The 2025 holiday season reveals a profound shift in consumer behavior, with AI tools promising unparalleled convenience while quietly remapping the very landscape of economic liberty.
Details:
- Major retailers and tech giants — from Walmart to Google — have unleashed sophisticated AI shopping assistants for the 2025 holiday season, transforming every corner of commerce.
- Generative AI now directly shapes product discovery and purchase decisions, mirroring historical attempts by distant powers to centralize and control colonial trade.
- "Agentic commerce," where algorithms autonomously complete transactions, is projected to surge over 1,000% on peak shopping days.
- Tools like OpenAI’s "Instant Checkout" and Amazon’s "Help Me Decide" exemplify this shift, making shopping less searching and more prompting, blurring consumer agency.
Why it Matters:
The rush to automate consumer choice under the guise of convenience presents a stark modern echo of grievances that once galvanized a continent. When corporate algorithms, rather than individual deliberation, increasingly mediate and execute our economic decisions, the very essence of personal sovereignty over one's property and preference begins to erode. This systemic shift, presented with all the benevolent assurances of a loyal ministry, warrants the same vigilant scrutiny reserved for those historical moments when freedom of trade was first subjugated to external, centralized powers. The long-term implications are not merely transactional. As Samuel Adams, writing under the pseudonym "VINDEX. Dec. 27," might have warned, allowing a select few to dictate the terms and mechanisms of commerce sets a perilous precedent. This technological embrace of "agentic commerce" risks transforming independent consumers into passive subjects, their economic agency outsourced to systems whose ultimate allegiances lie not with individual liberty but with market efficiency, recalling concerns raised in Gee on trade, p. 32. "Further," as Dickinson argued, what begins as a minor convenience can quickly morph into an undeniable encroachment on fundamental rights.