In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so keen on doing today, 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 common particular person 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 manner wherein he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he provides 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 Internetwas launched. It was 1995, generally thought to be the 12 months 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 status. Her job, house, funds, and really identification are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key pc data.
Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, maybe—properly 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 restricted 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 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, the whole lot: 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 considered one of us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and you recognize what? They’ve accomplished 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 rather more elementary: If all of our information is digitized, what occurs if the folks with entry to that data tamper with it? Or weaponize it in opposition to 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 could be extra correct. These movies have been broadly constructive and enthusiastic about new know-how; it virtually at all times 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 must 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 sequence 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 particular person. And we’ve all been by means of covid lockdowns the place that isolation was actively inspired. For an entire era of younger individuals who lived by means of that, socializing nose to nose 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 significantly 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 an enchanting time capsule of a second when the chances to come back felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend rising 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, they usually knew that I may very well 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.
Responsible know-how solely for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—can be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably enjoying an element in exacerbating the issue, its outsize position in our lives has at all times 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 means of authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key purpose we now have all grow 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 generally referred to 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 road furnishings and free public bathrooms, and a vibrant, different, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the most effective issues about metropolis life fall beneath the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and assist completely satisfied crowds quite 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 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 determined by engagement, the temptation is to cease occupied with human connection if you put up, and to assume extra about what’s going to fulfill The Algo to make sure harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your good friend? Solutions to this may occasionally fluctuate. Even if you happen to received’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 properly underway, with many highschool and school college students admitting to a deep reliance on the know-how.
Past the apparent concern that AI “associates” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that may by no means problem you in the way in which an actual good friend would possibly, it’s additionally price remembering who AI really works for. Not too long ago Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that induced it to solid doubt on the Holocaust and discuss “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we would have liked it, that these methods are by no means impartial, by no means apolitical, and at all times on the command of these with their fingers on the code.
I’m pretty fortunate. I reside with my accomplice and have a good group of associates. However I earn a living from home and might 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 identification theft. However it may possibly even have rather more deleterious functions: Our loneliness will 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 need to 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 will 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 increase and bust, earlier than Net 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the idea of a “useless web.” In that sense, it stays an enchanting time capsule of a second when the chances to come back felt infinite, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We are able to additionally see The Internet’s affect in trendy screen-life movies like Looking, Host, Unfriendedand The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy will probably 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.
