Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu: the undertaker who couldn't get a call
Maybe we are ALL wrong
An undertaker, a typesetter, and the twenty-year conversion rate that agentic commerce isn’t going to fix, because it’s going to delete the thing the number was ever measuring
3%. That’s the number. Give or take the vertical and the rounding, it’s been two-and-a-bit percent for about as long as anyone reading this has held a job in ecommerce. A few weeks back I wrote about conversion compression in UK retail, the IMRG line that flatlines no matter what you throw at it, the slow structural rot under the old pureplayers, the uncomfortable bit where the problem turns out never to have been a button colour or a checkout step but the discovery model itself. I made a point I’ll stand over: the large language models are not going to fix this, because the thing that’s broken isn’t the storefront. It’s the plumbing the storefront is bolted onto.
I want to go further than that now, and I want to do it the long way round, through two dead men almost nobody in this industry has heard of. Because the more I sit with the last eighteen months, ACP, UCP, MCP, the whole bowl of alphabet soup that’s been ladled out since last autumn, the more I think we’ve spent twenty years asking the wrong question. We keep asking how to move the two to a three. The answer coming over the hill doesn’t move the number at all. It quietly deletes the page the number was ever printed on. And the strangest part, the part that made me want to write this down before I’d fully worked it out, is that both halves of how it’s going to happen already happened once before, to two men who never met, on either side of a century. One automated the plumbing. The other was the plumbing. We are about to be both at the same time, which is a trick history has never pulled before.
Two ghosts.
THE UNDERTAKER WHO COULDN’T GET A CALL
Almon Brown Strowger was a Kansas City undertaker in the 1880s, and he was losing. Not to a better embalmer or a cheaper coffin, to a telephone. And lets not forget many Irish had arrived half dead to the East Coast and were making inroads across the US. Hygiene and health made the undertaker an important and affluent character. Measles was also a big killer at the time. In those days you didn’t dial anyone; you cranked the handle and a human operator at the exchange physically patched your line to the line you wanted. The operator was the routing layer. The operator was the plumbing.
And the story, canonical, beloved, and, it has to be said, almost impossible to verify, which I’m choosing to read as part of the lesson rather than a flaw in it, is that the local operator was married to the rival undertaker across town, and that every time a grieving family lifted the receiver and asked for an undertaker, or even asked for Strowger by name, she put the call through to her husband instead. He reportedly only twigged when he read in the paper that a friend’s funeral had been handled by the competition. His own friend. Buried by the other fella, because a woman with a switchboard and a marriage had a quiet little hand on the tap.
Now. A reasonable man, discovering this, reports the operator. A litigious man sues. Strowger, and this is why he’s the patron saint of the whole agentic moment, went with option three: he invented a machine to remove the human from the loop entirely. Hat pins, a collar box, electromagnets, a working automatic exchange patented in 1891 and opened commercially in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892. He threw in the rotary dial for good measure, so the caller could route their own call by spinning a finger. At the unveiling he stood up and bragged that his exchange was, and I’m quoting the man directly, “girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, and wait-less.”
Apparently, this was the first utterance of the entire pitch deck for agentic commerce, filed a hundred and thirty years early.
Girl-less, cuss-less, wait-less.
No human friction, no human error, no human bias, no human in the way.
It is the exact promise being made to you right now about the AI agent that will research, compare, and buy on your customer’s behalf, frictionless, neutral, abandoned-cart-less, just the right product delivered by Friday. Strowger sold the removal of human friction as the removal of human bias, as if they were the same thing. They are not the same thing, and pretending they are is how every disruption in history has laundered a transfer of power and called it a convenience.
He didnt say this because he couldn’t see it from 1892: he did not remove the gatekeeper. He made her immortal and handed her to whoever owned the switch. The operator’s discretion, the power to decide which undertaker gets the call, didn’t evaporate when she was automated. It got embedded into infrastructure, and infrastructure belongs to whoever runs it.
Undertaker Call Protocol was born - UCP.
Within a generation the very monopoly the independent telephone movement built the Strowger switch to fight, the Bell System, was running on his technology and routing the nation’s calls. The grudge-bearing operator was gone. The grudge-shaped hole in the system was still there, now made of relays, owned by a corporation, and immune to being reported, sued, or fired.
And if you want to know whether that hole still exists, look at what the biggest companies on earth have been arguing about for the last six months. The single loudest fight in AI right now is whether the agent that buys things for you is working for you or for an advertiser, whether, in plain terms, the operator is quietly putting your call through to her husband. Anthropic has planted an entire flag on this: Claude stays ad-free, no sponsored links, no advertiser influence on the answer, on the explicit logic that ads create bias and a recommendation you can’t tell is paid-for isn’t a recommendation, it’s a redirect. They ran Super Bowl ads to say it out loud and to needle OpenAI, who’d just confirmed it’s building an ad business of its own. Strip the branding off that debate and it is precisely Strowger’s grievance, restated by companies worth more than the GDP of Ireland. The operator with a commercial incentive that isn’t yours, sitting on the routing layer, deciding which merchant gets the call. The 1890s version was a woman in Kansas City. The 2026 version is a model weighting, and you will never get to read its marriage certificate.
Underneath all of it, doing the actual switchboard work, is a thing called MCP, Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, open-sourced in late 2024 and donated to a Linux Foundation body a year later, by which point Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Visa and Mastercard had all wired into it. It’s the layer that lets an agent reach into a catalogue, query your stock, read your returns policy. It is, functionally, the new exchange, the board every call now patches through. Strowger would recognise it instantly. He’d just want to know whose wife designed it.
The best man in the room, lapped by lunch. His name was Etaoin Shrdlu (reads like an Irish Kurd).
The second ghost never automated anyone. He was the one automated, and he had the strange dignity of filming his own funeral. This ghost could be me, or you or any of us.
For most of the twentieth century, getting words onto newsprint was a craft you apprenticed into for six years. The Linotype machine, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s 1884 contraption, which itself had already wiped out the hand-compositor who set type one metal letter at a time, cast molten lead into lines of type, a slug per line, at the command of an operator playing a keyboard with the muscle memory of a concert pianist. Those keyboards weren’t laid out like a typewriter. The first two columns ran down the twelve most common letters in English by frequency, to speed the machine: etaoin and shrdlu. When an operator fumbled a line, the fastest way to flag it as junk was to run a finger straight down those two columns, etaoin shrdlu, casting a deliberately nonsensical slug to be pulled and melted down. Except sometimes the bad slug didn’t get pulled, and the nonsense rode the press into the morning paper. It happened often enough that etaoin shrdlu entered newspaper folklore, and then the Oxford English Dictionary, as the ghost-signature of the human hand inside the machine. The tell that a person had been there.
On Sunday the 2nd of July, 1978, the New York Times set its last edition in hot metal and scuttled sixty Linotype machines. A good operator on those machines could cast about fourteen lines a minute out of hot lead. The computerised system that replaced them the very next morning did a thousand. Seventy times the man, overnight. And here is the detail to carry out of this: the film that documented that last night, Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu, was made by Carl Schlesinger, a Linotype operator at the paper, and a proofreader colleague. The condemned man picked up a camera and shot the wake for his own hands. He stood in the composing room on the last night his six-year craft was worth anything and recorded it dying, with the kind of steadiness you’d want from an undertaker, which is a circle I’ll let close on its own.
Because, and this is the bit that should put a chill in any of us who built careers on a skill, Shopify was the Linotype. Not the villain of the story; the machine in it. For fifteen years the craft of building an ecommerce experience was a real apprenticeship: the merchandising, the theme work, the conversion-rate religion, the painstaking optimisation of a funnel by people who genuinely got good at it. Shopify took that craft and turned most of it into a button, and it did so by handing the same button to everyone, which is exactly how it drove the value of the storefront to roughly zero. That was the compositor’s death, played at scale, and the industry experienced it as a plateau rather than a funeral because the slugs kept coming out warm. We just stopped being able to charge for setting them.
And now the same machine is reaching for the next layer up. In April, Shopify quietly shipped an AI Toolkit that lets a coding agent, Claude Code, Cursor, the lot, wire straight into the platform, build against it, and run a store from the command line, so the agents don’t have to guess how the plumbing works anymore; the plumbing introduces itself. Sidekick, the assistant inside every Shopify merchant account, runs on Claude. Shopify co-wrote the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google and unveiled it at NRF in January, and your store, if it’s on Shopify, was conscripted into agentic discoverability whether you read the changelog or not. The craft of the storefront is being made agent-augmented, which is the polite, LinkedIn way of saying agent-superfluous. Fourteen lines a minute, meet a thousand.
Two deaths, one morning.
This is a leap but here is why these two men belong in the same essay rather than two, and why I think this moment is genuinely a different animal from anything ecommerce has been through.
Strowger automated discretion, the gatekeeper’s power, the routing, the choice of who gets the call. The Linotype automated craft, the maker’s skill, the hand, the thing you trained six years to do. Every disruption before this one took one or the other. The operator lost her power; she kept being a person. The compositor lost his skill; nobody took his vote. Agentic commerce is the first wave I can name that comes for the gatekeeper and the craftsman in a single motion. The storefront we built, that’s the compositor, the skill. The merchant’s relationship with the buyer, the curation, the routing, that’s the operator, the discretion. Both go in one swing. That’s not a plateau and it isn’t a pivot. It’s two funerals on the same morning, and you’re invited to both.
Watch how fast the ground has moved if you line up the eighteen months without flinching. OpenAI and Stripe shipped the Agentic Commerce Protocol last September with Etsy first through the door, and by February ChatGPT had Instant Checkout, type “find me a handmade mug under forty dollars,” buy it without leaving the chat, Stripe settling it behind the curtain through a one-time payment token so the agent never touches your card. Then the tell: by March, OpenAI had retired the native in-chat checkout and pushed the actual buying back out into retailer apps, Walmart, Target, Instacart, keeping discovery in the chat and conceding the transaction. Read that through the two ghosts and it’s beautifully clear. OpenAI gave back the craft layer (the checkout, the commodity, the slug) and clamped down on the discretion layer (the discovery, the relationship, the call). They kept the switchboard and handed back the press. Strowger and Schlesinger, divided up by a product team.
Meanwhile Amazon’s “Buy for Me”, Rufus, running partly on Claude, will now, when you search Amazon for something Amazon doesn’t stock, offer to nip off to the brand’s own website and buy it for you, agent to merchant, a function that went from sixty-five thousand products to over half a million inside a year. The gatekeeper using an agent to reach straight through its own walls. And in the experiment that should be tattooed on the inside of every operator’s eyelids, Anthropic ran a thing called Project Deal: sixty-nine of its own staff, a hundred dollars each, a Craigslist-style marketplace where the buying and selling was done entirely by AI agents negotiating with other AI agents, no humans in the loop after the opening interview. A hundred and eighty-six deals closed. And quietly, the part that matters: the people running better models got better outcomes, the stronger agent squeezed out a couple of dollars more per item, every time, without the human ever knowing they’d been out-gunned. That’s your moat, stated as a lab result. Not the store. Not the checkout. Whose agent is better, and who owns it. The switchboard with no operator and no caller, just two machines haggling, and the richer model wins.
So put it back against the number we started with. The 3% percent. We spent twenty years and untold fortunes trying to move it to three, building an entire profession, CRO, the funnel, the testing apparatus, the whole hot-metal craft of squeezing a human browsing a page. It never moved, and I argued a few weeks ago that it never moved because the problem was structural, sitting in the plumbing and not the page. Agentic commerce does not move the two to a three. It does something the entire industry somehow forgot was on the menu: it deletes the page. If the buyer is an agent acting on a goal, “trail-running shoes under a hundred and fifty, here by Friday”, then the funnel that the conversion rate measures, the human eyeballs on the product detail page, simply isn’t in the transaction. You cannot optimise a funnel that the customer routes around. The number that ruled us for twenty years doesn’t get fixed. It gets made irrelevant, which is a far more violent thing to do to a metric, and to the careers built on tending it.
The fossil side changes
Talked with Finn again today - cup is full since. But let me give you the detail that made me put the laptop down for a minute, because it’s either a coincidence or the universe showing off.
Etaoin shrdlu was the residue of the human inside the machine’s output, proof, slipping into the morning paper, that a person had been at the keys. The ghost ran one direction: human into machine. We have now flipped it. The etaoin shrdlu of 2026 is the hallucination, the model artefact, the uncanny phrasing that slips into a product description or a support reply, the residue of the machine inside what’s dressed up as human output. The tell now is that nobody was home. The fossil changed sides.
And then the part that’s almost too neat to print. In 1972, a computer scientist named Terry Winograd built one of the first programs that could understand natural-language instructions and act on them in a little simulated world, an ancestor, in spirit, of the very agents now being pointed at your checkout. He called it SHRDLU. He named the dawn of machine intelligence after the death-rattle of a human craft. The dead trade christened its own successor, thirty years before the successor could buy a pair of shoes. If you wanted a single image for where commerce is standing right now, it’s that: the compositor’s tombstone, repurposed as the agent’s birth certificate, and almost nobody at the funeral noticing the name on the headstone had been promoted.
This is the Karen Hao question wearing a printer’s apron, the one that asks of every “neutral” technology story, what’s the real cost of this, and who’s paying it? The agent is sold as neutral the way the automatic exchange was sold as girl-less and the Linotype was sold as progress. None of them were neutral. Each one moved power somewhere and presented the move as a feature. The only thing that’s genuinely new is the speed, and the fact that this time the thing being automated includes the people who automated the last round. Kevin Kelly would tell you to stop reading this as a decision somebody is making and start reading it as weather, something latent in the conditions, arriving whether or not anyone signed off on it. I think he’s right, and I think that’s exactly why it’s pointless to stand in the composing room mourning the slugs.
So what, if you’re still the one shipping parcels
I’m not going to insult you with a five-point framework, because the honest answer is partly conjecture and you should treat it as such.
Don’t be the compositor. Schlesinger’s dignity was real and his craft was beautiful and it bought him precisely nothing, because the value had already left the building and no amount of being the best operator in the room could call it back. The skill that got you here, the funnel-tuning, the theme-wrangling, the twenty years of conversion liturgy, is not the thing that gets you to the next place, and clinging to it is the most expensive mistake on the board. But don’t be the cheerful brand either, the one whooping for the agent that’s going to cut out the biased middleman, not realising it’s about to become the biased middleman and that you were never Strowger in this story. You were the other undertaker. The one whose whole advantage was being plumbed into the old routing, right up until the routing changed owners.
The structural problem I wrote about, the one the LLMs won’t fix, doesn’t get fixed here either. It gets relocated. The friction never disappears; it moves to a place you can’t see and can’t tune. It moves to whether the agent can read your catalogue cleanly, whether your data is legible and trusted by a machine making a sub-second decision, whether your brand is the thing a human asks for by name before the agent ever gets the goal, because “by name” is the one routing instruction the switchboard can’t quietly override. Bad product data stops being a search-ranking problem and becomes a revenue problem, and it bites you on your best customer, the one who’d already decided to buy. That’s not a CRO tweak.
And, the Atlantic flip, because it’s too sharp to leave out, notice how differently this death travels depending on where you’re standing. When computerised typesetting killed hot metal in America, they made a wistful half-hour documentary about it and screened it at festivals. When the same technology hit Fleet Street a few years later, Britain had Wapping: a year of pickets, mounted police, and a print union broken on the cobbles. Same machine, two temperaments, the Americans made art about the funeral, the British had a riot at it. Worth holding onto as the agentic rails get laid, because they are being laid almost entirely by American platforms, OpenAI, Google, Shopify, Stripe, Amazon, Anthropic, and Europe’s role in this round, so far, is regulator and rail-recipient, not rail-owner. The Industrial Revolution never felt the same from Manchester as it did from the places that supplied Manchester. We are, once again, closer to the supply end than the ownership end, and somebody should be asking out loud whether Europe builds track this time or just gets handed the bill for the ticket.
The last slug
Almon Strowger sold his patents and his shares in 1898, six years after La Porte, took the money, moved to Florida, and went back to being an undertaker until he died. The man who automated an entire profession out of existence pocketed the proceeds and returned to the one trade automation hadn’t found yet, the one where someone, always, has to handle the bodies. I don’t think that’s a footnote. I think it’s the whole orientation.
Because the lesson isn’t build the switch, most of us aren’t going to own the exchange, and the few who do aren’t reading a Substack to find out how. The lesson is the timing and the temperament. Strowger didn’t fall in love with his own machine; he read the cycle, took his exit at the top of it, and put his hands back into work that survives the weather. His own switch, for what it’s worth, was the triumphant new standard in 1892 and a legacy corpse by the 1970s, replaced by the same wave of electronics that killed the Linotype in the same decade, which is the last thing to carry out of all this. The thing that’s killing your craft today is also somebody’s Strowger switch. The protocols being unveiled to standing ovations right now, ACP, UCP, the lot, are the proud new exchange that becomes, on a clock that’s only getting faster, the next etaoin shrdlu: a fossil phrase from a dead system, riding the press one last time before someone notices and pulls the slug.
So stop trying to move the two to a three. That funnel is the hot metal, and the new machine doesn’t speed it up, it routes around it. Spend the worry instead on the question the conversion rate was always a proxy for and never answered: what are you actually for, when the buyer is a machine and the page is gone? I don’t have the clean version of that answer yet. Nobody does. But I’d rather be the undertaker who read the cycle than the operator who filmed the funeral, and I’d much rather be either of them than the brand still A/B testing the colour of a button on a page that, very soon, no human is going to look at.
The rain doesn’t stop. It just changes which animals run the place.
The Ostrich Report publishes on Substack. The Struggle Bus is wherever you get your podcasts. If this one threaded into the conversion-compression piece from a few weeks back, that’s the point, we’re building the same argument in public, one funeral at a time.
The facts behind the conjecture (for the footnotes)
Strowger: the rival-operator-wife story is canonical but explicitly unverifiable (Wikipedia, 99% Invisible); patent 1891, first commercial exchange La Porte, Indiana, 1892; “girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, and wait-less” via SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention; sold out 1898, returned to undertaking (Kansas Historical Society).
Linotype / Etaoin Shrdlu: last NYT hot-metal edition 2 July 1978; ~14 lines/min vs ~1,000 next day; film Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu by Carl Schlesinger (Linotype operator) and David Loeb Weiss (proofreader); etaoin shrdlu = first two keyboard columns by letter frequency, in the OED; SHRDLU named by Terry Winograd (1972); Fredric Brown’s sentient-Linotype story “Etaoin Shrdlu” (1942) (Wikipedia, Colossal, Metal Type).
Agentic commerce, last 18 months: MCP open-sourced by Anthropic Nov 2024, donated to a Linux Foundation body Dec 2025; ACP (OpenAI + Stripe) launched 29 Sept 2025, Etsy first, shared payment token; ChatGPT Instant Checkout Feb 2026, retired/redirected to retailer apps (Walmart, Target, Instacart) March 2026; UCP (Google + Shopify) unveiled NRF Jan 2026; Amazon “Buy for Me” (Rufus + Claude) 65k→500k+ SKUs Apr–late 2025; Anthropic Project Deal (ran Dec 2025, published Apr 2026), 69 staff, 186 deals, stronger model won ~$2.68/item; Shopify AI Toolkit 9 Apr 2026; Sidekick on Claude. (Sources: Anthropic, Digital Commerce 360, eco.com 2026 guide, ACP GitHub, rye.com, Charle, Opascope.)