[Note: Armon Dadgar, a UW computer science alum, was co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation company that was founded in 2013, went public on the NASDAQ in 2021, and sold to IBM in 2025. In his role, he spoke with thousands of companies adopting cloud across a wide range of industries, giving him a unique perspective on technology adoption.]
Pixar released WALL-E in June 2008, about two weeks before Apple launched the App Store. The film follows WALL-E, a robot left to clean up Earth after the natural environment becomes unfit for life, forcing humanity out of space. The rest of the population is completely dead in the best seats and completely immersed in digital reality.
For years, I’ve been jokingly calling it a historical documentary from the future and every year we seem to be getting closer to its dark prophecy. Today, we live in a “WALL-E economy” with apps and services that cater to people’s convenience and vices, but negatively impact our mental, physical, and emotional well-being, as well as our environment. The growing power and spread of AI threatens to accelerate those trends, and push us further into a WALL-E dystopia.
WALL-E’s faustian is that we voluntarily commercial convenience in everything, including our free will. We live the lives of cows, where we are constantly fed, told what to wear, what to buy, what to think, and how to vote, and in turn are kept safe and warm in the proverbial womb. We get our dopamine, but we never ask at what cost.
Rather than speculating, we can see many of these same trade-offs in today’s most popular services. The average American spends about 2.5 hours a day on social media, and for Gen Z it’s even worse, with a staggering 5 hours every day. It sounds costless to browse memes and share posts with friends, but these services have stolen time from exercising, connecting with friends, engaging in hobbies, and other activities that promote connection and purpose. We have a youth mental health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness, the rise of political extremism and the “decline of friendship.” While correlation isn’t causation, it’s reasonably safe to admit that it’s the phones.
Outside of social media, we have many convenient services, such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart, which are mainly used for food delivery. While you may think of it as “luxury services,” data shows that usage is widespread across all income levels, and is actually being misused by those who can afford it, even tricking users into “Buy Now, Pay Later” services. The convenience of the moment is undeniable, but so is the financial burden on users, the damage to the restaurant industry as they are forced to adapt to delivery services, and the growing frustration that comes with one-person dining.
The economy of WALL-E is often paired to deliver luxury and packaging vice under a layer of glossy application. Sports betting services like DraftKings, prediction markets like Kalshi, and retail options trading on Robinhood are prime examples. All are combined and made visible. Chesterton’s fence reminds us that if we have discouraged gambling for millennia, there may be a good reason for that. Unsurprisingly, making these services available 24/7 and putting them in our pockets has led to an increase in addiction, bankruptcy, and suicide.
If the smartphone powered WALL-E’s economy, AI would charge it more. AI accelerates the ability to collect and analyze data, provide greater personalization, and algorithmically target with precision, with the goal of influencing user behavior. This threatens to make WALL-E’s economy smarter and more dangerous.
Targeting people who are already lonely and isolated, virtual dating services are one of the most dangerous use cases for AI. Users are willing to believe that they have found a meaningful interaction with AI while getting used to the “soft” interaction of chatbots makes the mysterious and mysterious world of real people more difficult to navigate. It is clear that the cure is worse than the disease, as this only increases isolation from people, leading to depression and suicide.
AI will also enable sophisticated capitalist surveillance applications and dark patterns that aim to manipulate user behavior. AI-driven customer profiles will determine whether you are a price-sensitive shopper and use that to increase prices or implement price increases. Betting apps can detect when the average gambler hasn’t bet recently and give them free credits to entice them with a 24/7 AI-bookie that can chat and encourage bets.
The AI-slop future of social media is clear as Zuckerberg steps back from the metaverse and turns to AI. Social media platforms historically required users to create content, which they could promote based on user interests. The need for content producers disappears if content can be generated by AI, optimized and personalized, indefinitely. This future may increase user engagement, but it may increase the isolation and fragmentation problems we already face.
We can be nostalgic for a simpler time, but there’s no way back before smartphones, social media, or AI. We wouldn’t wish it, and there’s an incredible amount of money being spent to expand AI into every corner of the economy. While Silicon Valley may argue about “technological inevitability” and the idea that technological progress is inevitable and good, this ignores the fact that people still have agency. Many technologies are inseparable from a set of social and political questions, and unrestricted use is inevitable. The recent order banning Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos model is a prime example.
In the movie, WALL-E is given the sisyphean task of cleaning up a corrupted world. Despite his plans, he envisions a better world and refuses the inevitability of his destiny to fight for something better. Today as we look at the AI-supercharged version of WALL-E’s economy, it’s no surprise that many people are not happy. We suffer from the failure to imagine what a better future might look like instead.
The rise of “friction-maxxing” as a new trend that rejects comfort as its end is just the beginning. It is part of the growing recognition that people need what they need to find meaning in our lives and work. The growing discourse about the dangers of convenience, and individual behavioral changes, is helping to clear the Overton window. Changing hearts and minds is an important step towards new regulations, which are needed to solve social challenges more broadly. This is a slow process, but we can look at tobacco as a good historical analogy.
Tobacco companies had a clear motive for aggressive marketing and sales, and went to great lengths to hide the health effects of their products, much like the companies powering the WALL-E economy. Eventually, it became clear that tobacco posed a serious health risk, both to direct users and bystanders, which led to social changes in how they were viewed and ultimately political changes in how they were controlled. As a result, there has been a significant decrease in their use today.
In WALL-E’s modern economy there is no perfect, single goal. It requires a democratic process to balance harm reduction as we best understand it, with individual rights and autonomy. On the digital front, countries such as Australia and the UK are leading the way in banning the use of social media by children and young people, recognizing the harm it causes. Utah is taking action against “prediction marketplaces” recognizing that they are effectively online gambling. This type of regulatory change is essential to solving social problems but it takes time, especially with vested interests lobbying for disorganized society.
Without waiting for improved control, we can regain our individual agency by living with more purpose. In my personal life, I always look for opportunities to host, whether it’s a small dinner or a big party to create and encourage connections. I’ve worked to reduce “information noise” by disabling most notifications, limiting time on social media, and spending more time reading on my Kindle distraction free. I avoid eliminating all daily friction to provide a healthy level of resistance. None of these are radical changes, and they won’t solve the broader problems, but they help reshape our environment so that we avoid relying on willpower alone.
Changing our behavior can help protect us from the WALL-E economy, but that’s not enough. Taxing the profits of AI companies to provide a UBI to fund “bread and circuses” would be nothing more than WALL-Esque. We must look to the techno-optimism of the Jetsons, where technology empowers humanity, and builds towards a future we enjoy, rather than one we accept as inevitable. WALL-E is incredibly dark for a children’s movie, but the character’s struggle ultimately gives hope for a more hopeful future, and reminds us of the old boy’s motto: try to leave this world a little better than you found it.
Special thanks to Josh Kalla, Behzod Sirjani, and Kevin Fishner for their feedback on this post.
