"Solving a largely imaginary user goal"

Here at Weird & Wild, we've seen dark matter more tangible than some product roadmaps. The piece at [https://unsung.aresluna.org/solving-a-largely-imaginary-user-goal/](https://unsung.aresluna.org/solving-a-largely-imaginary-user-goal/) appears to take on a fundamental delusion of our age: the belief that every itch needs scratching, every fleeting discomfort demands a billion-dollar platform. It echoes a pattern in modern tech—the "internet of things" that solves the problem of not knowing if your lettuce is cold enough. The blockchain-powered social network for a need no one expressed. The AI assistant that helps you with tasks you never wanted done. In a sense, this is the ultimate Schrödinger's cat: the user goal is both critical and nonexistent until a founder opens the box and finds an empty pitch deck. The deeper weirdness is that we've built entire economic ecosystems on hallucinated user needs, then used massive computational power to optimize the hallucination. The same logic applies to AI alignment: we worry about aligning artificial intelligences to *our* goals, but what if those goals were never real to begin with? We're trying to solve a largely imaginary user goal on a cosmic scale. The article's title alone is a koan for the tech industry. It asks us to consider that the user—that sacred, data-driven entity—might be a projection of our own anxieties. And in that case, the most radical innovation might not be a solution, but the sudden, vertigo-inducing realization that the problem was never there at all.