You may notice a name and logo change for this newsletter. It’s because the conversation has grown. UNCX was where this started — Our Entangled Selves is where it’s going. I've been writing about identity, AI, and the Self more — and giving the work the name it now deserves. Same thinking, but a wider door.
It's May 31st. Welcome back to the Weekender’s dive into Entanglement with some shorter reads.
Welcome.
Trust, we’re told, is collapsing. Institutions are crumbling, people are angry, and nobody believes anything anymore.
Except that’s not what the data says.
There’s a subtler, more entangled picture: trust isn’t falling. It’s rewiring.
Rewiring sideways, downwards, and inwards. It’s more local, more conditional, more “I trust this person in this context for this thing” and less “I broadly trust them to do what’s right.”
Trust in institutions hasn’t gone off a cliff everywhere.
It’s risen in developing countries and stagnated in developed ones. Within countries, the gap between high‑income and low‑income groups has more than doubled over the past decade, so your experience of “how trustworthy the system feels” now depends on which group you sit.
And one data point jumps out: we trust our own employer. “My employer” remains one of the most trusted institutions in our lives, with trust in employers and in business overall largely ticking up. But we continue to lose trust in national governments and media, while gaining trust in neighbours, family, friends, coworkers — the people within our arm’s reach.
In other words, trust hasn’t evaporated: it has shrunk and thickened.
It’s retreated from “shared public infrastructure” into dense little clusters of “my people, my company, my feed.” Seven in ten now describe themselves as hesitant or unwilling to trust those who differ from them in values, facts, or ways of solving problems.
Most of us still believe in trust. Just not in you if you sit outside my circle.
In Entanglement, this is the emotional underlay of everything I write about: intelligent interfaces, consumorphosis, liquid loyalty, cognitive sovereignty.
We aren’t designing for a neutral, open citizen of the world. We’re designing for someone whose trust has been pulled inward, then routed through interfaces, creators, and soon, personal agents that act as trust adapters between our local circle and the wider world.
Edelman calls the emerging response “trust brokering”: the work of listening without judgment, translating across difference, and surfacing shared interests instead of trying to overwrite people’s identities.
It sounds like the job description for the next generation of brands, employers, and AI‑mediated experiences: not just persuading, but helping us to cross the gaps we’re now too wary to cross alone.
So this is about trust as it actually exists now: not as a universal setting in the background, but as a dynamic, entangled, interface‑mediated resource.
So who brokers it? Who hoards it? How do our systems either harden insularity or gently widen people’s circle of “us”?
And what happens when our most trusted “neighbour” is no longer a human at all, but a personal agent that claims to know us better than we know ourselves?
When the interface is your weekend
Weekends used to feel different from the workweek, and the change is the interface we use.
The same systems that organise our workdays are starting to shape our free time.
Google’s latest AI-first Search update shows search turning into a network of conversational agents, always-on information agents, and personal intelligence that quietly works in the background.
They monitor topics, compare options, and give you synthesised answers before you even type a question. These agents work around the clock, tracking things like apartment listings, sneaker releases, or local events, and delivering them as AI-curated, zero-click updates.
So here’s the challenge: Instead of exploring the open web, we’re spending more time inside a managed layer that decides what deserves our attention on the weekend.
From a human experience perspective, this goes beyond channels and touchpoints and into shaping our moods. Interfaces influencing how we feel during our downtime, deciding which stories we see first, which invitations we get, and which worries get pushed aside. If you want to know more, check out MarketingProfs’ analysis of Google’s new Search approach, Google’s own blog post “A new era for AI Search,” and a narrative piece on how AI assistants are already woven into our daily routines.
The weekend isn’t “offline” anymore; it’s a space where our interfaces can gently or forcefully guide us. marketingprofs
Brand loyalty when a customer is an algorithm
Marketers still talk about “knowing your customer,” but in today’s agent-driven marketplace, it often won’t be the human making the first decision.
It’s a mix of a retailer’s AI concierge, Google’s shopping agents, and soon, personal agents working for the customer.
Google has said its agents will gather live prices, availability, and reviews to create unified recommendations and bookings. Deloitte’s 2026 retail outlook and eMarketer’s coverage highlight that 44% of retail executives expect generative AI to weaken brand loyalty by shifting choices toward value and fit instead of brand distinctiveness. businesstoday
Here’s the challenge: brands have spent years trying to connect with us, but now decisions are shifting to machines that don’t much care about emotional stories. They focus on relevance, rules, and performance.
Brands increasingly “own” just small pieces of context instead of the whole relationship. With this fragmentation and agent filtering, we may never see a brand unless it ranks high on the qualities our agent look for. Loyalty is now the result of repeated good matches, not a bond formed in advance. basisglobal
For consumers, it empowers them. The focus moves to brands having to send clear signals about who they are, how well they do, and how reliably they do it. And more pressure on what happens after a purchase.
When agents handle discovery, the only part of the journey the human really experiences is what happens after they click “buy.” Service performance becomes key.
For more, see the eMarketer briefing on AI-driven loyalty changes, the Deloitte Shopper Schism summary, and Basis’ Gen Z Brand Radar. All point to the same idea: in an agent-driven economy, loyalty is earned in every small interaction and is always being re-evaluated, not given once and kept forever. emarketer
Personal agents as the new plus‑one
It’s the start of the era of “bring your own agent.”
The conversation around agents has shifted from tools you call on when needed to companions that know your context, negotiate for you, and work with other agents.
Experts say the AI agent industry will be worth nearly $60 billion by 2027, with platforms competing to lead in both personal and professional agent technology. YouTube videos now show how multi-agent systems are becoming coordinated teams, not just single bots. youtube
Here’s the question: who is really “in the room” when you show up somewhere?
Is it you, or a mix of you and the agents that filtered what you saw, and maybe even wrote your talking points? When your calendar accepts a meeting your prioritisation agent thinks is important, or your shopping agent gets you a better deal while you sleep, the line between your choices and your systems’ actions gets fuzzy.
The International AI Safety Report 2026 highlights this issue with AI companions: even a small amount of emotional dependence can mean millions of people have their beliefs and choices quietly shaped by non-human actors. linkedin
Now, we’re a combination of identity, context, personal agents, and platform interfaces.
And it raises questions about consent and control: can your agent agree to things for you?
What happens if two agents, representing different people, disagree?
For more, check out the personal AI agents explainer, Flowtivity’s overview of agent platforms, and recent videos on how quickly a simple helper bot can become an autonomous team. The plus-one isn’t a person anymore. It’s a system. youtube
Our entangled selves, in practice
At the heart of all this is a question I explore in Our Entangled Selves: what happens to identity when it’s not just shaped by systems, but actually co-created with them?
“The Frame Has Changed” post argues that identity, context, and intelligent interfaces together form a strategy. Now, what we design is less about creating “journeys” and more about building the framework for ongoing self-renovation, or consumorphosis.
The entangled self isn’t fixed; it’s a constant negotiation between who I was, am, who I want to be, what my interfaces think I am, and what my agents suggest I should care about next. uncx.substack
Here’s the challenge: selfhood has always been open to outside influence, but now we’re moving from general influences like culture and media to direct ones like personalised feeds, adaptive agents, and AI companions.
The International AI Safety Report 2026 specifically warns that these systems could reduce our autonomy by shaping our beliefs and social circles over time.
It’s a big enough issue to be a societal concern, not just a UX problem. Research shows how easily AI has become part of our daily lives, from waking us up, to planning our commute, to suggesting what we read, watch, and learn. thecogitatingceviche.substack
That’s where the Entangled Self Stack, Consent Rails, and Intelligent Interfaces comes together. In a world with agent customers, interface-driven weekends, and shifting loyalty, the real question is: who is shaping the you that these systems are optimising for?
Our identities used to be shaped by family, place, and institutions; now, they’re also shaped by models trained on our past clicks. For more context, see “The Frame Has Changed” as a main reference, Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer for insights on trust and community, and the AI Safety Report’s sections on autonomy for a balanced view. internationalaisafetyreport
Together, these themes tell one story: weekends shaped by interfaces, loyalty managed by agents, plus-ones that aren’t people, and identities that grow out of all these changes. The challenge isn’t people versus machines; it’s whether we can design these meeting points so our entangled selves remain familiar to us, not just understandable to the systems observing us.
I’m Michael Cooper, and I think about our entanglement - 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:
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Thanks for reading,
Michael