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 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 means by which he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he provides his answer 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 repute. Her job, house, funds, and really identification are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key pc data.
Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, maybe—nicely positioned for this identification 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 like. Her most dependable companion is the display in entrance of her. A wild, unimaginable state of affairs 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 pieces: 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 in all us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and you understand what? They’ve finished it to me, and you understand 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 basic: If all of our information 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 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 know-how; it nearly 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 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 technology of younger individuals who lived by way of that, socializing head to head just isn’t 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 might 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 a captivating time capsule of a second when the chances to come back felt countless, 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 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 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.
Accountable know-how solely 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 by 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 motive we’ve got all turn out to be a bit extra crowd-shy in current many years is the extended, top-down assault on public area 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 inexpensive sports activities and leisure services, 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 below 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 way of 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 financial 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 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 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 vital pondering for them—is already nicely underway, with many highschool and faculty college students admitting to a deep reliance on the know-how.
Past the apparent concern that AI “associates” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that can by no means problem you in the best way an actual pal would possibly, it’s additionally price remembering who AI really works for. Just lately Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that triggered 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 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 after all be used for identification theft. However it may well even have way more deleterious functions: Our loneliness could be manipulated to make us devour 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 by which it may be abused.
It doesn’t must be this fashion. We are able to 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 are able to additionally arrange collectively IRL: be part of a union or a neighborhood 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 growth 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 come back felt countless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We are able to 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 can be inviting us to go outdoors, contact grass, discuss to a different human being, and arrange.
“Discover the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Workforce Human (2019)
Tom Humberstone is a comic book artist and illustrator based mostly in Edinburgh.