The Great Rebundling
There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.
— Jim Barksdale
For the last twenty years, the internet has been defined by Unbundling. We took the newspaper and unbundled it into Twitter, Substack, and Craigslist. We took the bank and unbundled it into Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase. We took the operating system and unbundled it into millions of distinct Apps.
This explosion of choice was necessary to build out the capabilities of the web. But we have reached the point of diminishing returns. The user experience today is a fragmented mess of disconnected silos. You have 50 passwords. You have four different wallets. You have subscriptions scattered across 10 platforms. Your data is fragmented across a dozen clouds.
The friction has become the product.
The Pendulum Swings Back
History tells us that when complexity becomes unmanageable, the market demands a Rebundling. We are standing at the precipice of the “Great Rebundling.” But this time, we are not rebundling around a Portal (Yahoo) or a Social Network (Facebook).
We are rebundling around the User Agent.
Why now? Because AI Agents require it.
As I discussed in “From Interfaces to Intent,” an AI agent cannot function effectively if it has to negotiate 50 different logins and 10 different payment rails. To deliver on the promise of the “Intent Economy,” the Agent needs a unified environment where Identity, Money, and Data live together.
It needs a Trust Stack.
The Components of the New Bundle
The next dominant platform will not be an “App.” It will be the infrastructure that unifies the three core primitives we have analyzed in this series:
Identity (The Login): Not a Google password, but a portable, cryptographic DID that proves humanity without surveillance (“Identity is the New Compute”).
Value (The Wallet): Not a Stripe checkout form, but a native Stablecoin rail that streams micropayments instantly (“Payments Without Platforms”).
Intelligence (The Context): Not a cloud-based chatbot, but a local AI that sees what you see and understands your intent (“The Rise of the Attention Operating System”).
When you bundle these three things into a single interface, the friction of the web disappears. You don’t “log in” to websites; your User Agent verifies you. You don’t “enter credit card details”; your User Agent streams the payment. You don’t “search” for products; your User Agent executes the trade.
The Sovereign User Agent
This represents a shift in power from the Server to the Client.
In the Unbundled era, power accrued to the Aggregators (the Servers) because they controlled the relationship. In the Rebundled era, power accrues to the User Agent (the Client) because it controls the Integration.
The entity that builds this Sovereign User Agent will not just be a browser. It will be the operating system for the AI economy. It will be the bank for the unbanked. It will be the passport for the digital citizen.
The Inevitability
The market is currently screaming for this solution.
Users are tired of surveillance and ads.
Creators are tired of platform taxes.
Developers are tired of closed APIs.
The technology is ready. The capital is ready. The demand is infinite. The only missing piece is the vehicle to build it.
The Great Rebundling is not a possibility. It is an inevitability. The only question is who will lead it.