Member-only story
‘User agent’ is a great idea that has been weirdly perverted.
Nobody these days (even highly technical people) has a user agent. (Maybe The Doctor does.)
A user agent is a piece of software controlled by the user, that performs the automatic tasks the user has instructed it to. It communicates with other user agents, automatically, on the user’s behalf.
Today, the term ‘user agent’ means ‘long, misleading browser-lineage-identification string’. It identifies one of ~3 corporations.
Imagine if we actually had user agents.
Like, imagine if our computers were doing things we wanted them to do, automatically, on the network. And, it was our computers doing these things, instead of a rental service like IFTTT or google alerts that’s selling info on the back end. Imagine if they stopped doing things when we told them to stop.
Imagine if non-technical users had this too.
The most important thing about a user agent is that they keep on doing things on the user’s behalf when the user isn’t there. This is something that end users aren’t used to: that they can control an automated process — that this process is theirs, rather than a service that a company is providing out of its own self-interest (inevitably partially if not wholly misaligned with the user’s).
