Agentic Shopping Is Worse for Everyone (opens in new tab)

I wanted it 25 years ago. One of the “paths not taken” on the web a long time ago was that if the semantic web had succeeded as an extension of the web [1] we would have had agents do stuff for us and would have bypassed the personalized ad economy before it ever existed.

[1] it did succeed to some extent as an extension of symbolic ai.

The original title is "Agentic Shopping Is Worse for Everyone But Lazy Fucks" but I didn't want to get in trouble for unnecessary profanity or trying to grab clicks. It's how I feel though, and used Google's announcement of the universal cart as a jumping off point to talk about agentic shopping and more on my blog.