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The Conditional Button

The mid-block crosswalk at a flashing-yellow pedestrian signal does work. A pedestrian presses the button, the overhead lights flash yellow, drivers slow or stop, and the pedestrian crosses. The system responds visibly, with no covert work happening underneath. The button does what it claims. But the same system also fails, often, in ways that have nothing to do with the button itself and everything to do with what is wired several layers behind it. A reader pointed out that drivers in his city tend to keep rolling through the flashing yellow if the pedestrian is still on the curb, and only stop once the pedestrian commits to the street. The same reader noted that drivers in his town do not give flashing yellow signals the obedience they give to red lights. Here in Jersey City the same mid-block button gets a more reliable yield because the lights are tied to traffic enforcement cameras, and drivers know that yield failures can become citations they actually have to pay. The button works because what is wired behind it works.

The conditional button is the fourth kind in this series. Placebo buttons claimed to do something and did nothing. Honest buttons stopped claiming to do anything and openly instructed the user. Dishonest buttons pretended to be innocent while doing covert work. The conditional button does exactly what it claims, but the result of that claim depends on systems the user cannot see and did not choose. It is honest about itself but dependent on conditions it has no control over.

The driver pulling up to a mid-block flashing yellow runs three calculations in roughly the time it takes to lift the foot from the accelerator. First, is the pedestrian committed enough to step into the street? Second, is there a camera mounted somewhere that will record a yield failure? Third, is there any enforcement infrastructure attached to that camera that will turn a recording into a citation, a citation into a fine, and a fine into a consequence the driver will actually feel? The yield rate at any given flashing yellow is the sum of those three calculations across all drivers, weighted by how often each driver is paying attention. A jurisdiction that has invested in all three inputs gets pedestrian yields close to red-light obedience. One that has installed the lights but not the cameras gets the rolling-yield behavior. Cameras installed without follow-through to fines produce a brief honeymoon of compliance followed by gradual return to rolling-yield as drivers learn the system has no teeth.

This is the diagnostic feature of the conditional button. The button is the same in all three jurisdictions. A flashing yellow is the same color, the same intensity, the same height above the crosswalk no matter where it sits. The pedestrian doing the pressing is doing the same press. What varies is invisible to the pedestrian and to the driver in the moment of decision, which is whether the recording infrastructure, the citation infrastructure, and the enforcement infrastructure are all wired up and functional. A pedestrian standing at a flashing yellow in Jersey City and a pedestrian standing at a flashing yellow in a smaller town fifty miles away are pressing the same button. Only one of them is being protected by the press.

The pattern extends well beyond crosswalks. A school-zone speed sign that flashes during arrival and dismissal hours is a conditional button activated by time of day. The sign works in jurisdictions where the local police treat school-zone speeding as a priority and write citations during the flash hours. That same sign in a jurisdiction where school-zone enforcement is rare gets the same kind of rolling compliance the mid-block crosswalk gets. School-zone flashing lights are not dishonest about what they are doing. They are conditional on enforcement that may or may not arrive.

A red-light camera at an urban intersection is a more visible version of the same pattern. The camera takes a photograph of every vehicle that enters the intersection after the light has turned red, and an algorithm reads the license plate, and a human reviews the algorithm’s reading, and the human signs off on the citation, and the citation gets mailed to the registered owner. Each step in that chain can fail. Cameras can go unmaintained. Algorithms can misread. Human review can be backlogged. Mailings can be delayed past the statutory limit for issuing citations. An intersection where all five steps work reliably produces stopping behavior at red lights that approaches the textbook ideal. The same intersection where any step is broken produces gradually deteriorating compliance as drivers learn that the camera no longer produces consequences. The light is the same red. The brake pedal is the same physical object in the same physical location relative to the driver’s foot. Compliance is conditional on infrastructure three layers behind the light.

Workplace policies are conditional buttons of a different kind. An employee handbook prohibits a particular behavior. The prohibition is the button. The compliance depends on whether anyone in management notices the violation, whether the manager who notices is willing to write it up, whether HR processes the writeup, whether the writeup translates into a documented consequence, and whether the documented consequence affects the employee’s compensation, advancement, or continued employment. Many corporate handbooks contain prohibitions that have not been enforced in years, and the employees know which ones those are, and the prohibitions function as posted instructions in a building no one is inspecting. The handbook is honest about the rule. The rule is conditional on enforcement that has been quietly defunded.

Tax law is the largest conditional button in American civic life. The Internal Revenue Service publishes thousands of pages of regulations describing what taxpayers must do, what they must not do, and what consequences attach to violations. The compliance rate with the published rules tracks the audit rate with high precision. Audits declined for most of the past fifteen years as IRS enforcement budgets were cut, particularly for high-income returns and complex business structures, and the compliance shift the budget cuts predicted followed the cuts with high precision. The rules stayed the same while the rate at which they were enforced changed, and the compliance changed with the enforcement rate. Tax cheating is a conditional behavior. The conditional input is the audit rate, and the audit rate is a budget line item.

This is the civic structure the conditional button reveals. A jurisdiction that wants citizens to comply with a rule has to fund the enforcement chain that makes compliance produce consequences. The visible part of the system, which is the button or the sign or the rule or the law, is the cheap part. The expensive part is the camera, the citation processor, the auditor, the inspector, the prosecutor, the court, the collection system, and the political will to keep all of them funded. A jurisdiction that funds only the visible part of the system gets the appearance of compliance infrastructure without the function. A jurisdiction that funds the entire chain gets pedestrian safety, road safety, workplace safety, and tax revenue at rates other jurisdictions would consider implausible.

The inequality this produces between jurisdictions is the moral feature of the conditional button. A pedestrian in Jersey City has a better chance of crossing safely at a flashing yellow than a pedestrian in a small town in a state that does not fund traffic enforcement. The product is the same while the protection varies. Cities with the budget to fund the full enforcement chain protect their pedestrians, and cities without that budget watch their pedestrians take their chances. The injury and fatality rates follow the budget. The conditional button is a fairness problem with infrastructure across its surface and politics underneath.

There is also a behavioral discovery the commenter noted that fits this category. The commenter has developed the habit of making direct eye contact with drivers while crossing, and that eye contact produces better yields than passive waiting. This is a documented finding in traffic psychology going back decades. A driver who has been seen by a specific pedestrian has lost the deniability that comes with anonymous flow. The eye contact is a kind of citizen-level enforcement that operates in the gap left by missing camera enforcement. A pedestrian who looks the driver in the eye is supplying out of pocket the witness function that the missing camera was supposed to provide. Conditional buttons can be supplemented by individual behavior. That supplementation is exhausting and should not be required.

The fix for the conditional button is the boring one, which is to fund the full enforcement chain rather than just the visible signaling layer. Cities that want their flashing-yellow crosswalks to work should pay for the cameras, the citation processors, the appeal staff, and the political position that defends automated enforcement against the predictable backlash. Cities that cannot afford the full chain should be honest about the limits of the signaling layer rather than installing more flashing yellows and hoping for the best. A flashing yellow without enforcement infrastructure is an aspiration dressed up as a safety system. Selling it to residents as a safety system is the only dishonest part of the conditional button, and the dishonesty lives in the political claim rather than in the button itself.

The four buttons now describe a complete small civic taxonomy: the placebo button claims to give you control and does nothing; the honest button stops pretending and tells you what to do; the dishonest button looks innocent and runs covert work underneath; the conditional button does what it claims, but only when the layers behind it are funded and functional. The pedestrian standing at the mid-block crosswalk in Jersey City is pressing the same button as the pedestrian fifty miles away. Both pedestrians live in different countries, and the difference between those countries is wired behind the buttons, not visible in them.

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The Dishonest Button

The mute button on the top of an Amazon Echo of a certain vintage is supposed to disconnect the microphone. A small icon of a crossed-out microphone sits next to the button, and pressing it turns on a red LED that confirms the disconnection. Software controls this button, which means the microphone remains electronically capable of capturing audio after the LED turns red, and the only thing preventing that capture is a line of code in the firmware. Security researchers have documented the capability and the manufacturers have acknowledged it. Whether the capability was ever exercised in practice is a separate question that the user pressing the button cannot answer from the front of the device. Bloomberg reported in April 2019 that Amazon employed thousands of workers worldwide whose job was to listen to Alexa recordings, and similar contractor review programs were acknowledged by Apple and Google for Siri and Assistant later that year. Subsequent Echo models added a hardware microphone disconnect that physically interrupts the microphone circuit when the mute button is pressed. Press the mute button on a smart speaker without that hardware disconnect and you are pressing the third kind of button in this series.

The placebo button was the first kind. It pretended to give you control over a system that ignored your input. The honest button was the second kind. It openly delivered instructions to you while making no claim about the system. The dishonest button is the third kind. It claims to do nothing or to disconnect or to refuse, and then it does the opposite of what it claims, quietly, with no LED to confirm what is actually happening on the other side of the press.

The Wait LED is honest about its uselessness. The dishonest button is dishonest about its activity. It is the most worrying of the three because the user has no way of telling, from the front of the device, whether the button has done what it promised. A placebo button can be tested by timing the signal. An honest button announces what it is doing. The dishonest button presents a clean front while running operations the user is not authorized to see.

The Facebook Like button on a third-party website is the same kind of object. It appears on a news article, on a recipe page, on a blog post, and a reader can press it to share the content with their Facebook friends. A reader who does not press the Like button generally believes nothing has happened. In fact the Like button is a script loaded from Facebook’s servers, and the act of loading the script transmits to Facebook the URL of the page, the time of access, and whatever identifying information the reader’s browser cookies make available. Facebook receives the data whether or not the button is pressed. Pressing is the visible activity. Loading is the actual activity. The button serves as cover story for the script that runs whether the button is touched or not.

The thermostat in a hotel room is a quieter version of the same pattern. The placebo thermostat described in the first essay in this series did nothing because the actual climate control happened from a central building management system. A dishonest thermostat in many newer hotels is the same hardware doing covert work. Its Set Point is recorded. Room occupancy is inferred from the timing of thermostat adjustments. Hospitality analytics vendors aggregate the data and sell hotels reports on guest behavior patterns. The button on the wall is dishonest about being a button. Underneath, the device is doing data work the user has not been asked to consent to.

The Ring video doorbell is a residential version of the same architecture. Amazon sells the product as a security camera that lets a homeowner see who is at the front door. Its Neighbors program, built around the product, partnered with more than two thousand US police departments by 2022, allowing police to request video clips from Ring users for investigative purposes through the app. Amazon ended that feature in 2024 under significant public pressure, after years during which the user’s pressing of the doorbell completed a circuit the user had not been asked to authorize. The user pressed the doorbell. They pressed the install button. They did not press a button labeled “Submit my footage to local law enforcement on request without a warrant.” That button does not exist on the device, because the device was not designed to require that press. The covert work happens at the policy layer, where the user agreement permits what the device cannot ask about directly.

The self-checkout terminal at a grocery store is a more visible example for shoppers who pay attention. Its screen prompts the customer to scan items, place them in the bag, and pay. A camera trained on the customer watches the transaction, and the bagging area’s weight sensor triggers an attendant alert when the weight does not match the scanned items. Many newer self-checkouts also have AI loss-prevention systems that classify customer behavior in real time, flagging movements the system has been trained to identify as potential theft. The customer pressed a button labeled Pay. They did not press a button labeled Be Recorded And Behaviorally Classified. Pay is the cover story. Recording and classification are the covert work, and they run on every customer regardless of whether the customer presses anything.

The pattern across these cases is consistent. A button presents itself as a simple input device, an inert surface, or a placebo. The actual function of the device runs continuously underneath the button, and the button serves either as a trigger for a parallel covert process or as a distraction from a continuous covert process that does not need the button at all. The dishonest button is a magician’s misdirection. A user watches the visible hand pressing the visible button. The other hand is doing the data work, and the data work is what the device exists to perform.

Distinguishing the dishonest button from the placebo button matters for both diagnosis and remedy. A placebo button can be left in place because it does nothing in either direction, and a citizen who knows the button is a placebo can press it for fidget value without harm. A dishonest button cannot be left in place. The dishonest button is the device through which the covert operation runs, and pressing it, or sometimes just being near it, completes the surveillance circuit. Recognizing a placebo button is enough to neutralize it. The remedy for a dishonest button is to refuse it, replace it, or surround it with hardware controls the front-end button cannot override.

This is what hardware microphone disconnects on premium smart speakers were designed to address. The hardware disconnect physically interrupts the microphone circuit when the mute button is pressed, making it impossible for software to continue capturing audio. Apple introduced this on the M1 MacBook in 2020 for the laptop microphone. Some Echo models added similar features after the 2019 reporting. The hardware solution exists because the software solution had been proven dishonest. The hardware disconnect makes the button honest again, in the sense that the LED indicator now corresponds to the actual state of the device. A dishonest button can be rehabilitated by changing what happens on the other side of the press.

The civic version of this pattern is harder to fix because the buttons are everywhere and the disconnects are usually unavailable. Cookie consent banners on websites are the most visible example. A banner asks the user to accept or reject tracking. The user clicks Reject All. Tracking continues via cookies categorized as essential, via fingerprinting, via the user’s IP address, and via the loaded scripts from third parties that do not respect the user’s choice. The Reject button is dishonest in the way the mute button on the early Echo was dishonest. The press is recorded while the compliance is ignored.

The fix has to operate at a layer below the button. Hardware microphone disconnects on smart speakers. Browser-level tracking blockers that operate independently of cookie banners. Mobile operating system permissions that physically prevent apps from accessing data even when the apps claim to need it. State and federal privacy laws that make the covert work illegal regardless of what the user pressed on the front-end interface. Each of these solutions accepts that the button is not the location where the user’s choice will be honored. The user’s choice has to be enforced upstream of the button, or downstream of the data the button covers for, or beside the button entirely.

The three buttons together describe a small civic taxonomy. Among the three, the placebo is the most familiar, the honest is the most political, and the dishonest is the most dangerous because it looks like one of the other two while doing something neither of the other two does, and the user pressing it cannot tell which.

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The Honest Button

The crosswalk button at the corner of my downtown intersection has an LED above it that lights up red and says “Wait!” when you press it. The traffic signal does not change any faster. No wire runs from the button to the signal timer. The LED is connected only to the button itself, and it does the single job of telling the pedestrian to wait. A reader who pressed one of these recently described pushing it three or four times rapidly anyway, because it’s fun. They are correct on both counts. The button is fun. The button is also a different kind of object than the placebo buttons it replaced.

The first-generation placebo button pretended to give the pedestrian control over the signal. The Wait LED button has dropped the pretense. It tells you directly that your job is to wait. The arrow of communication has reversed. You used to press the button and the system was supposed to listen. Now you press the button and the system instructs you. The button is the system’s mouth rather than its ear.

This is honest in a way the placebo button was not. The Wait LED is not lying about what it does. The lying happens elsewhere, in the placement of the button at a corner where pressing it changes nothing, and in the implication that the city cared enough about pedestrians to install a responsive device. But the button itself, the small red sign that says Wait, is just doing what it says it does. The instruction is real, the light is real, the wait is real, and the only fiction is that the wait has anything to do with the button.

I keep using the word “fun” because the reader, RealGene, who described pressing it rapidly four times in a row was telling the truth about why anyone presses any button on any device that does nothing useful. The button is a fidget object. The hand needs something to do while the body waits, and a button with a tactile click and a visual feedback light gives the hand a small ritual to perform. Researchers in human-computer interaction have studied this for decades under various names. The button is doing kinetic work the body wants done. The fact that the signal does not change is a separate matter from the fact that the finger has been satisfied.

The pattern shows up in many places once you start looking. Hotel thermostats that say “Set Point” and accept your preference and report it to the building management system, which may or may not honor it depending on policy and demand. Self-checkout terminals that flash “Please wait for an attendant” while emitting a beep that signals nothing to any attendant within earshot. Customer service hold systems that announce “Your call is important to us” between hold music intervals, which is honest about the message being a recording and dishonest about whether anyone is actually listening for your call. Airport gate displays that flash “Boarding” before any of the boarding groups have been called, training travelers to drift toward the gate in advance of an instruction the airline has not yet issued. Each of these works as a second-generation honest button, with the system speaking to the user and the button trigger initiating that outbound communication while routing nothing back to whatever underlies it.

The reversed arrow is the diagnostic. A working button takes your input and routes it to a system that responds. First-generation placebo buttons take your input and route it nowhere while pretending to route it somewhere. Second-generation honest buttons take your input and use it to deliver a message back to you while making no claim about the system. The Wait LED functions as a one-sided doorbell. The bell rings only on your side of the door, and the message that comes through the speaker is addressed to whoever pressed it rather than to whoever lives in the house.

Civically this is the more interesting development of the two. The placebo button required citizens to believe they had agency they did not have. The honest button skips the belief requirement and asks only for the ritual. A citizen presses, reads the instruction, complies with the instruction they would have followed anyway. The transaction looks like participation while functioning as training. The body learns to expect that pressing a button produces an instruction, and that the instruction will tell the body what it should already be doing. Over years, this trains a population in a relationship to authority where the authority does not need to listen, because the citizen has already been instructed to do what the authority wanted before the citizen asked.

The Wait LED is small enough that this analysis sounds disproportionate. A red sign at a crosswalk is not a totalitarian apparatus. The point is the pattern, not the single light. A city full of honest buttons is a city training its citizens to confuse instruction with response. Workplaces full of dashboards that display compliance metrics back to the worker do the same thing at a different scale. Schools full of forms that record student behavior and display it back to the student as a flagged dashboard do it to children. The honest button is more dangerous than the placebo button precisely because the honesty disarms the critique. The user cannot complain that the button is lying, because the button never claimed to do anything but tell them to wait.

The fix is the same kind of recognition the placebo button required, with one addition. Notice when the arrow of communication is pointing at you rather than at the system. The diagnostic question is whether a button you press is telling you something or telling something for you. A piece of public infrastructure in the business of issuing instructions disguised as interactive devices deserves the same scrutiny as one that pretends to take input. Then make the choice the rapid-presser at the crosswalk made, which is to press the button anyway, while knowing what the button is. Pressing is fine. Compliance is the problem. The hand can fidget without the body submitting.

The crosswalk button at my downtown intersection will continue to say Wait when I press it, and I will continue to wait, and the signal will continue to change on a fixed timer that has never heard of me. Light and system both keep doing what they have always done. What is new is that the system has decided to speak to me through the button rather than pretending to listen through it, and the speaking is what I need to learn to hear as instruction rather than as conversation.

💗 #VendrediLecture Plus ou moins tout le monde pense savoir ce qu'est un #placebo.

Moi aussi, avant d'éplucher le nouveau livre de @RichardMonvoisin, Léo Druart et Nicolas Pinsault.

Mais tout le monde aura quelque chose à apprendre de cette lecture, qui permet à fois d'éviter les promesses pseudoscientifiques farfelues et le scientisme froid et déconnecté.

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