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 feel it’s fewer than three buddies. And the typical particular person has demand for meaningfully extra. I feel it’s like 15 buddies 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 presents his resolution to the loneliness epidemic: AI buddies. Ideally AI buddies 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 considered 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 wrong way up because the conspiracists start systematically destroying her credibility and repute. Her job, residence, funds, and really identification are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key pc data.
Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, maybe—properly positioned for this identification 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 proscribed to an internet chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.internet; her neighbors don’t even know what she seems like. Her most dependable companion is the display in entrance of her. A wild, unimaginable situation that I’m positive none of us can relate to.
“Simply give it some thought. Our entire world is sitting there on a pc. It’s within the pc, every thing: your DMV data, your Social Safety, your bank cards, your medical data. It’s all proper there. Everyone seems to be saved in there. It’s like this little digital shadow on each certainly one of us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and you already know what? They’ve carried out it to me, and you already know what? They’re gonna do it to you.”—Angela Bennett, The Internet
Whereas the villain of The Internet is in the end a nefarious cybersecurity software program firm, the movie’s preoccupying worry is far more elementary: If all of our information is digitized, what occurs if the individuals with entry to that info tamper with it? Or weaponize it in opposition to 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 expertise; it nearly all the time performed a job 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, nevertheless, essentially the most prescient a part of The Internet is Angela Bennett’s digital alienation. What was initially a sequence of believable sufficient contrivances to make the theft of her identification 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 particular person. And we’ve all been via covid lockdowns the place that isolation was actively inspired. For a complete technology of younger individuals who lived via that, socializing nose to nose shouldn’t be 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 might 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 a captivating time capsule of a second when the probabilities to come back felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend rising quantities of time our telephones, the place finely tuned algorithms aggressively foyer for increasingly more of our ad-revenue-producing consideration. As Bennett warns: “Our entire lives are on the pc, they usually knew that I could possibly 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 weak 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.
In charge expertise totally for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—can be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably enjoying an element in exacerbating the issue, its outsize position in our lives has all the time mirrored bigger underlying components. In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Fashionable 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 via authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key purpose we’ve all turn into a bit extra crowd-shy in latest a long time is the extended, top-down assault on public house and the broader public realm—what are typically known as the city commons. From correctly funded libraries to nice, open parks and squares, free or inexpensive sports activities and leisure amenities, protected, accessible and low cost public transport, comfy road furnishings and free public bathrooms, and a vibrant, diversified, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the very best issues about metropolis life fall beneath the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and assist comfortable crowds quite than unhappy, alienated, stay-at-home loners.”
Almost half a century in the past Margaret Thatcher laid out the neoliberal consensus that will body the subsequent 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 via individuals, and folks should take care of themselves first.”
TOM HUMBERSTONE
Consistent 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 is determined by 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 harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your good friend? Solutions to this may increasingly range. Even when you gained’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 crucial considering for them—is already properly underway, with many highschool and school college students admitting to a deep reliance on the expertise.
Past the plain concern that AI “buddies” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that may 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. Lately Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that brought on it to forged doubt on the Holocaust and discuss “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we would have liked 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 a good group of buddies. However I make money working from home and may 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 feel 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 identification theft. However it might probably even have far more deleterious functions: Our loneliness could be manipulated to make us devour extra, work longer, flip in opposition to 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 must be this fashion. We are able to withhold our consideration, observe more healthy display routines, restrict our publicity to doomscrolling, refuse to interact 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 buddies if they should speak. 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 increase and bust, earlier than Net 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the speculation of a “lifeless web.” In that sense, it stays a captivating time capsule of a second when the probabilities to come back felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We are able to additionally see The Internet’s affect in trendy screen-life movies like Looking, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy can be inviting us to go exterior, contact grass, speak to a different human being, and set up.
“Discover the others.”—Douglas Rushkoff, Workforce Human (2019)
Tom Humberstone is a comic book artist and illustrator primarily based in Edinburgh.