In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so keen on doing as of late, 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 pals. And the common particular person has demand for meaningfully extra. I feel it’s like 15 pals or one thing, proper?”
Earlier than you’ve had a second to register the ominous method during which he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he gives his answer to the loneliness epidemic: AI pals. Ideally AI pals 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 laptop nerd for rent named Angela Bennett, who unwittingly uncovers a sinister laptop safety conspiracy. She quickly finds her life turned the other way up because the conspiracists start systematically destroying her credibility and fame. Her job, dwelling, funds, and really id are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key laptop data.
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 dwelling for shoppers who’ve by no means met her; her social circle is restricted to an internet chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.internet; her neighbors don’t even know what she seems to be 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 complete world is sitting there on a pc. It’s within the laptop, every little 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 one among us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and what? They’ve performed it to me, and 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 way more elementary: If all of our knowledge is digitized, what occurs if the individuals with entry to that data 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 perhaps extra correct. These movies have been broadly constructive and enthusiastic about new expertise; it virtually at all times 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, 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 particular person. And we’ve all been by way of covid lockdowns the place that isolation was actively inspired. For a complete technology of younger individuals who lived by way of that, socializing nose to nose shouldn’t be second nature. In 2023, the World Well being Group declared loneliness to be a urgent international 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 significantly 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 chances to return felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend rising quantities of time our telephones, the place finely tuned algorithms aggressively foyer for increasingly 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 person would care, that no person 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.
In charge expertise solely 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 position in our lives has at all times mirrored bigger underlying elements. In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Fashionable World (2024), the journalist Dan Hancox examines the methods during which crowds have been demonized and othered by these in energy and means that our alienation is way more structural: “Whether or not by way of authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key purpose now we have all turn out to be a bit extra crowd-shy in latest many years is the extended, top-down assault on public house and the broader public realm—what are generally referred to as the city commons. From correctly funded libraries to nice, open parks and squares, free or reasonably priced sports activities and leisure services, secure, accessible and low-cost public transport, snug avenue furnishings and free public bathrooms, and a vibrant, various, uncommodified social and cultural life—all one of the best issues about metropolis life fall underneath the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and help 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 might body the following many years 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 way of individuals, and folks should take care of themselves first.”
In step with that philosophy, social connectivity has been outsourced to tech firms for which the eye economic system is paramount. “The Algo” is our new, capricious god. In case your livelihood will depend on engagement, the temptation is to cease enthusiastic about human connection once you put up, and to assume extra about what’s going to fulfill The Algo to make sure harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your pal? Solutions to this will likely range. Even if you happen to 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 essential pondering 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 “pals” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that can by no means problem you in the way in which an actual pal would possibly, it’s additionally price remembering who AI really works for. Not too long ago Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that induced it to solid doubt on the Holocaust and speak about “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we wanted it, that these techniques are by no means impartial, by no means apolitical, and at all times on the command of these with their fingers on the code.
I’m pretty fortunate. I reside with my companion and have a good group of pals. However I earn a living from home and may spend nearly all of the day not speaking to anybody. I’m not resistant to 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 id theft. However it might probably even have way more deleterious functions: Our loneliness could be manipulated to make us eat 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 during which it may be abused.
It doesn’t should be this manner. We will withhold our consideration, follow more healthy display routines, restrict our publicity to doomscrolling, refuse to interact with energy-guzzling AI, delete our accounts. However, crucially, we are able to additionally arrange collectively IRL: be a part of a union or a neighborhood membership, ask our pals 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 an interesting time capsule of a second when the chances to return felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We will additionally see The Internet’s affect in fashionable screen-life movies like Looking, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy might be inviting us to go exterior, contact grass, speak to a different human being, and arrange.
“Discover the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Group Human (2019)
Tom Humberstone is a comic book artist and illustrator primarily based in Edinburgh.
