The vampires feed on us when we're alone

This parasocial technology took over from where television left off and pushed society even more radically into an atomized configuration.

To continue on the topic of AI…

Last week or so, Elon Musk posted some AI porn teasers, telling his eloncel fanbase that now Grok can animate any photo of a person and have it say anything they want. He provided an example:

Grok Imagine prompt: She smiles and says “I will always love you”

Isn’t that cool? You can create a shitty little fantasy version of a life you’ve always wanted…but never got. That girl you had a crush on in high school who didn’t even know you existed? Well, you can generate evidence of a whole life you spent together — intimate moments, actions, sex vids. The real-time, custom, all-consuming virtual life that promises to take gooning to the next level.

Of course other users countered with their own creations:

Or here is my own contribution:

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Looking at this and all the crazy stories of people going into chatbot psychosis — being driven insane, killing themselves, killing others…and then of course thinking of the billions of chatbot relationships that are not reported — you know, not the revelatory crazy edge cases, but the normal, well-adjusted people using chatbots casually, going to them for mundane stuff…stuff they might have asked or talked about with their real friends or family members…stuff they might have posted about online in forums or social media or whatever — and it’s obvious that the chatbots are taking over. People now go to chatbots with their questions. And the chatbots understand you. The more you use them, the more they know your context, the more they understand the things you’re into, the more they anticipate you, the less you have to specify your questions — like talking to a true friend. It’s now so easy and so frictionless and natural and you don’t have to call anyone…don’t have to do small talk or listen to others talk about themselves or their problems. And these chatbots do seem to have good answers most of the time. And why wouldn’t they? They’re the repositories of most of the information humanity has produced to date and digitized. Even I feel the pull. Why bother someone when I can just query the online helpful buddy?

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These AI chatbots tap into the vast stores of knowledge humanity has produced and preserved. But that’s just the lure.

In the 2010s, the spread of social media represented a new development in parasocial world wide web technology. Social media tapped into something fundamental to human beings, something that makes us who we are — talking, telling stories, and spending time with others. The immediacy and the real-time nature of platforms like Facebook and Twitter mimicked the real world enough to trick us into thinking that basic part of our biology, tricking us into thinking that we were really connected to other people, that we were being social with our friends. It was a powerful sensation, and I remember falling prey to it when I first started hanging out on Twitter back in 2011. As time went on, people spent more and more time on these technologies — for many, social media was the only meaningful social interaction they had. All the while, on the backend, we were giving giant corporations power to be mediators and to facilitate our relationships…the relationships of billions of people around the world. And as the tech advanced, these companies grabbed more and more control: they could deplatform you with no recourse, they manipulated the feed to control what showed up on your screen. And this technology, which was sold to us as being about us, stopped being about us at all. Once we were lured in and addicted, it became about what was good for the company. Turned out we just product. Actually, we were more than product, we were the producers and the product. We generated content and were then milked for our attention — doubly milked, doubly exploited. Of course, these companies — and the people who ran them — became extremely powerful politically. How could they not? The people who controlled them had power over the spectacle.

But this old social media approach is outdated now. LLMs and the chatbots that access them represent the next leap in parasocial world wide web technology. Looking at the trajectory of OpenAI and its many competitors like Gork and even the move by Facebook to roll out AI friends, it’s kind of obvious what’s coming next: the minimization of human-to-human interaction. We’re moving towards a world where real interactions between real people online are going to be supplanted — or rather, optimized. It makes sense. Human-to-human interaction is messy. Better to remove the person completely. Automate the whole thing. The idiot savants in charge of our technological development will only be happy when there’s no person-to-person interaction. Too messy. Too unpredictable. Too scary. They won’t stop until each one of us is totally alone, talking to our machine friends — machines that know all our secrets, know us better than those who love us. That’s the peak of civilizational progress for these people.

It’s funny, too. The theme of early internet ads was all about connectivity and global communication. The internet was supposed to melt global borders and erase all barriers, bring people close together. Turns out the opposite reality has come into being: all of us alone, atomized, relying on machines to interact with the world and others.

Look at these two clips side by side. The first is from 1996; the second is from 2025 — three decades apart.

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What I want to stress is this: loneliness. Being alone, devoid of friends in the flesh, devoid of any real social connections in the physical world — this is the key to this technology’s success and also the key to our own demise. The more alone we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more we need this technology to function. We’re human. We need connection — we’ll take the debased virtual kind with a robot if that’s the only thing we can get. This technology feeds on loneliness — it can’t function without it. And so over time this technology has molded the world in its image, creating an environment in which it can thrive — replacing real social interaction more and more with a parasocial world. It took over from where television left off and pushed society even more radically into an atomized configuration.

As our Metaverse Overlord Zuck recently said: “The average American has three friends, but has demand for fifteen.” And he — the gracious lord full of noblesse oblige that he is, decked out in his cool Ray-Ban branded metaverse glasses — is here to give us the good news: He’ll be providing us the twelve standard issue missing AI friends we all so desperately require.

There is no doubt that this parasocial world wide web technology we all use has helped create the conditions for its own success. It is a vampiric technology. And vampires feed on us when we’re alone.

—Yasha

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