In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so keen on doing lately, pontificated at punishing size on a podcast. Within the interview, he addressed America’s loneliness epidemic: “The common American has—I feel it’s fewer than three associates. And the common individual has demand for meaningfully extra. I feel it’s like 15 associates or one thing, proper?”
Earlier than you’ve had a second to register the ominous approach through which he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he gives his resolution to the loneliness epidemic: AI associates. Ideally AI associates 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 wrong way up because the conspiracists start systematically destroying her credibility and status. Her job, house, 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, not acknowledges her; she works from house 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 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 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 considered one of us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and what? They’ve finished 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 far more basic: If all of our information 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 could be extra correct. These movies have been broadly optimistic and enthusiastic about new expertise; it virtually all the time performed a job in how the hero saved the day. Their greater concern was with the people who had final management of those instruments, and what oversight and restrictions we should 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 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 via covid lockdowns the place that isolation was actively inspired. For a complete era of younger individuals who lived via that, socializing head to head 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 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 enchanting time capsule of a second when the chances 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 complete lives are on the pc, they usually knew that I might 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.
Responsible expertise fully for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—could be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably enjoying a component in exacerbating the issue, its outsize position in our lives has all the time mirrored bigger underlying components. 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 via authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key motive we’ve 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 typically known as the city commons. From correctly funded libraries to nice, open parks and squares, free or inexpensive sports activities and leisure services, protected, accessible and low-cost public transport, comfy avenue furnishings and free public bathrooms, and a vibrant, various, 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 glad crowds moderately 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 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 via individuals, and other people should take care of themselves first.”
Consistent with that philosophy, social connectivity has been outsourced to tech firms 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 fascinated with human connection once you submit, and to suppose extra about what is going to fulfill The Algo to make sure a very good harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your pal? Solutions to this will likely 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 pondering for them—is already properly underway, with many highschool and school college students admitting to a deep reliance on the expertise.
Past the apparent concern that AI “associates” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that may by no means problem you in the way in which an actual pal may, it’s additionally price remembering who AI really works for. Just lately Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that precipitated it to solid doubt on the Holocaust and discuss “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we would have liked it, that these techniques 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 reside with my accomplice and have an honest group of associates. However I earn a living from home and may spend the vast majority 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 after all be used for id theft. However it could possibly even have far more deleterious functions: Our loneliness will 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 through which it may be abused.
It doesn’t should be this fashion. We will 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 arrange collectively IRL: be a part of a union or an area membership, ask our associates 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 Internet 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the idea of a “useless web.” In that sense, it stays an enchanting time capsule of a second when the chances to come back 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, 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.
