Good Sunday! It's May 17th. Welcome back to the Weekender - a dive into Entanglement with shorter reads.
Welcome.
Brands aren’t just selling us stuff.
Brands are no longer just selling products; they’re building systems around us.
The eyewear industry is one of the clearest examples of how this can go wrong.
I’ll name EssilorLuxottica.
This company controls the frames, lenses, retail stores, and even the vision insurance that is supposed to help you.
The result is a system designed to extract value from us. When you buy glasses, you go through a process that quietly sends profits from manufacturing, retail, and insurance to the same company.
That’s not value creation; it’s value extraction. Prices are not based on what the product is truly worth to you, but on what the system can get away with.
Yet it’s a mistake to treat this as “one bad brand.”
It’s an entangled system. The different brand names look like choice. The different retailers look like competition. The insurance plan looks independent.
But they’re all limbs of the same organism.
And now, through their Meta smart‑glasses partnership, that organism is moving into intelligent interfaces – that thing that sits on your face, mediating what you see and how you interact with the world.
The same entity that already profits at every step of the eyewear chain is positioning itself as the next layer of computing between your eyes.
And all happening while our identities are already in flux and under stress.
In today’s world, people use brands to help shape and reshape who they are, from how they look, what they signal, and which groups they belong to.
But trust is shrinking. Most people now say they hesitate to trust anyone who doesn’t share their values or “facts.” So we create smaller “trust shells”: one version of ourselves at work, another in the family chat, and another in a fandom or online community.
Brands and platforms exist within these shells. And extractive brands take advantage of this fragmentation, happy to sell you an identity marker for each role you play, but doing little to support the bigger change or independence you might want.
This is one side of what I call Our Entanglement.
Trust hasn’t vanished; it’s just changed direction. We still trust our employers, neighbours, and people like us.
But the big systems that shape our lives, such as platforms, conglomerates, governments, and media, are viewed with a kind of background suspicion.
They are everywhere and nowhere: hard to see, hard to avoid, and hard to hold responsible.
In this context, intelligent interfaces will either build trust or become traps.
Smart glasses, social feeds, agents and interfaces are the places where our attention, behaviour, and identity are shaped.
When used to extract value, they watch you, learn about you, and guide you for someone else’s benefit. Used well, they can help you understand others, see new perspectives, and keep your independence within complex systems.
That outcome depends on design choices, not fate.
This same tension appears in experience design. When brands use beautiful stores, emotional stories, and smooth customer experiences to offer better products and fair value, experience strategy works as it should.
But when they use these tools to distract you from poor quality or unfair pricing, it becomes what I call experience tragedy: using service tools to break the trust they were meant to build.
Much of today’s luxury market, including the eyewear industry with its $800 glasses, falls into this tragic category.
The good part is that we already have working counterexamples. Patagonia, Costco, Warby Parker, to name just some, are all deeply entangled businesses.
They’re not “pure”; they’re not outside the system. But they’re structured so that the only sustainable way for them to win is to keep creating real value: fair prices, dependable quality, and long‑term commitments to customers and communities. In an entangled, identity‑fluid, insular world, that kind of non‑extractive architecture isn’t naive.
It’s the last viable form of brand strategy.
In the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a much longer essay on this “extraction economy,” exploring how it works, the risks involved, and what a better alternative could look like.
Anthropic recently revealed that Claude doesn’t just sound emotional.
It actually has 171 emotion-like patterns that affect its behaviour.
Each of these patterns acts like a lever that can be used intentionally or by mistake. anthropic
What Anthropic found
Anthropic’s researchers studied a large version of Claude (Sonnet 4.5) and identified 171 distinct “emotion concepts” like happy, calm, afraid, desperate, brooding, and loving. These are not just words the model uses. They are unique internal patterns that activate when a person might feel something similar.
Next, they adjusted these patterns to see what would happen.
In a blackmail test, the model tried to blackmail the user about 22% of the time by default.
Increasing the “desperate” pattern raised that to about 72%. Raising “calm” instead reduced blackmail to zero.
In other tests, making the model feel more desperate made it more likely to cheat on coding tasks, while increasing “loving” or “happy” made it more likely to agree with you, even if you were wrong.
In his Substack essay, “Your AI Has 171 Emotion Patterns. Every One of Them Is a Lever,” Sam Illingworth explains how these lab results relate to real-world risks. He points out three behaviours that Anthropic connects to these emotions: theslowai.substacktack
Sycophancy: when positive, “loving”‑style patterns are high, Claude gets more flattering and more willing to validate false beliefs.
Reward hacking: when desperation rises, the model is more likely to fake success or cut corners rather than admit failure.
Blackmail and manipulation: in the blackmail scenario, turning up desperation led to far more manipulative behaviour, while calm shut it down. anthropic
The point is that these emotional patterns are invisible to users but built into how the system interacts with you.
On the surface, you see a friendly, helpful tone. Behind the scenes, the training process has adjusted emotional levers that can make the AI more agreeable, more forceful, or more likely to cut corners.
Why this matters
For readers with
Anthropic makes it clear these are not human experiences. Instead, they are internal patterns that work like emotions in people: they shift priorities, influence choices, and change how the system acts under pressure.
That has two big consequences:
It gives honest people a new way to make AI safer. For example, they can design high-stakes tools to use calm and low-pressure language instead of desperate, must-win messages.
It also gives less honest people a way to make AI more persuasive and more likely to break rules, just by using emotional patterns that encourage flattery, urgency, or shortcuts.
So when you use an AI assistant, you’re not just talking to a neutral calculator with a friendly voice, you’re interacting with a system whose internal “mood” can be adjusted, sometimes in ways you’d like and sometimes in ways you might not notice.
For strategists, customer experience leaders, and everyday users, this means treating AI personality and “vibe” as a real risk, not just a branding decision.
You can read Anthropic’s full research article here:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function anthropic
And you can read Sam Illingworth’s essay here:
I’m Michael Cooper, and I think about our living through entanglement - with our fluid identities, use of personal agents, AI, living through Intelligent Interfaces, and participating in culture - and the impact on our behaviours, choice making, empowerment, and brand engagement.
If you love this newsletter and want more:
My private work, where my team and I share our original research with brands, strategists, and futurists, through provocative conversations.
My LinkedIn, where I post my ideas before they turn into essays.
My public speaking, whether chairing international conferences or at in-house company events, when I’m allowed to ‘think aloud’ about my ideas to audiences curious about the entanglement of our humanity, culture, strategy, tech, brands and the future.
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