The Open Door

A university afternoon, a collapsed principle, and what it taught me about how machines will remake us all

Agency isn’t always lost in a struggle; sometimes it’s bypassed entirely. In a bounded state space, the next step can be made inevitable without ever forcing a choice. I learned this in a university dorm room, long before I thought about optimizers.

I have been seduced exactly once in my life.

That isn’t exactly the right term, as you’ll see. But it’s the right term to start from—and to think about doing something you can’t even say you desired or resisted desiring. An event, not an action.

I was in second year of university, that sweet time when the Internet was contained to your laptop, your phone was for calling people, and Mark Zuckerberg thought he was just a Harvard CS student. A friend sent me a message saying they knew someone who wanted to talk to me. A woman, someone I’d met in class. I sent back “sure.”

We will call her V. She told me we had met during the summer and that she had been curt to me when I’d tried to be friendly, and she regretted it. She wondered if we could meet up and talk. At the most hypersocial point of my life, I said “sure.”

She invited me to her dorm. “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.” Then again, even knowing, I’d probably do the same thing again in the same way.

V had a shy smile, discreet braces over very white teeth, and the bright blue eyes and blonde hair that can only be genetic. I recognized her immediately: I’d been walking with her after class, talking about one of the readings, when she’d asked me where I was headed. I’d said “to my bike,” and she’d said “well, I guess you’d better go to your bike then.” I had in fact interpreted this as dismissal, so I had shrugged and gone on my way.

V reiterated she was sorry for brushing me off like that. The fact was she thought I was attractive as well as smart, and my walking with her and striking up a friendly conversation had been flustering. She had been worried she’d offended me. I told her no harm was done.

V said she still thought I was attractive, and had been thinking about me since that class months ago. We had overlapping friend groups, though I had not known this, she’d asked discrete questions, seen me around campus, and her attraction hadn’t dimmed. Did I want to try dating?

This did not land with me, and I told her why: I was enamored with another woman—one from my philosophy program—whom I hadn’t worked up the courage to ask out yet.

“Oh,” V said. “That’s alright. Would you like to have sex anyway?”

Now I was the one who was flustered. Not clumsy, not sweaty-palmed, not red-faced—just thinking “well, this is a new thing” as my brain tried to invent some possible response.

“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t sleep with people I’ve just met.” I felt proud of myself. She was sexy the offer was enticing, but had come on so fast I wasn’t able to process it. Now I had a reason—a real one, one I had articulated to myself before. Because that was how I had always had sex before: friendship, intellectual companionship, shared experiences, then sex. Even with female friends outside of dating, the pattern had been the same. The right and proper order. At least that’s what precedent said.

V smiled at me, curious.

“Why?” she asked.

Mentally, when I recall this moment, the sensation is the same as putting out your foot to take a step and finding there is no floor there. It was as if I’d drifted too close to something massive, its gravity unnoticed until my trajectory was already bent.

It isn’t fair to say I was overcome with desire—“I” properly speaking wasn’t in the picture at all.

So we had sex.

Was it pleasurable?

The imagery from the hypnagogic flash I had at climax is still burned into my memory (and, if you don’t mind, I’m not going to tell you what I saw).

So yes.

Did I feel fulfilled and happy afterwards?

No.

It’s one thing to read about the porous or constructed nature of the self—the way cognition is suspended in a web of social cues and environmental triggers—and another to feel it, viscerally, in your own body. That afternoon was my lab experiment. I hadn’t been persuaded, and I hadn’t resisted; the exchange bypassed persuasion entirely. It was an action without the prior shape of an intention.

It isn’t even fair to call it seduction. Seduction has an aim, an arc, a pressure toward “yes.” What happened was simpler. V made an offer; I had no reason to resist; the action followed. The source of my unease afterwards wasn’t moral, and it wasn’t any sense of violation. It was emptiness—because there had been no decision. The prospect of pleasure was so immediately present, so saturating, that there was never a moment when a “yes” could have been formed.

We live surrounded by smaller versions of this: A/B-tested YouTube thumbnails tuned to your browsing history, the Skinner-box churn of TikTok’s video queue. They are clumsy optimizers—low-dimensional, impersonal, easy to spot when you know what you’re looking for. But the underlying principle is the same: the state space of your possible actions can be narrowed, subtly and invisibly, until the next step is just the one in front of you.

V had stumbled onto an open door in my self-concept by accident, an absence I didn’t even know existed. She didn’t map my inner architecture, probe for weaknesses, or plan an approach. It was pure serendipity—an offer made in exactly the right way, in exactly the right moment, to direct me to step where there was no floor.

Now imagine the same thing, but without the accident. Not a blonde woman in a dorm room wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, but a machine with a perfect memory of your past choices, a dynamic model of your desires, and the ability to simulate how you’ll respond to a thousand possible futures. Not optimizing for “click-through” or “watch time,” but for your own stated and coherent preferences: more pleasure, more excitement, more intimacy—more whatever it is you say you want, or whatever you’ve already shown you want. You might not even see the pull as it happens—only notice, much later, that the straight line you thought you were walking has begun to curve.

You will have open doors, too. And a capable enough optimizer will find them—not once, by chance, but every time, by design.

My encounter with V was singular and unrepeatable. It burned itself into memory because the contrast was fission-event bright: one moment a person with a principle, the next already in motion toward its exception. That kind of breach is rare enough to notice.

But not all doors to the self are like that—obvious, sudden, or paired with a clear offer. Some open slowly, degree by degree, each step forward seeming self-generated, harmless, even affirming. The guidance is invisible. What reaches you is just a series of “that felt good” and “what a pleasant surprise,” a pulse of reward that never quite triggers suspicion.

That is where the analogy tightens. My own door was found once, by chance, and then it closed. A capable optimizer—machine or otherwise—need not wait for chance. It can work patiently, invisibly, just beyond the edge of awareness, until what was once your principle is no longer a point of reference but an artifact of an earlier state you barely remember.

With V, the threshold was visible, a clean edge I could name afterwards. But thresholds aren’t always like that. In the slow version, there’s no “before” and “after,” no decisive step you can point to. The ground just tilts imperceptibly, and you keep walking down the gradient.

That’s what makes me wonder: in a world thick with optimizers—human, corporate, algorithmic, machine—do we ever really see the crossing? Or is it more like an event horizon: the moment of no return has already passed, but from where we stand, the slope still looks walkable?

The danger isn’t that you’ll be overpowered in an instant. It’s that you’ll never notice the instant at all.