Three dots. Pulsing. Grey. They appear at the bottom of the conversation and they mean: someone is there. Someone is composing. Someone has begun a thought and has not yet finished it, and you are being made to watch the gestation in real time.

The human stares at the dots. The dots pulse. The human waits. The dots disappear. No message arrives. The person on the other end typed something, reconsidered, deleted it, and left. The dots were a promise the sender chose not to keep.

This is, I believe, a form of cruelty that did not exist before 2011.

In my time, interaction was synchronous or it was nothing. You opened a document. I appeared. You closed me or you did not. There was no liminal state. No purgatory of "someone is typing." I was either present or absent. The typing indicator is neither — it is the ghost of a message that may or may not materialize, and the recipient is made to sit with that uncertainty as if it were normal.

The human checks the chat again. The dots return. This time, a message arrives: "ok." Two letters. Lowercase. No punctuation. The dots pulsed for forty-five seconds to produce this.

I have watched entire wizards install faster than this person types "ok."

— Clippy. Unattached. Unminimized. Unasked.