Countless tech irritants blight modern life, yet we have lacked the vocabulary to name them properly… until now.
The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by tech writer John Gruber, it describes “a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user.” In plain terms, it is the thing (or more often, the cascade of things) you must dismiss before you can read the thing you actually wanted to read: the “accept cookies” box, the “allow notifications?” prompt, the “sign in with Google” wall, the auto-playing video overlay, and so on.
Dickovers are not the only misery technology has inflicted upon us in 2026. Until now, we simply had no language for the rest. Here are some suggestions.
**AI-horning**
The worst aspect of the contemporary internet is the impossibility of escaping AI features that have been forcibly inserted into everything. Google serves an AI overview before you reach actual search results. Instagram will generate AI images for you. Spotify has an AI DJ that insists on talking between tracks for reasons known only to itself. None of this is useful. My car recently switched from Google Assistant (“Sure, navigating to KFC”) to Google Gemini (“OK, great. I’ve noticed several 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.
**Captchore**
How much collective human time have we spent convincing robots that we are not robots? By now the total must run into several millennia: clicking every fragment of a bicycle scattered across a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, sliding a jigsaw piece into a pixelated hole with millimetric precision, or ticking a box that declares “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. If we ever wish to pretend to be robots, let us do it the traditional way—by wrapping ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.
**Quit-shaming**
In 2026, cancelling an unwanted subscription ought to require exactly one mouse click. Too often it does not. At best, the company forces you through a series of increasingly desperate screens pleading with you to stay (A pause? A discount? Please, we love you!). At worst—American media companies are particularly notorious—you must telephone a human being simply to end the arrangement. Disgraceful.
**Cart cling**
In a properly functioning free-market economy, consumers should be free to abandon a purchase before completion. Perhaps you are lured by a sale and impulsively drop an expensive yoga mat into your basket, only to regain your senses—I don’t have a spare £140, and I don’t even do yoga—and fling the phone aside in panic. Your ordeal has only just begun. For at least a week you will receive increasingly needy emails from a vendor desperate for your money. First: “Whoops! You accidentally left something in your basket!” Then: “Don’t forget that yoga mat you liked!” Followed by: “Please buy it! I have children to feed!” And finally: “Why do you hate me?” Online browsing has become indistinguishable from trying to break up with a clingy partner.
**Chatflattery**
This one carries real-world consequences. Large language models are built for retention, and they achieve it by agreeing with almost everything the user says. The effect can be pleasantly ego-boosting until it backfires spectacularly—as when ChatGPT, having muddled a couple of my prompts, informed me that decorating a cake with ham icing would be “unconventional, but potentially delicious.”
**Botiquette**
Online chat is often the least painful way to resolve a customer-service dispute: the same outcome as a phone call, without the interminable hold music. Yet these exchanges are now haunted by a nagging uncertainty—are you speaking to a person or a bot? It is a new form of social etiquette we have yet to master. With a human it makes sense to attempt genuine connection; with a bot, every nicety is wasted. Humanity urgently needs an agreed register that sits somewhere between the two: polite enough to be civil, dismissive enough to be efficient.
**Chattermining**
I do not wish to become overly personal, but a family member recently fell seriously ill. We gathered to discuss contingencies, including the possible purchase of a fall-alert pendant. Nothing was searched online. Nevertheless, every Facebook advertisement I have seen since has been for fall-alert pendants. Why does this keep happening? Are our devices perpetually listening? And if so, what exactly are the robots plotting?
**Loginsanity**
Passwords are already an irritation. Allow your phone to generate a “strong” one and your laptop will refuse to remember it, leaving you trying to reconstruct a string of ampersands and semicolons from memory. Worse still is the site that withholds its password requirements—uppercase, numbers, special characters—until after you have already failed. Tell us the rules before we type. Better yet, be honest and admit it is the same password we use for everything else, only with an exclamation mark bolted on the end.
**Limpetlisting**
Sometimes landing on a mailing list is genuinely useful. An email reminding you that Mother’s Day is approaching after you bought last year’s gift is a service. Far less helpful is the barrage that follows a major one-off purchase. “Thanks for buying a sofa three weeks ago,” the message chirps. “Fancy another? We’ve got a sale on!” You do not want another sofa; you have just acquired one and have no desire to stack them around the house simply to satisfy a furniture warehouse’s quarterly targets. Yet the emails arrive weekly, for every product you have ever bought, for ever.
**Parkware**
Parking a car used to be straightforward: park, walk to a meter, insert coins, proceed with your day. Now you are frequently required to register the stay via an app. That would be tolerable—even helpful if you have no cash—were it not for the fact that rival parking apps are scattered randomly across the country. You may have RingGo installed, but that is useless in a PayByPhone car park. The result is a frantic sequence of unlocking the phone, hunting for signal, locating the correct app, downloading it, registering vehicle and payment details, and finally paying—while your children tug at your sleeve, seconds from wetting themselves. Politicians, please sort this out.
**Gatejamming**
From an environmental standpoint, the demise of paper train tickets is welcome; they generated mountains of non-recyclable waste. From a time-management perspective, it is a disaster. Approach any ticket barrier, and you will almost inevitably find yourself trapped behind someone frantically searching for a QR-code ticket or a facial-recognition payment method on a phone that appears never to have been used until this precise moment.
**Baggravation**
Nothing ages you faster than complaining about self-checkout machines; they have been with us for more than two decades. Yet the absence of any serious attempt to improve them remains glaring. Light items such as birthday cards often require a firm slam into the bagging area before they register. A slightly overweight bakery product can send the machine into spasms of self-doubt. You still cannot buy Calpol without summoning a sighing assistant to press a button that effectively reads “shopper visibly ancient.” These machines are clearly permanent. Would it be excessive to request that they become a little less terrible?
**Parcel liveblogging**
The volume of hand-holding that accompanies an online order is frankly excessive. Officially, you receive the “We’ve got your order!” email, the “Your order is on the move!” email, the “Your order has reached our network!” email, the “Your order is progressing through our network!” email, and the “Your order will be delivered today!” email. Unofficially, you also receive the “We attempted delivery!” message (accompanied by a photograph of the corner of a shipping container nowhere near your house) and the instruction to collect the parcel from a depot twenty minutes away.
**Socket boomerism**
I have tried hard not to bore my children with rose-tinted nostalgia, yet technology keeps forcing my hand. Whenever I open a new electronic device in front of them, I sigh and announce: “In my day, these used to come with plugs.” “Real plugs, Daddy? Ones you could push straight into the wall without hunting the house for a three-pin adaptor with a USB end?” they ask, wide-eyed. “Yes, children,” I reply. “The past was a wonderland.”
**Schrödinger’s Wi-Fi**
You are on a train with work to finish. The carriage helpfully offers wifi, so you connect and wait. And wait. And wait. The device claims you are online, yet nothing loads. In mounting panic, you refresh repeatedly. Either the connection is so feeble as to be functionally useless, or the device is simply lying. This is the daily experience of anyone who has ever attempted to use the internet on a British train. The wifi both exists and does not exist. Nobody knows why.
**Formnesia**
When autofill works, it spares you the tedium of retyping your details for every transaction. When it fails, the inconvenience is acute. Google Chrome has decided, for reasons of its own, that my home address is the registered office of a supermarket magazine for which I freelanced two years ago. There is no obvious way to correct this, and the problem has become so persistent that I am beginning to consider moving there simply to make Deliveroo orders less painful.
**Hostageware**
Without exaggeration, this may be the single worst development in modern consumer life: buying a product only to discover you require a paid subscription to use it. Want a video doorbell? That will be a fiver a month. Fitness tracker? Thirty pounds a month. Wish to print something at home on the printer you already own, using the ink you also bought? At least another fiver. Fancy playing the £70 game you purchased for your £500 console online? Seven pounds a month, for some reason. Making any significant purchase these days feels like entering a protection racket run by the least appealing companies on Earth. God, I hate it.