I bought a strip of bias binding.
Bias binding reinforces a seam. That is what it is for. It is a length of folded fabric, cut on the diagonal to finish an edge or strengthen a join. It has one function. It either performs that function or it doesn’t. Mine arrived, I used it, it performed as expected. The transaction was complete.
Two weeks later I received an email.
Thank you for shopping with us! We hope you’ll write about your Birch Bias Binding Sold By The Metre Black 25 mm while it’s still fresh on your mind.
The transaction had already been completed.
The word itself is worth a moment. Review: to look again. At what, precisely? The strip of fabric had not changed. It was the same width it had been when it arrived, the same colour, performing the same function it had always been designed to perform. There was nothing new to see. The looking again was not for my benefit. I had already established, through use, everything I needed to know about the product. The looking again was for someone else’s benefit, in service of a purpose I had not agreed to when I completed the purchase.
The request assumed several things simultaneously. The request assumed that I remembered, that my memory had a useful shelf life, and that my time was available. That my experience of the product — which I had acquired through my own use, at my own expense — was a resource they could draw on after the exchange had ended.
The request assumed my memory was theirs to use.
Where is the transaction?
When I bought the binding, something was exchanged. I provided money. They provided fabric. Both parties received what they had agreed to receive. The exchange was concluded. Neither party owed the other anything further.
The review request was not part of that exchange. It arrived afterward, unbidden, as an extension of a transaction that had already closed. It asked me to produce something of value after the exchange had ended. Without offering anything in return. The only return mentioned, implicitly, was the possibility of my name appearing in their marketing. Visibility I had not asked for, in a context I had not agreed to, attached to a product whose entire review could be rendered in a single sentence.
It does what it is designed to do.
That sentence would not, I suspect, satisfy the algorithm that generated the request. Algorithms are not interested in adequacy. They require language that can be extracted and displayed and deployed as evidence that real people have encountered this product and found it worth describing. The review is not really a review. It is content. Content costs money to produce. The request was asking me to produce it for nothing.
This is not unique to fabric shops or to strips of bias binding. It is a structure that has settled, quietly and without much examination, into the ordinary mechanics of buying things.
You purchase a hotel room. Before you have finished unpacking, an email arrives asking you to rate your experience. You purchase a book. A request follows for a review that will appear alongside the listing. You purchase a service — a haircut, a tax return, a plumbing repair — and the request arrives within hours, sometimes before you have had the opportunity to determine whether the service has worked. The carpet was cleaned this morning. The automated email arrived this afternoon. The carpet has not yet dried. There is nothing yet to assess.
The requests have a consistent tone — warm, informal, apparently modest in what they ask. While it’s still fresh on your mind. As though they are doing you a favour by catching you at the optimal moment, before the experience fades. As though the review is something you were going to produce anyway and they are simply providing a convenient mechanism.
What they are providing is a mechanism for extracting unpaid labour from people who have already paid for a product. The extraction is legal and common. It has become so embedded in the experience of purchasing things that the request itself is no longer remarkable. It arrives. Most people ignore it. Some people comply. The algorithm does not distinguish between them. It simply keeps asking.
The email made no mention of how my contribution might be used. It did not specify whether my name would be attached to whatever I wrote. It did not indicate whether a negative review would be treated with the same visibility as a positive one.
The review request presents itself as an invitation to honest assessment. It does not say: please tell us what you liked about the binding. It says: please write about the binding. The implication is neutrality — that the system welcomes all responses and will treat them equally. Whether this is true is not established by the email, which is silent on the point. What is established is that the system is interested in your response. What it will do with that response, and under what conditions, is not part of the offer.
It is not clear whether the transaction includes honesty.
There is a broader pattern worth naming, because this essay does not sit alone.
I have been refused the use of my own preferences, politely and at some length. I have had my consent assumed by people who substituted their own tolerance for mine. I have had my data shared by someone who did not understand that sharing constituted a breach. I have been treated as an interruption by businesses whose survival depends on people like me not feeling like one. In each case, something was taken or assumed after the point at which the exchange should have ended — after the photograph was taken, after the data was shared, after the purchase was made.
The review request is the mildest version of this pattern. The harm is negligible. The email is easy to ignore. The algorithm generates no consequences for non-compliance. It is, in isolation, trivial.
But the structure is identical. The exchange is complete. One party has decided it isn’t.
The decision is made without negotiation, without acknowledgment that an extension is being requested, and without any offer that would make the extension a new exchange rather than an assumption. The email does not say: we would like something further from you, and here is what we are prepared to offer in return. It says: we hope you will— a form of words that is grammatically a wish and functionally an expectation, delivered in the register of friendliness to soften the fact that a request is being made of someone who has already given what was agreed.
While it’s still fresh on your mind. The phrase deserves attention. It acknowledges that memory fades — that the experience I had is a depreciating asset, worth more now than it will be later. This is true. It is also the logic of extraction: act quickly, before the resource degrades. The freshness of my mind is framed as a reason for me to act. It is also a reason for them to ask now rather than later, before the moment passes and the asset diminishes.
They are not concerned about my freshness. They are concerned about the content while it is still producible.
I do not write reviews of bias binding.
Not because I have strong feelings about the genre, but because the product does not require it. It holds the seam or it doesn’t. It held mine. There is nothing further to say that would be of use to anyone, including the people who asked.
But the request itself is worth describing, because it is a small and precise example of something that has become so common it no longer registers as the thing it is.
An exchange was agreed. An exchange was completed. Two weeks later, a request arrived for something that was not part of the exchange, offering nothing in return, framed as though it were the natural continuation of a relationship that had, in fact, concluded at the point of delivery.
The binding holds the seam. That is its function.
The review serves the seller. That was not part of the transaction.
