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 typical American has—I feel it’s fewer than three pals. And the typical individual 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 manner wherein 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 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 status. Her job, house, 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, 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.web; her neighbors don’t even know what she seems 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 part: 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 considered one of us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and you already know what? They’ve achieved 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 finally a nefarious cybersecurity software program firm, the movie’s preoccupying worry is rather more elementary: If all of our knowledge is digitized, what occurs if the folks with entry to that info tamper with it? Or weaponize it towards us?
This era of Hollywood’s flirtation with the web is also known as 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 nearly all the time performed a task 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, 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 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 way of covid lockdowns the place that isolation was actively inspired. For an entire era of younger individuals who lived by way of that, socializing nose to nose will not be 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 a captivating 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 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.
Guilty know-how totally for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—could be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably taking part in 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 wherein crowds have been demonized and othered by these in energy and means that our alienation is rather more structural: “Whether or not by way of authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key cause we have now 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 amenities, secure, accessible and low-cost public transport, comfy road furnishings and free public bogs, and a vibrant, various, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the very best issues about metropolis life fall underneath the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and assist comfortable crowds reasonably 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 way of folks, and other people should take care of themselves first.”
In line 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 dependent upon engagement, the temptation is to cease interested by human connection if you put up, and to assume 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 in the event you received’t, different persons 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 important considering for them—is already properly underway, with many highschool and faculty college students admitting to a deep reliance on the know-how.
Past the apparent concern that AI “pals” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that can by no means problem you in the way in which an actual buddy may, 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 brought about 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 palms on the code.
I’m pretty fortunate. I stay with my accomplice and have a good neighborhood of pals. However I earn a living 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 will probably even have rather more deleterious purposes: Our loneliness might be manipulated to make us eat extra, work longer, flip towards 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 must be this fashion. We will withhold our consideration, follow more healthy display screen 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 part of a union or an area 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 growth and bust, earlier than Net 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 infinite, 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 shall 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.
