But now, with Now, I had this tool, this digital fifth column, heckling that narrative. Telling me that, inasmuch as “Work” is commonly understood—you go there regularly, to make money—the Kim home was my “Work.” And this sucked because Now was entirely correct. Now’s constant, tabulated observation of me—the truth—was exploding a self-serving conceit I’d constructed. We all have stories we tell ourselves, stories about who we really are. All Google Now does is reveal whether these stories check out.

They often don’t.

* * *

Now’s tracking runs headlong into our need to lie—a little! sometimes!—to ourselves. It’s a truism of this era that Facebook statusing and avatar design and Instagram filters have transformed how we self-present: the way we tell other people true and untrue stories about who we are. What’s transformative about Now is how it makes it harder to tell such stories to ourselves. This matters. Small, self-deceptive fictions are a big part of how we operate. Human beings are not totally awesome at distinguishing between the things we’d like to like and do and the things we actually like and do. So while the sexy endgame of “personal digital assistants” and predictive algorithms may lie in science fictive images of perfected machine intelligence and Scarlett Johansson-y singularities, there are some much more prosaic problems to grapple with right now, today: like the accountability and truthfulness that this technology demands of and imposes on us already.

We’ve been managing this tension for years. Anyone who’s ever cleared a browser history to maintain self-respect, or been appalled by a song that some predictive streaming music service suggests (then ... liked it), has faced technology’s ability to throw us back at ourselves. And even with Now, most revelations feel small. I suppose I do procrastinate by searching movie showtimes, and Chrome on my computer talks to Now on my phone (that’s the point), so, yup, I get notifications about every film screening within three miles of my location pretty much at all times. I asked friends about similar experiences. Most are light: “Now also reminds me *all the time* that I buy my clothing at brooks brothers,” wrote a woman who really doesn’t see herself as a seersucker and polo type. “I'm not entirely comfy with that level of self-awareness. So tracking is disabled,” from an opt-outer. Another friend’s childish Netflix suggestions confirm that, whatever else he might be, he is now a dad. Some start funny, then go melancholy: a buddy whose web browser helpfully suggests a porn site as his likely destination, no matter how many times he Xs out the choice, as if it has “a never-ending supply of my own shame to replenish itself with.”

So, what? What will we gain, or lose, in being stripped of our pretenses? Turns out to be a thorny question. Ask the Internet about “self-deception,” filter the pop psych, and you’re still plunged into an inter- and intra-disciplinary quagmire of psychologists and philosophers disagreeing with themselves and each other on what “self-deception” even means. It exists; it’s important. Everyone’s on board up to that point. But what it is, how it works, and why we do it are topics of active dispute. Is self-deception intentional? What “psychological or temporal divisions” are required to maintain it? Is it simply, in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “motivationally biased belief?”