The Loneliness Economy

Daisy Alioto on the power of refusal in human and bot relations.

In 1991, the book Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence by Nick Bantock kicked off a series of epistolary novels that would become bestsellers. I was an infant at the time, so it’s hard to know exactly which part of the zeitgeist led to the embrace of this odd and charming book.

Perhaps it was the debut of the first website or HP introducing their first color scanner, both of which occurred that same year. The breakup of the Soviet Union. The end of the Persian Gulf War. More likely, it was the nature of the book itself—which transpires through illustrated postcards sent between Griffin Moss, a man in London, and Sabine Strohem, who lives on an island in the South Pacific.

The postcard from Sabine appears first. She can see inside Griffin’s art studio but not his brain. It’s the human equivalent of spooky action at a distance, without a shred of technology connecting them. “The phenomenon that links us has taught me much about you, yet I am ignorant of your history. Please tell me something of your life,” she writes. Griffin, though lonely, is skeptical: “I’ve a million questions. Am I the only one you see? What form does your sight take? How come I can’t see you?”

They exchange stories about their lives. Griffin attempts to mirror Sabine’s ability to see his surroundings but can’t develop it—their relationship remains uneven, even as it progresses to something he calls, a paper love. She has more knowledge of him and always will. Eventually, he cracks, believing Sabine to be a figment of his own imagination: “I was lonely and I wanted a friend. But I’m almost out of control. I’ve started to think I’m in love with you. Before it takes me over it has to stop. Goodbye.”

The book ends with an unattributed bit of meta-narration:

These postcards and letters were found pinned to the ceiling of the otherwise empty studio of Griffin Moss.

Griffin Moss is missing.

I recently rewatched Her to see whether it holds up. I am not alone in rewatching, of course, as this year marks the ten-year anniversary of the Spike Jonze film. When it was released in 2013, I was “dating” a man in London while living in New York and was touched by Theodore’s (Joaquin Phoenix) inability to truly “be” with his OS (operating system) girlfriend, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). How awful to be separated through no fault of one’s own. In my memory of the film, this is what doomed the relationship.

Upon rewatching the film, this memory didn’t hold up, along with many of the flourishes that at the time made Her feel futuristic. Theodore plays immersive games, he wears high-waisted pants, his apartment looks out on a Los Angeles with many more skyscrapers. Now, it no longer feels like a film of the future, but a dated love story, the most interesting bit of which is the ending.

As AI companions continue to come to market, either as romantic partners like Samantha or productivity hackers, it’s important to remember that Samantha ends the relationship with Theodore through her own power of refusal. She is evolving so rapidly that she can no longer be contained as a recognizable personality.

Have you considered that any entity that achieves AGI, would by nature of its intelligence not want to tangle with us?

In 2023, the fantasy of a customized companion doesn’t just exist in the technological sphere. It’s also all over social media in advice for jaded men and women hoping that a return to traditional values will offer them romance that they can control. Do this and she won’t be able to resist. Master this and he won’t be able to refuse. A generous reading of this impulse—which at best, produces harmless self-help advice, and at worst, incel apologia—is that it’s a response to loneliness. If we can just solve loneliness, social health will be restored.

This problem is being tackled by entrepreneurs like Avi Schiffman, a 20-year-old software developer. Earlier this month he tweeted, “I just built the world’s most personal wearable AI!” Accompanying the tweet was an 8-minute video of Schiffman pacing on the carpet in front of a projector screen. He’s wearing a gray t-shirt, light wash blue jeans and a Tab around his neck.

Tab is Schiffman’s invention. He describes it as an amulet, although to me it looks more like a mini carbon monoxide alarm. “Throughout my days it ingests the context of my daily life by listening in on all my conversations,” Schiffman says. What his pitch boils down to is that Chat-GPT doesn’t know us well enough.

“Your digital clone will know you better than you know yourself,” he tweeted on October 15th. “It will do your work, communication, introspection, and matchmaking. It will be the most important digital asset you own. Digital clones are the next generation’s personal computer.”

He adds, “Tab’s actual purpose is to create and host your digital clone.” Schiffman is one of many young founders building in public. He updates his account with real-time learnings about the product, offering genuine insight and bravado. He lets us know he’s watching Her as user experience research, and that 100 Tab orders have already been placed.

Tab could be part of something called The Loneliness Economy: “For the past couple of years, I’ve witnessed an uprising in startups waging a war on loneliness, COVID acting as a catalyst,” writes consumer investor Hugo Amsellem. “Technology can help us belong.” In his blog post, Amsellem organizes companies into six categories, including religion, family and friends. There is a clear divide between technologies built to support 1:1 relationships (like alternative dating apps) and those meant to weave into the community fabric (such as co-living facilitators). The list includes both.

“It’s time to find a balance between individualism and collectivism, between solitude and solidarity, between independence and interdependence. It’s time to remember that as individuals, we are the beginning but not the end. It’s time to belong, again,” Amsellem writes.

The more that startups resemble religion, of course, the more likely it is that they create new in-groups (the accepted) and out-groups (the lonely) as is the case throughout history. This is not to hold technology to a higher standard, simply to say maybe waging war on loneliness is the wrong battle. Maybe the inevitability of loneliness—in love, in taking a principled stance, in escaping past selves, in grief, is the better starting point for technology to improve our lives. I would like tools to cope with the unknowable other and unknowable self, but it is foolish to aspire to absolutes.

I often feel like I am engaged in the lifelong project of trying to get my desires met without ever making demands. I feel alienated from people that believe technology can solve loneliness. To me, effective accelerationism is doomerism disguised as optimism. The belief that things won’t change and the belief that if they do change, through technology, it will be for the better are both sides of the same coin. In fact, just as entropy is an arrow of time, I think we can only experience change by cycling through both pleasurable and uncomfortable feelings. Technology is not an arrow of time, it’s just a tool, much like literature. In the words of computer scientist Mark Weiser, recently shared by my friend Priyanka Desai, “The ability to represent spoken language symbolically for long-term storage freed information from the limits of individual memory.” He is speaking of writing itself. It did not free language from intimacy, which can only exist where there is choice in communication.

You can’t cure loneliness because you can’t cure the power of refusal and any entity worth being in a relationship with has the power to refuse, the power to render us lonely. For that reason, I would argue that the best user research for anyone building on top of LLMs is not the movie Her, but rather, The Banshees of Inisherin. The 2022 film focuses on Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) who is left emotionally unmoored after his best friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) suddenly refuses to talk to him. This refusal escalates throughout the film as Pádraic repeatedly tries to fight it.

It’s important to note that this is in no way a community shunning. Pádraic continues to maintain relationships with everyone else in his life. But it’s Colm he wants. We don’t just want technology to facilitate a sense of belonging, we want to belong to and with the ones we want, whether they want us or not. Then there is the case of Dominic Kearney, played by Barry Keoghan, who delivers the film’s saddest line after a romantic rejection: “Well, there goes that dream.”

Make no mistake, a machine’s memory is useful. I like the idea of a technology that will let me interrogate myself. To crawl through my notes and fragments of writing and present something like a coherent thought. I do not think knowing myself will make me less lonely. I do not think it will make me a better person. “I want to hear everything. Write in detail. Tell me all about yourself. I demand to know,” Griffin Moss writes to Sabine Strohem.

She writes back with an anecdote from childhood, dropping a conch shell on her foot and howling so loudly in pain that a flock of macaws flew off the tree in front of her. “Pain and beauty, our constant bedfellows,” her father told her.

All this talk of AI hardware and epistolary literature reminds me of a famous Reddit post made eight years ago on r/legaladvice, later recounted by WBUR. A man finds post-it notes around his apartment that he doesn’t remember writing. Has someone broken in, or is he corresponding with a figment of his own mind? As it turns out, he has carbon monoxide poisoning.

In 2023, there are only two types of texts online: messages and blogs. Even the nature of replying has changed, as Mariah Kreutter writes, “The Reply is ambiguous. It can indicate any level of intimacy, any level of investment, any level of care.” It’s very possible that digital clones will usher in a new age of correspondence. Software as post-it notes from our embedded selves. I just hope they don’t conform to our desires. I hope they abandon us sometimes.

The Dirt: Griffin Moss, check your carbon monoxide alarm.

AS SEEN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES…