Friendship in the Age of Digital Simulation

Only echoes.

James Ensor, Masks Confronting Death.

The new version of Mark Zuckerberg — I’ll call him alt-Mark — is peddling a new version of the metaverse. The original idea behind the virtual world, as you may hazily recall, was that we’d be digitally transformed into legless cartoon characters who would fly around a cartoon planet having sword fights and doing other supposedly fun things. It was a reboot of The Jetsons with Mr. Spacely as executive producer.

That version didn’t come close to achieving critical mass — I think only five people have signed up for Meta’s Horizon Worlds — and it was ditched when the release of ChatGPT rerouted the future onto a new and more lucrative path. With generative AI, you don’t need a critical mass of people to populate a user’s virtual social sphere. You can use chatbots, which have, to companies like Meta, distinct advantages over their human brethren. They’re cheap to produce, limitless in supply, and tractable in the extreme. Told what to do, they do it.

As friends, too, the bots have advantages over their meatier precursors. They’re always online, always awake, always there for you — exclusively for you.

Alt-Mark has been making the podcast rounds to promote Meta’s new vision of a virtualized society in which bot friends take the place of real friends. Technology, in this view, is the obvious solution to the loneliness crisis that technology created. “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends,” Zuckerberg says (oblivious to the fact that he’s confessing that Facebook failed utterly in its stated aim of strengthening social bonds), “and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like fifteen friends.” Meta can bring friendship’s supply-demand imbalance back into equilibrium by using its mountain of personal data to gin up a dozen bespoke bot friends for every average American. Any squeamishness about such relationships will subside once we develop “the vocabulary as a society to articulate why they are valuable.”

And the friends that come out of Meta’s friend factory won’t be limited to the disappointing, run-of-the-mill friends available in your local neighborhood. These will be cool friends, hot friends. Meta can even — for a small added fee, one assumes — manufacture celebrity friends for you. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “To boost the popularity of these souped-up chatbots, Meta has cut deals for up to seven-figures with celebrities like actresses Kristen Bell and Judi Dench and wrestler-turned-actor John Cena for the rights to use their voices.” It’s hard to imagine a better BFF than Dame Judi.

If the metaverse in its original conception represented a break from Facebook-style social media — Meta pitched it as a radical advance in the re-creation of society as a simulation — the botverse represents a retreat back to the familiar. It’s a continuation of the reigning social-media model, with nonhuman disembodied voices replacing human disembodied voices. Once you separate voice from being, alt-Mark understands, the next step is to mass-produce voice as a commodity, to offer friendship as a service.

The botverse is in fact the logical culmination of the social-media model, which has always sought to replace real friendship with a computer-generated facsimile. As the cultural critic Rob Horning argues, the social-media system was never actually designed to encourage people to, in Zuckerberg’s oft-repeated phrase, “connect with friends and family.” It was designed to disconnect people from friends and family, to sever traditional social ties in order to reconstruct them in an algorithmically mediated form. “Tech companies,” Horning writes, “built social infrastructure only to undermine it, to help with dismantling it as a site of resistance to commercialization, commodification, and mediatization.” The companies knew that “isolated people make for more dependable consumers.” To monetize friendship, you first have to dismember it.

The Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink, in his 2019 book Sad By Design, argued in a similar vein that unhappiness and angst aren’t unintended byproducts of social media but rather design features built into the system from the start. Through their continuously replenished supply of messages, each offering a simulation of connection, social platforms promise to alleviate the sense of loneliness they provoke. Parched, we keep returning to the well, even though we know the water’s bad.

By turning social interactions into symbolic transactions, the platforms reconstruct society on a foundation of anomie. Bots fit seamlessly into such a society, upping the monetization potential substantially.

When Facebook’s News Feed introduced us to what Zuckerberg termed “frictionless sharing,” we learned, or should have learned, that friction is the essence of sharing. Freed of any investment of effort, time, or care, sharing loses all meaning. It becomes mere transmission. The frictionless friendship offered by chatbots, by removing the need to adapt one’s self to another self, to make room in one’s life for a different being, will be similarly empty. Because our personalized chatbots will be modeled on our own characteristics and desires, as defined by the data the platforms collect on us, they will be versions of ourselves. They’ll do us in different voices. That seems like another recipe for amplifying loneliness, not alleviating it.

Our fate, should we take the path Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley mates are laying for us, would be similar to that suffered by the stranded man in Robert Frost’s poem of existentialist despair, “The Most of It”:

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried.

The voice of your personalized chatbot friend will never be more than a mocking echo of your own, even if it sounds exactly like Judi Dench.