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 believe it’s fewer than three pals. And the common individual has demand for meaningfully extra. I believe it’s like 15 pals or one thing, proper?”
Earlier than you’ve had a second to register the ominous manner wherein he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he provides 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 12 months 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, residence, funds, and really identification are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key laptop 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 restricted to a web based chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.web; her neighbors don’t even know what she appears to be like like. Her most dependable companion is the display screen in entrance of her. A wild, unimaginable situation that I’m certain 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 every one among us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and you realize what? They’ve accomplished it to me, and you realize 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 concern is way more elementary: If all of our information is digitized, what occurs if the folks 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 know-how; it virtually 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, nevertheless, probably 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 individual. And we’ve all been by covid lockdowns the place that isolation was actively inspired. For an entire era of younger individuals who lived by 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 menace, 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 critically 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 limitless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend growing 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 complete 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 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 know-how solely for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—could be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably enjoying 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 wherein crowds have been demonized and othered by these in energy and means that our alienation is way more structural: “Whether or not by 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 current many years is the extended, top-down assault on public house 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, snug road furnishings and free public bathrooms, and a vibrant, assorted, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the perfect issues about metropolis life fall below the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and assist completely happy crowds somewhat than unhappy, alienated, stay-at-home loners.”
Almost half a century in the past Margaret Thatcher laid out the neoliberal consensus that may body the subsequent 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 folks, and other people should take care of themselves first.”
Consistent with that philosophy, social connectivity has been outsourced to tech corporations for which the eye economic system is paramount. “The Algo” is our new, capricious god. In case your livelihood is dependent upon engagement, the temptation is to cease fascinated about human connection once you publish, and to assume extra about what’s 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 buddy? Solutions to this will likely differ. Even for those who 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 crucial 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 “pals” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that may by no means problem you in the best way an actual buddy would possibly, it’s additionally value remembering who AI truly works for. Not too long ago Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that prompted it to solid doubt on the Holocaust and speak about “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we would have liked it, that these methods are by no means impartial, by no means apolitical, and all the time on the command of these with their palms on the code.
I’m pretty fortunate. I stay with my associate and have an honest neighborhood of pals. However I make money working from home and might spend the vast majority 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 after all be used for identification theft. However it might probably even have way more deleterious functions: Our loneliness will 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 wherein it may be abused.
It doesn’t need to be this manner. We will withhold our consideration, follow more healthy display screen routines, restrict our publicity to doomscrolling, refuse to have interaction with energy-guzzling AI, delete our accounts. However, crucially, we will additionally arrange collectively IRL: be a part of a union or a neighborhood membership, ask our pals 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 increase and bust, earlier than Net 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the speculation of a “useless web.” In that sense, it stays an interesting time capsule of a second when the chances to return felt limitless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We will additionally see The Internet’s affect in fashionable screen-life movies like Looking out, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy can be inviting us to go exterior, contact grass, discuss to a different human being, and arrange.
“Discover the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Staff Human (2019)
Tom Humberstone is a comic book artist and illustrator based mostly in Edinburgh.
