Is your car a tool?
How about your phone?
Have you noticed that if you exceed the speed limit your car starts to beep at you? Sure, you can turn the reminder off, but the next time you start the car it turns itself back on. Have you noticed your computer installing an update without you asking it to, maybe even after you told it explicitly not to? Perhaps it was a vital security update, perhaps it was bundled with others.
These things are becoming more and more common in the modern world. Part of that is simply technology advancing, but another part is regulation and liability. After all, if a beeping reminder causes some people to slow down and that leads to fewer accidents, that sounds like a good outcome. Like many debates though, it comes down to whether the ends justify the means.
When your car beeps at you for speeding, designers say it creates friction. When you turn it off and it comes back on again, they call it a behavioural nudge. What it really does is impose a small penalty. It makes things slightly worse for you until you behave the way the system expects. Your car does not display stopping distances or try to persuade you with information. It does not reason with you. If you do not do what it wants, it irritates you until you do.
For lack of a better word, these are anti-tools.
A tool is something you use. Take a drill. There are correct bits for certain surfaces, and times when you probably should not use one so you don’t annoy the neighbours. But you still can. If you do not have the right bit, you might risk using the wrong one. If you need to drill a hole late at night, you can decide that it is worth it. The tool leaves the judgement to you.
Now imagine that drill refuses to spin with the wrong bit installed. Imagine it will not run after seven in the evening, or if it detects the wrong material. Imagine it beeps at you when it thinks you are doing something inadvisable.
Those measures do not help you do the right thing. They simply pressure you to behave the way the designer prefers.
Even if the intentions behind these systems are good, there is another cost. They create situations you cannot really win. You can comply, or you can resist. Compliance means surrendering your judgement to the system. Resistance means constant effort just to maintain control over things that used to be simple tools. Over time that changes how people relate to the systems around them. Small defeats accumulate. You stop pushing. You stop expecting to win. You start working around systems rather than directing them.
More and more of the things we use are becoming anti-tools: systems designed to steer behaviour rather than enable action. Not through persuasion or understanding, but through small, persistent pressures until compliance is easier than resistance.
Is your car a tool?
Yes, but whose tool is it?