This week, technologists and designers worldwide fawned over images of Sir Jony Ive standing shoulder-to-shoulder (awkwardly half-hugging) with Sam Altman following OpenAI’s $6.4 billion (stock-only) acquisition of WithLove. Admittedly, The optics are delicious: one of design’s most revered figures is joining forces with AI’s most powerful architect, promising to “reimagine human-computer interaction”. Initially, I thought, oh well, finally, some good design in AI development. On a second take, this is nothing more than thinly-veneered data extraction.
For all the talk of “delight” and “human-centered design”, the acquisition stinks of recruiting cultural icons to sanctify monopolistic ambitions. The partnership’s rhetoric leans heavily on emotionally intelligent design, the kind that makes you whisper, “Somebody gave a damn about me” when unboxing a cable (at least that’s still included when purchasing a new doohickey, unlike charging bricks). But with LLMs emotions are increasingly mimicked, not earned. OpenAI’s prototypes will likely weaponise Ive’s design language to make surveillance feel like intimacy.
This is the apotheosis of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” - the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for behavioural data. Let’s not forget that Altman’s other startup scans biometric data in exchange for cryptocurrency.
The WithLove (sorry, now called io) device, with its promise to be “fully aware of the user’s environment” and “see everything in users’ lives,” represents the logical endpoint of this trajectory. Inevitably these data points end up “packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioural futures markets”. Now imagine that surveillance apparatus rendered in crisp fonts, with rounded corners and a carbon-neutral supply chain. Chef’s kiss.
Enshittification has never found a more elegant vessel. Here we will have a device that promises frictionless integration into daily life, wrapped in the design language that once convinced us that paying $1,000 for a phone was somehow liberating.
The Altman-Ive alliance embodies what Ron Salaj calls “theftploitation”, a system built on data theft and exploitation, where users willingly pay for their own influencing. The upcoming io device sounds to me like a masochistic contract. Users will clamor to be monitored, soothed by Ive’s design touches even as OpenAI monetises their behavioral data.
This acquisition will probably be effective. As Max von Thun observes, Big Tech firms are “buying themselves an insurance policy, ensuring that even if their own in-house AI efforts flop, their digital dominance will be maintained”.
And exactly there lies where the Ive partnership becomes particularly insidious. By wrapping this monopolistic land grab in the design philosophy that gave us the iPhone, OpenAI is building aesthetic barriers. Who will compete with a device that feels better, looks better, and carries the cultural cachet of revolutionary design?
Should we celebrate disguising surveillance as care?