In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so keen on doing nowadays, pontificated at punishing size on a podcast. Within the interview, he addressed America’s loneliness epidemic: “The common American has—I believe it’s fewer than three associates. And the typical individual has demand for meaningfully extra. I believe it’s like 15 associates or one thing, proper?”
Earlier than you’ve had a second to register the ominous method wherein he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he presents 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 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 popularity. Her job, house, funds, and really id are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key pc data.
Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, maybe—nicely positioned for this id annihilation. Her mom, within the throes of dementia, now not acknowledges her; she works from house for shoppers who’ve by no means met her; her social circle is proscribed to a web-based 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 screen 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 pc, all the things: 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 recognize what? They’ve executed it to me, and you recognize 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 way more elementary: If all of our information is digitized, what occurs if the folks 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 could 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, probably 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 a complete technology of younger individuals who lived by means of that, socializing head to head is just not second nature. In 2023, the World Well being Group declared loneliness to be a urgent international 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 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 a captivating time capsule of a second when the chances to return felt limitless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend growing quantities of time taking a look at 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, and so they knew that I might 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 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 totally for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—could be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably taking part in a component in exacerbating the issue, its outsize position in our lives has all the time mirrored bigger underlying elements. In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Fashionable 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 means of authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key purpose we’ve got all grow 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 known 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, comfy avenue furnishings and free public bogs, and a vibrant, diversified, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the perfect issues about metropolis life fall underneath the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and assist comfortable crowds moderately 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 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 means of folks, and folks should take care of themselves first.”
In step 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 depends upon engagement, the temptation is to cease eager about human connection while you put up, and to suppose extra about what is going to fulfill The Algo to make sure an excellent harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your buddy? Solutions to this may increasingly range. Even for those who 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 nicely underway, with many highschool and faculty college students admitting to a deep reliance on the expertise.
Past the plain concern that AI “associates” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that can by no means problem you in the way in which 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 wanted it, that these techniques are by no means impartial, by no means apolitical, and all the time on the command of these with their arms on the code.
I’m pretty fortunate. I dwell with my associate and have an honest neighborhood of associates. 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 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 could possibly even have way more deleterious purposes: Our loneliness might 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 should be this manner. We will withhold our consideration, apply 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 part of a union or an area membership, ask our associates 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 Internet 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the speculation of a “useless web.” In that sense, it stays a captivating 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 trendy screen-life movies like Looking, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy shall be inviting us to go outdoors, contact grass, speak 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.
