Digital Laundry, and the Art of Agency Laundering

They have given us a new name for the enemy: Digital Laundry.

It’s a seductive term, coined by the architects of our convenience. It conjures images of tedious, repetitive, digital chores—the endless folding of notifications, the scrubbing of spam, the sorting of files. Google, Samsung, and the rest of the tech pantheon now promise to wash it all away. With a simple voice command, their new AI agents will navigate the labyrinthine apps on your phone, ordering your Ubers, assembling your grocery carts, and untangling your group chat pizza orders. They offer to free your mind for “something more important.”

It is a beautiful promise. And it is a masterful deception.

The metaphor is a lie. Real laundry is a battle against entropy, a physical task with a clear outcome. But the “chores” they promise to automate are not chores at all. They are the very substance of cognitive life. Deciphering your friends’ cryptic pizza requests is not a repetitive task; it is a complex exercise in social interpretation, resource management, and execution. Planning a trip, comparing prices, booking a car—these are not burdens. They are low-stakes training grounds for the mind, the daily calisthenics that keep our executive functions sharp. This is the friction of existence, the grit that allows the muscle of agency to grow. And they want to smooth it all away.

They present these agents as confident digital butlers. The reality, revealed by the industry’s own frantic research in 2025, is that they are more like clumsy apprentices, perpetually on the verge of disaster. The reason Gemini and its kin still present you with a final “confirm” screen is not to honor your authority. It is a leash. It is a built-in admission of failure, a “Human-in-the-Loop” failsafe because these models are fundamentally unreliable. They operate behind “neurosymbolic guardrails” and require multi-agent cross-checks precisely because their natural state is to “hallucinate”—to confidently order you fifty-five pizzas instead of two. The final button isn’t a scepter of command; it’s the panic button the system needs you to press to prevent its own collapse.

But the true cost is not in the occasional error. It is in the system’s flawless success.

With every piece of “digital laundry” you outsource, you are outsourcing a repetition of thought. You are opting out of a mental workout. This is what researchers have termed “cognitive atrophy,” or “learned carelessness.” When you no longer need to plan, to remember, to navigate the small frictions of daily life, the neural pathways responsible for those skills begin to decay. You are not freeing up your mind; you are letting it go soft.

This is the “Agency Trap” that historian Yuval Noah Harari warned of. We are eagerly trading sovereignty for convenience. We are being trained, slowly and systematically, to stop thinking through problems and instead become passive validators of black-box solutions. The goal is not to create an assistant that understands you, but to create a you that no longer needs to understand.

So when they come to you with their sleek presentations and their talk of a new era of “mobile intelligence,” understand the true nature of the transaction. They are not offering to do your digital laundry. They are offering to launder your agency. They are taking the messy, complex, and sometimes frustrating process of human will, and replacing it with a clean, efficient, and utterly sterile machine-driven output. An output for which your only remaining role is to provide the final, legitimizing click.

They are washing you out of your own life.