system design. 

How we describe ourselves when we fill in a form is now very consequential; it shapes how we are seen by the systems, the opportunities that are offered to us, and the services we access. But if we don’t have the right kind of information to fill in the form – to be visible to the system, to unlock “computer says yes” – then there are whole load of other problems that get created along the way. 

AI ❤️ Forms

Not all of the forms in our new AI-powered world will feel like forms. Some of them will seem automagical, but – through agents, chatbots, biometric ID, and one-click connected services – many of us are already sharing more and more structured information about ourselves in ways that can be used, processed and understood by digital tools and services. Information we have previously given on forms will also start following us around: more technology-mediated services will rely on “single sources of truth” to enable autocomplete and automated verification, so our past answers and identities will persist and continue to be important and relevant. 

In modern digital experiences, “forms” are no longer just interfaces with text boxes and dropdown menus; they are methods for extracting structured information that come in all shapes and sizes, and some of them will be easier to spot than others. 

I ❤️Forms 

Before I go further, it’s also worth saying that I am a big fan of forms. When I was at primary school the two greatest jobs I could imagine were:

(1) working at the Post Office, where there were forms and big official rubber stamps;and
(2) being a pharmacist, which involved not only forms but also cool-looking stuff in glass bottles AND white coats (the trifecta of nerd joy).

Rather than enjoying this halcyon infancy of low/no admin, I’d get my mum to pick up spare forms from any place that had them on a carousel and I’d fill them in to pass the time. Subsequently, my first proper job was working in the local library, a veritable treasure trove of forms and systems and stamps. I still go weak at the knees at the sight of an interlibrary loan form. 

I also have a stutter and have been lucky enough that the arc of digitisation has curved to make my preferred kinds of accessible tech more usual and everyday. My first job after university was as a junior editor on a dictionary: to my absolute horror, this required making spontaneous phone calls where I’d have to announce my name and explain what I needed, everyday tasks I still find very difficult. (The particular quirk of my speech and language disability is that words that cannot change – such as my name or my bank card number – are harder for me to say than words I can pick spontaneously.) When email started to become the norm, this was a godsend, but it was also brilliant when my dealings with banks, utilities, and public services could move online. On a day when my speech is difficult, I’d rather fill out a form than speak to a person: having to recount my name and identifying information can be both difficult and tiring, plus hearing a stutter on the other end of the phone can make people react in unpredictable ways and I’d rather fill out a form than have to listen to someone laughing uncomfortably while I try to form a sentence. 

Another reason I love forms is that I am no good at small talk. My ability to turn a routine interaction into a personal mortification is rivalled only by George Costanza (Seinfeld is, amazingly, not a documentary). I won’t labour the point further, but you can take it as a given that I don’t mind the gift technology gives me of fewer random conversations – a trait, I think, shared by many who’ve spent their working lives making digital products and services. 

I’m also aware that my love of forms is made possible by the fact that I have a lot of other privileges, including decent literacy levels, a bank account, access to up-to-date hardware, good connectivity, and other people in my life who can and will pick up the phone as needed. But let it be known that I am Extremely Form Tolerant, and often find them to be fun. 

Working for Forms 

No matter how much I love forms, it’s a pretty one-way relationship. A successfully completed form might give you access to something you didn’t have before, but an unsuccessfully completed form either gets you nowhere or gets you into trouble. There’s no incremental progress, just win or lose. 

One reason for this is that the data schemas are rigid — even with new methods of input like conversational interfaces, the required information doesn’t flex. The database needs what the database needs. Because of this, digital services are terrible at making discretionary decisions: you are either old enough to access a piece of content or too young; you’re eligible for a payment or you’re not. There is rarely capacity for shades of grey in digital systems, even though most of life happens in uncertainty and negotiation rather than in tidy binaries or clear schemas.  

Digital delivery is also often mistaken for universal delivery. In the UK, between 6 and 12% of households don’t have access to a smartphone (Ofcom, ONS), but it’s not just an issue of “digital inclusion”: people who do have access to smartphones and other devices also use them in different ways to do different things. For instance, as a Londoner, I delight in watching the many ways and angles people hold their phones over the payment sensors at TfL gates: there’s no one way to do it, so everyone does it their way. Forms, however, are not so forgiving: there is usually a right way and a wrong way to complete them. Things like mandatory fields create GO/NO-GO conditions of access and subjective pieces of information are often treated like right and wrong answers. The starkness of forms puts very firm barriers around softer, more human requirements, and these barriers are then intensified by algorithmic processes. Hiring a nanny, for instance, is not the same as opening a bank account or ordering a cab, but in the platform economy it becomes another verifiable transaction that requires forms to be “accurately” completed. 

Maïmonatou Mar’s paper on French nannies and the platform economy reminds us that the people we want to look after small children are people who are good with small children, which is not the same as being great at filling in forms. But in the platform economy, you’re only as good as your star-rated, fully verified profile. Of course, some (rare) people can do both, but as a form-filling professional, I know I’d do a horrible job of looking after a group of toddlers for more than 3 minutes. And although we all want decent due diligence, the starkness of digital verification has little in common with the attributes of good care. For me, a personal recommendation from another parent or a known relationship with someone in my established network indicates more about whether or not a carer is able and worthy of trust than a pristine, verified profile on a website. Human relationships are a form of active and ongoing accountability that remain purposefully small and difficult to scale; while they can be augmented by digital verification, they cannot be entirely replaced by transactional services. 

Everyone who depends on the platform economy is now expected to do free labour to feed the beast. If you’re on Hinge, you’re running a personal optimisation campaign with a side order of digital admin; if you run a specialist local shop or a restaurant in a tourist hotspot you need to be digitally discoverable and social-media ready, with impeccable reviews and seamless customer service. Everyone whose business is tanking because search-engine optimisation is a thing of the past is now burning the midnight oil working out how to look good for genAI. The several failed attempts and 2-hours of applied problem-solving I needed to verify my identity at Companies House is a new digital cost of doing business. All of this data input and optimisation, all of these Canva graphics and LinkedIn updates and casual TikToks, all of this bureaucratic wrangling to get a blue tick is unpaid work we do so the platforms will pick us and the databases will know we’re real.

Transaction planet 

As a working parent - with an unpredictable job, not much time, some disposable income, an aversion to random conversations, and a love of innovation - I have allowed most of my domestic organising to take place via forms that I fill out on my phone at weird times of the day. 

When the dirty washing pile gets too big, I fill out a form for a local laundry company who come and take it away; our supermarket shop is delivered by someone I’m asked to score out of 5; regular payments for everything from milk to vegetables to cat food are left on the doorstep; and the payments to my kid’s school are taken via an app, meaning I’ve never once had to visit the school office. In the unlikely event I’m at home, I’ll sometimes chat to the postman, or accost the EVRI delivery person before they pop a delivery in the bin for safe keeping, but I have more or less organised all of these domestic chores to take place at a distance, via subscription, mostly without more than a few words of conversation. If I had more time, or was better organised, perhaps I’d chat to the greengrocer (I mean, it could happen), take my laundry for a service wash, and get to know some more people in my neighbourhood. But that feels like a Disney movie model of domestic management, that I’ll only have time for once my other responsibilities start to peel away. And of course, this is only one part of the overall domestic load that I share with my partner: I don’t have  any apps that can strip the beds, empty the bins, walk around the house picking up socks, or notice when the windows suddenly really, really need cleaning.

On the one hand, it is (sort-of) great that technology allows me to live two lives in one day and pack everything in, finishing important domestic tasks while standing up on the train in the morning or under the duvet late at night, but it is also exhausting and quite lonely — even for someone who doesn't really want to talk to anyone. In a world before smartphones and online services, I’d only be able to get this all done if I could afford a nanny or if I had the luxury of arranging my working life so that it took place outside of normal business hours and had more time for domestic admin during the day. My “village” is a set of forms I fill out on my phone and none of them will notice if I look tired today, if deliveries pile up on the doorstep, or wonder what’s happened to Dolly if we cancel the cat food. 

And on the one hand, it is useful to be able to get all this done, but it is also very fucking tiring and there is no slack or redundancy built into the system. The endless form filling still relies on me to order stuff for packed lunches when drama rehearsals shift to lunchtime rather than after school, note when the teen starts eating five meals a day rather than four, cancel the subscription when the cat changes his mind, and to observe that turnips in two consecutive veg boxes is more turnips than our household can ever know what to do with. While there are probably domestic tasks I could programme an agent to deliver, I’d then also have to take care of an agent (no thank you) and there is only a certain amount of love and care that can be parsed by “if this then that” style commands. 

The formification of life helps me live two lives in the short term - which seems necessary to get things done and live from day-to-day –  but it doesn't create a fairer society for working parents with desk jobs: it pushes care out of sight, allows work to take up more time, and increases the unseen mental load. And it is only available to me because (as I said above) I can more or less afford to make all these monthly payments, have a decent phone and bank card and the kind of job where I can sometimes add things to the supermarket order while on a particularly boring call. The exhausting life I’m describing is a privilege, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. 

Formification also creates an invisible class  of work, powered by delivery drivers who are fitting in too many stops to go to the bathroom and workers in gig-economy jobs that fade out of sight, including dark kitchen staff and warehouse workers, typically working for low pay in poor and often exploitative conditions. 

Our phone screens hide and dehumanise the people who make the platform economy tick, reducing them to push notifications, status updates and star-ratings, making their hard work seem magical, efficient and faceless. I get to just-about-manage in an extractive, constantly optimising society because forms and digital technologies have made bespoke services cheaper and more accessible, but they’ve done this by putting forms between people - minimising interactions so we don’t have to deal with the guilt, maximising productivity so we can’t imagine life without access to these time-extending services, and tiring us all out. Digital technologies are stretching what it means to live a complicated middle-class life: more of us can get bespoke door-to-door service, but the cost of that is exhaustion and extraction. 

But Forms Don’t ❤️ You Back

For all kinds of reasons, digitisation and automation have become irrevocably linked with “progress”, but progress towards what, exactly? A digital system that doesn’t deliver a shared benefit is just a change - and it’s not necessarily one for the better. When we pour our effort into filling in forms and interacting with interfaces, we only get transactions; we don’t get better relationships or safety nets or cheery smiles, we get notification emails and reminders to rate our satisfaction. The emptiness of those transactions might give us a little bit of time back or, if we’re lucky, a discount on our fifth purchase, but it rarely leads to joy. We all know that doomscrolling is the worst, but form-filling is becoming pretty bad. No matter how many forms you fill out, how many interfaces you interact with, none of them will love you back. 

So often the problem with technological change is that it plays out gradually and in plain sight for years and years before anyone really notices it. I’ve written about the datafication and digitisation of social life before (in 2018, and in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic); in both of those pieces I suggested that better social infrastructure was needed to keep up with digital change, but I’ve changed my mind. Eight years since that first piece, I don’t think it’s social infrastructure that needs to improve, I think it’s technology development that needs to slow down. I keep reading LinkedIn updates and blog posts by people who are breathless about the potential of agentic AI, but I really don’t want another form to get in the way of a conversation, I don’t want a few lines of code to maximise my efficiency. I don’t want to keep seeing the world through my phone screen, and I don’t think I’m alone. There’s a whole other newsletter to be written about how X is for fascists, AI is cringe and being offline - having a digital SLR and spending £50 on a vinyl record - is cool again, but I’m also not really making a case for a binary here. This newsletter is called Just enough Internet and we’ve gone way, way past “just enough”. We’re at total saturation, like we’ve been on a full-scale, whole-of-society digital binge for the decade, and I’m definitely getting a hangover. 

Perhaps this collective hangover will be the thing that makes the AI bubble burst – or at least, start it rolling slowly off the peak of inflated expectations. Lord knows, there is no form of reason or economic sense behind the relentless game of Number Go Up being played by the rulers of our AI age: Huang, Bezos, Altman, Musk, and Amodei will keep cranking the money machine till everything explodes, and politicians will continue to run round at their behest. Instead, it seems likely that more of us will choose different things: WhatsApp will probably remain the default social operating system, but it seems likely we’ll see more atomisation for those of us who can choose, fewer common platforms, more pick and mix. But most importantly, it would be nice to see folks in the tech industry stop chasing their tails, desperately finding ways to apply new technologies to everything when sometimes the innovation we need is a little less technology and a little more of a personal touch.