Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user”. Essentially, it is the thing (or more often, things) you have to click away in order to read the thing you wanted to read. It is the “accept cookies” box, the “allow notifications?” box, the “sign in with Google” box, the pop-up video box, etc.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that dickovers are the only terrible thing about technology in 2026. Until now, though, we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them, so here are some suggestions. The worst part of the internet is that it is now impossible to escape AI features because they are shoehorned into everything.
Google gives you an AI overview before you get to your search results. Instagram can create AI images. Spotify has an AI DJ that can talk between songs for some reason.
My car just switched from Google Assistant (“Sure, navigating to KFC”) to Google Gemini (“OK, great. I’ve noticed a number of locations within 100 miles of you that contain the letters ‘K’, ‘F’ and ‘C’. Give me a little more information on where you’re heading and I’ll get straight to showing you the way”).
Shut up you water-guzzling idiot and give me my chicken. How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system.
Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair. In the year 2026, cancelling an unwanted subscription should require exactly one mouse click. Often, though, this is not the case.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
