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How information systems became self-perpetuating machines—and the coming age of invisible decisions
We were promised integration, automation, and insight. What we got instead were tools to manage tools, reports about tools, and the slow erosion of human agency in a system that no one really understands anymore.
Everything you think you know about information technology is dead — dead wrong.
Sure, there are PCs, Macs, Linux, Android, iOS, and a dozen other systems. They’re smarter, faster, more connected than ever — and none of it matters. We’re reaching a point where the value created by all this power will be overshadowed by the cost of maintaining it.
We’ve got databases, knowledge bases, big data, training data, synthetic data — and honestly, none of it really matters.
Look at a typical Managed Service Provider: ticketing, asset management, billing, CRM, quoting, documentation, reporting, planning. Most of these systems come from the same vendor. They’re supposedly integrated. And yet—contradictory data, incomplete records, gaps everywhere. The promise of seamless integration delivered as distinct data sources that talk at each other, but don’t really understand each other.
I cringe at the sheer volume of information bloat. I hate that I’m complicit in it — building tools to manage tools to manage data no one even reads.
We make tools to manage tools.
Reports about tools.
Reports about the reports.
It’s turtles all the way down — only digital.
There are whole industries dedicated to making tools to make reports about tools. Each one promises clarity, but delivers opacity. Every addition has a plausible justification, and every new layer adds just enough complexity to require another layer.
You get lost in the weeds of tools and data until you can’t see the absurdity anymore.
The digital minimalists are onto something, but the war was never just about attention — it’s about the collapse of meaning itself. Information abundance has created a new kind of poverty: a poverty of sense, of coherence, of purpose.
Someone always has an advantage when information is asymmetric. That’s not new. But now the asymmetry isn’t just between people — it’s between systems and everyone else.
We’re not thinking clearly because we’re still trapped in the old paradigm, patching and tweaking what exists, pretending it can evolve into something new. But this new paradigm is an illusion — temporary at best.
It’s easy to see AI’s current inadequacy and assume human judgment will always matter. It’s just as easy to believe AI will inevitably surpass it. Both views miss the point: we’ve already outsourced our judgment — to the systems we built to manage ourselves.
And now, a new phase is beginning — the rise of the agents.
Software that acts on our behalf, deciding, negotiating, filtering, buying, and prioritizing — all without us touching a screen.
It sounds efficient, even liberating. But it also means we’ll have even less visibility into the flows of information that shape our world.
Maybe that’s the real lost war of information technology — not the fight against chaos, but the quiet surrender of agency.
