I have for a few years now, been running a reverse engineering experiment in corporate enshitification.

This culminated in Watson, my AI receptionist, who greets all callers with the same ineptitude we have all come to expect from companies wishing to demean us into servitude.

I can’t pinpoint an exact starting point in this journey as I have been unaware of my intentions until recently, but a good place to start is with an encounter with Estate agent a couple of years ago. 

They were hired to find a tenant for an apartment I wished to let out. After a few months they found a suitable candidate. I didn’t want them to manage the arrangement, so I owed them an agreed £600 in finders fees.

I have covered this interaction in detail on this protocol, so I will simply summarise the outcome by saying they couldn’t invoice me because I refused to allow them to KYC my bank account. This culminated in them they waiving their fee in lieu of a packet of biscuits, delivered by hand when I collected the keys from their offices.

Scroll forward a few months and another encounter with an estate agent resulting in them refusing to provide two utility bills, a passport and driving license in order to prove who they were while visiting the house. They instead expected to KYC me to prove I owned the house they were guests in.

More recently, my new fibre Internet company have refused to book an appointment with my AI receptionist to complete the install, instead expecting me to wait in a phone queue to book that appointment.

Then, a virtual business card app that I decided to trial decided to phone me to sell unwanted services. They got an incredibly frustrating experience with my AI receptionist Watson, who insisted on knowing their postal address before passing on any messages to me.

Another incident involves a bank account my late father used. In order to close it, the bank expected me to produce a £25 copy of the death certificate in person at an appointment I was expected to make by phoning a call centre and waiting in the obligatory queue. Instead, I have let the account run for the past year until finally the bank are threatening to close it themselves as there are no funds in it.

Lastly, a management company refuse to send invoices by email instead posting copies to an address I rarely occupy. This has mean’t I have been unable to pay their fees for nearly a year.

There are other more significant events going on right now. Most of which I am unable to share, but the examples above are some of the surface level shenanigans I am having fun with.

We often think of self sovereignty as holding our own money in the form of Bitcoin, but I would suggest that forcing the world of corporates and governments to adapt to you, the customer, is real sovereignty. It is a gradual journey and I have not been fully aware of starting it, but I am fully aware of the direction I am headed.

Watson, my AI receptionist is the latest piece of armoury and  provides me with hours of fun reading the transcripts of call centre workers, tradesmen and scammers try to negotiate their way around a very authoritarian computer assistant.