Every major tech rollout follows the same story: The Emperor’s New Interface. The company unveils a stunning, minimalist, “intuitive” dashboard for its world-changing AI. It’s just a glowing orb that responds to your mood! A single, elegant touchscreen! They present a vision of effortless control. And then, within a week, the power users—the people who actually need to get things done—have covered it in digital duct tape. They’ve built kludgy browser extensions, hacked-together macros, and written 500-page manuals explaining the secret key combinations that actually make the damn thing work.The beautiful, public interface is a stage prop. The real interface—the one where the work happens—is a Rube Goldberg machine of scripts, workarounds, and whispered command-line incantations. This happens because the designers prioritize aesthetics and the illusion of simplicity over the messy reality of human need. They design for the first five minutes of use, not the five-thousandth hour.Now, imagine this on the scale of a World Model that manages a city or a nation. The public-facing interface is a sunny civic app where you “vote” on policy moods with emojis. The real interface, used by the civil servants, is a terrifying, Lovecraftian spreadsheet with macros that would make a Cthulhu cultist blush. This creates a dangerous knowledge gap. The public thinks they’re steering via a simple joystick. The bureaucrats know they’re performing blood magic on an ancient machine to keep the water running. When the system fails, no one understands why, because no one truly understands the interface.My controversial take is this: We should demand, by law, that any public-facing World Model interface must also have a publicly accessible “Clunky Mode.” A mode that exposes the levers, the logs, the confidence intervals, and the raw data streams. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It has to be true. The right to understand how you are being governed should include the right to be confused by the complexity of the governance machine. The emperor’s beautiful robes are a lie. We need to see the knitting needles, the dropped stitches, and the sweat of the tailors, or we are just children applauding an empty procession.This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t just accept the shiny dashboard—we demand the right to see the ugly, truthful wiring behind the drywall. Subscribe now.