Sub Sandwich Surveillance and the End of Magic
Did you have a moment when the Internet seemed like a magical creation? Was there ever a time when you sat at a keyboard or held a phone and discovered you could use it to do something you’d once only read about as science fiction?
In the old days, back in the 1900s, BTI (Before the Internet), keeping up with the weather was not simple. There were only a few ways to get a forecast. Radio stations made jingles about the times when they would clue you in on the temperature or the chance of rain, so you could get that information at one minute past the hour. Some places actually had a phone number you could call to find out the current temperature. Your other option was to wait for the local news to air in the evening for a detailed explanation, complete with maps and jargon about cold fronts and barometric pressure.
When the walled gardens—Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL—entered their heyday, before access to the World Wide Web was widespread, the content you got in Miami was the same content people got in Seattle. It wasn’t localized. Over time, that began to change, in an actual example of companies improving their products to better compete with their rivals. One day I logged into AOL to see if the “You’ve got mail” guy had anything to say to me when I noticed a new button labeled “Weather.” I clicked it. Hard. I don’t remember whether I typed in my city and state or my ZIP code, but whatever it was, the result was an on-demand weather report—the first of my life. I was 28 years old, and all of a sudden, I was living in the future.
Let’s fast forward to 2026. Today, magic is pretty scarce. We’ve largely become immune to amazement because we’ve been inundated with bullshit from tech companies for so long—and it’s obvious. One of the most egregious ongoing examples is the question too many apps ask you on an iPhone. You go to the App Store to install the app from your favorite sub sandwich place because, well, you’re hungry and you want that footlong Italian. Before you can start placing your order, you get hit with a request from the sandwich app to track what you do in other apps and across the Internet. Why? Seriously—what possible benefit could you get from such an arrangement? Jersey Mike’s wants to add to its bottom line by acting as a data broker? That’s not the relationship you were seeking, was it?
These requests are always presented as though they will benefit you in some way. You would think everyone would see straight through that, but you would be wrong. Many otherwise intelligent people get instantly confused any time something unexpected appears on a screen. They get flustered and blindly click buttons until the message they didn’t read goes away. (Source: my 30 years in IT support.) The whole experience is the furthest thing from magic.
Some people give Apple kudos for giving us the choice to opt out of exploitation. I have to reject that. Yes, it’s better than what Google does with Android, but the option shouldn’t even exist. No one installs a sub sandwich app so their unrelated behavior can be harvested for profit. And if you accidentally click the wrong button and agree to be surveilled, you didn’t choose that—you were ambushed. It happens to all of us. Undoing that choice isn’t obvious, and the burden shouldn’t be on the user to hunt down the consequences of a momentary misclick.
As a certified Old, I remember the magic, and I miss it. I know how cool technology can be. I know there are still real possibilities. But kids today think the enshittified Internet is the only Internet there ever was. It isn’t—and it didn’t have to turn out this way.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇