Lately, I’ve found that meeting someone for coffee has come with a new ritual, and I’ll be the first to say, I cannot fucking stand it. We sit down, take our first sips, and then they introduce me to their new favorite tool. They’ve brought an AI notetaker to an in-person conversation, and they’re excited to show it off. They come in various shapes - rings, pendants, plastic pucks and disks, apps, and so forth. But the function is the same; they’ve brought a third wheel to a one-on-one conversation.
“It’s super helpful. You don’t mind, do you?”
I’m left with an uncomfortable choice. I can either ignore it and let the thing log every stumble and tic and half-baked idea - every aside I would have previously assumed was off the record - or I can be the one who makes things awkward and ask them to turn the bloody thing off.
But in 2026, there seems to be no way to say “yes, actually, I do fucking mind” without sounding like a paranoid luddite, or like someone with something to hide. So I wind up saying, “No, totally fine.” But my walls go up. And from that second on, even subconsciously, I’m giving a deposition - weighing up each sentence before it leaves my lips, wondering where the transcript ends up once we shake hands and go our separate ways...
Historically, humans have operated with a clear distinction between ‘The Record’ and ‘The Ephemeral.’ The Record was for treaties, land deeds, holy books and the scratchings of news hounds; The Ephemeral was for everything else - the gossip at the well, idle chat, friends spending time with friends, various confessionals etc.
The tape recorder began to blur this line, but the device’s physical reality at least provided some safeguard. A tape recorder was bulky, with a spinning reel and limited capacity. You didn’t record the conversation of a casual coffee, because it wasn’t worth the $3 for a blank TDK cassette; recording was still a slightly higher-stakes function.
But AI note-takers have lowered the marginal cost of recording to zero; and when the cost of an action goes to zero, the volume of that action tends toward infinity, moving from a world where “most things are ephemeral by default,” to a world where “everything is on the record by default.”
Why does this feel so uniquely uncomfortable?
I’ve adjusted to - and even embraced - the idea of AI note takers on every Zoom and Google Meet call, and they are indeed incredibly useful. Taking Granola’s output from a client meeting and dropping it into Poke to create all my tasks in ToDoist is a bloody useful workflow that shaves off a good deal of cognitive load.
But that’s in a semi-formal, work-based setting.
It’s different when you’re face to face with a human being, in a conversation that should at least attempt to be authentic.
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman uses the metaphor of the theater to explain human behavior, arguing that social interaction is a constant performance. He divides our social world into two distinct realms: the “front stage” and the “back stage.” The front stage is where we perform our polished, professional roles for an audience - managing impressions, maintaining a curated facade, and sticking carefully to a socially accepted script. But the backstage is a restricted sanctuary where the performance ends. It’s the private area where actors can drop their masks, step entirely out of character, and commiserate with their teammates without fear of ruining the illusion.
A Zoom call is a front stage, demanding constant vigilance and impression management. The local cafe, by contrast, is a vital backstage. Escaping the rigid, highly monitored environment of Zoom to grab a long black provides a rare, liminal space for actual human connection. The coffee shop becomes a safe backstage area where you can lean across the table and say, “Look, between you and me, this whole XYZ is a fucking disaster,” because you’re backstage with a trusted teammate, and you know that A) you’re safe to break character, and B) this unscripted vulnerability will all but evaporate the moment you step back onto the front stage.
When an AI note-taker appears, that backstage disappears; you are always on the front stage, always performing and always becoming a part of the archive.
In Cryptography, there’s a concept called “Forward Secrecy” - the compromise of one key doesn’t compromise past communications. We used to have “Social Forward Secrecy,” too; you could change your mind, and evolve your position, or just be a bit of an idiot for an hour at a time, and it wouldn’t be indexed and searchable against your name for the next twenty-odd years. Social media started that process of obsolescence, but AI note-takers are making it infinitely worse, giving everyone a socially accepted perpetual witness that never forgets and certainly never forgives a single nuance.
Asking for permission to run Granola on our catch-up is, theoretically, a polite gesture - but in practice, it’s actually an exercise of power. The person with the note-taker is the one setting the terms of the engagement. By asking, “You don’t mind, do you?” they get to offload the social cost of their app onto you. If you say no, you’re the one making it awkward; you’re the one “making it into a thing.”
I think there’s a consent tax at work, and it’s not unique to AI note-takers; you can see it in the asshole who brings a Bluetooth speaker to a public beach. They’re technically asking for the group’s “consent” through their silence, but the consent is assumed, all the same. Same with the assumption that everyone will have read receipts turned on; to opt out signals a lack of trust, even if your desire for privacy has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with maintaining the simple dignity of being unobserved.
I suspect we’re losing the capacity for play. Serious thinking happens in serious environments, but we need lower-stakes environments too, where we can try out shitty ideas and see how they fit. If every conversation is being synthesized into a “Summary and Action Items” list by a GPT-4o instance, it pressures every conversation to be “productive,” and gone are the meanderings, the non-sequitors, and the comfortable silences that humans use to build rapport.
When we record every casual encounter, we’re optimizing for “Information Retrieval” at the expense of “Relationship Formation,” treating our friends // colleagues // loved ones as data sourced to be mined, rather than co-conspirators in the brilliantly messy and intentionally unquantifiable business of being alive.
I’d like to see some sort of new social etiquette where the “No-AI zone” is as clearly demarcated as a “No-Smoking zone” - or at least where the assumption is that most people don’t want to participate, second-hand, in your dirty habit and they’re not the weird ones for asking you to abstain in their presence.
For me, the next time someone puts a Plaud or anything else on the table, I might just try saying “Yes, yes, I do mind. I’d like this conversation to be between you and me.”
It’ll be awkward and high-friction, and I’m quite prepared for it to ruin the vibe. But at the very least, for forty-five minutes, the only record of our existence will be the chemical signatures in our brains and a receipt for an overpriced batch brew and a slice of Banana bread.