In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so keen on doing today, pontificated at punishing size on a podcast. Within the interview, he addressed America’s loneliness epidemic: “The typical American has—I believe it’s fewer than three mates. And the typical individual has demand for meaningfully extra. I believe it’s like 15 mates or one thing, proper?”
Earlier than you’ve had a second to register the ominous method through which he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he provides his resolution to the loneliness epidemic: AI mates. Ideally AI mates his firm generates.
“It’s like I’m not even me anymore.”
—Angela Bennett, The Internet (1995)
Thirty years in the past, Irwin Winkler’s proto–cyber thriller, The Internet, was launched. It was 1995, generally thought to be the yr Hollywood found the web. Sandra Bullock performed a social recluse and pc nerd for rent named Angela Bennett, who unwittingly uncovers a sinister pc safety conspiracy. She quickly finds her life turned the other way up because the conspiracists start systematically destroying her credibility and status. Her job, residence, funds, and really id are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key pc information.
Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, maybe—properly positioned for this id annihilation. Her mom, within the throes of dementia, now not acknowledges her; she works from residence for shoppers who’ve by no means met her; her social circle is restricted to a web-based chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.internet; her neighbors don’t even know what she appears like. Her most dependable companion is the display in entrance of her. A wild, unimaginable state of affairs that I’m positive none of us can relate to.
“Simply give it some thought. Our complete world is sitting there on a pc. It’s within the pc, all the things: your DMV information, your Social Safety, your bank cards, your medical information. It’s all proper there. Everyone seems to be saved in there. It’s like this little digital shadow on every one in all us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and you understand what? They’ve completed it to me, and you understand what? They’re gonna do it to you.”
—Angela Bennett, The Internet
Whereas the villain of The Internet is finally a nefarious cybersecurity software program firm, the movie’s preoccupying worry is far more elementary: If all of our knowledge is digitized, what occurs if the folks with entry to that data tamper with it? Or weaponize it towards us?
This era of Hollywood’s flirtation with the web is sometimes called the period of the technophobic thriller, however that’s a surface-level misreading. Techno-skeptic is likely to be extra correct. These movies had been broadly constructive and enthusiastic about new know-how; it nearly all the time performed a task in how the hero saved the day. Their larger concern was with the people who had final management of those instruments, and what oversight and restrictions we must always place on them.
In 2025, nonetheless, essentially the most prescient a part of The Internet is Angela Bennett’s digital alienation. What was initially a collection of believable sufficient contrivances to make the theft of her id extra plausible is now simply a part of our on a regular basis lives. All of us financial institution, store, eat, work, and socialize with out essentially seeing one other human being in individual. And we’ve all been by means of covid lockdowns the place that isolation was actively inspired. For an entire era of younger individuals who lived by means of that, socializing nose to nose isn’t second nature. In 2023, the World Well being Group declared loneliness to be a urgent world well being risk, estimating that one in 4 older adults expertise social isolation and between 5% and 15% of adolescents expertise loneliness. Within the US, social isolation could threaten public well being extra severely than weight problems.
The Internet appeared at a time when the web was solely faintly understood as the brand new Wild West … In that sense, it stays an interesting time capsule of a second when the probabilities to return felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend growing quantities of time our telephones, the place finely tuned algorithms aggressively foyer for an increasing number of of our ad-revenue-producing consideration. As Bennett warns: “Our complete lives are on the pc, they usually knew that I may very well be vanished. They knew that no one would care, that no one would perceive.” On this sense, in 2025 we’re all Angela Bennett. As Bennett’s digital alienation makes her extra susceptible to pernicious actors, so too are we more and more in danger from those that don’t have, and have by no means had, our greatest pursuits at coronary heart.
Guilty know-how fully for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—can be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably taking part in an element in exacerbating the issue, its outsize function in our lives has all the time mirrored bigger underlying elements. In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Trendy World (2024), the journalist Dan Hancox examines the methods through which crowds have been demonized and othered by these in energy and means that our alienation is far more structural: “Whether or not by means of authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key purpose we’ve got all turn into a bit extra crowd-shy in latest a long time is the extended, top-down assault on public area and the broader public realm—what are typically referred to as the city commons. From correctly funded libraries to nice, open parks and squares, free or reasonably priced sports activities and leisure amenities, protected, accessible and low cost public transport, comfy road furnishings and free public bogs, and a vibrant, different, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the perfect issues about metropolis life fall beneath the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and assist completely happy crowds reasonably than unhappy, alienated, stay-at-home loners.”
Practically half a century in the past Margaret Thatcher laid out the neoliberal consensus that may body the following a long time of individualism: “There’s no such factor as society. There are particular person women and men and there are households. And no authorities can do something besides by means of folks, and folks should take care of themselves first.”
TOM HUMBERSTONE
In step with that philosophy, social connectivity has been outsourced to tech corporations for which the eye financial system is paramount. “The Algo” is our new, capricious god. In case your livelihood will depend on engagement, the temptation is to cease interested by human connection once you publish, and to suppose extra about what is going to fulfill The Algo to make sure a superb harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your good friend? Solutions to this will likely differ. Even in the event you received’t, different individuals are already making shut connections with “AI companions” or “falling in love” with ChatGPT. The rise of “cognitive offloading”—of individuals asking AI to do their essential pondering for them—is already properly underway, with many highschool and school college students admitting to a deep reliance on the know-how.
Past the plain concern that AI “mates” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that can by no means problem you in the way in which an actual good friend would possibly, it’s additionally value remembering who AI really works for. Just lately Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that prompted it to forged doubt on the Holocaust and speak about “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we wanted it, that these programs are by no means impartial, by no means apolitical, and all the time on the command of these with their fingers on the code.
I’m pretty fortunate. I dwell with my companion and have an honest neighborhood of mates. However I do business from home and might spend nearly all of the day not speaking to anybody. I’m not proof against feeling remoted, anxious, and powerless as I stare unblinking at my information feed. I believe all of us really feel it. We’re all Angela Bennett. Weaponizing that alienation, because the antagonists of The Internet do, can in fact be used for id theft. However it may even have far more deleterious purposes: Our loneliness could be manipulated to make us devour extra, work longer, flip towards ourselves and one another. AI “friendships,” if engaged with uncritically, are solely going to supercharge this disaffection and the methods through which it may be abused.
It doesn’t should be this manner. We will withhold our consideration, apply more healthy display routines, restrict our publicity to doomscrolling, refuse to have interaction with energy-guzzling AI, delete our accounts. However, crucially, we will additionally set up collectively IRL: be a part of a union or a neighborhood membership, ask our mates if they should discuss. Hopelessness is what these in energy need us to really feel, so resist it.
The Internet appeared at a time when the web was solely faintly understood as the brand new Wild West. Earlier than the dot-com growth and bust, earlier than Internet 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the idea of a “lifeless web.” In that sense, it stays an interesting time capsule of a second when the probabilities to return felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We will additionally see The Internet’s affect in trendy screen-life movies like Looking out, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy might be inviting us to go outdoors, contact grass, discuss to a different human being, and set up.
“Discover the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Staff Human (2019)
Tom Humberstone is a comic book artist and illustrator based mostly in Edinburgh.
