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 common American has—I believe it’s fewer than three buddies. And the common individual has demand for meaningfully extra. I believe it’s like 15 buddies or one thing, proper?”
Earlier than you’ve had a second to register the ominous manner through which he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he provides his resolution to the loneliness epidemic: AI buddies. Ideally AI buddies his firm generates.
“It’s like I’m not even me anymore.”
—Angela Bennett, The Web (1995)
Thirty years in the past, Irwin Winkler’s proto–cyber thriller, The Web, was launched. It was 1995, generally considered the yr Hollywood found the web. Sandra Bullock performed a social recluse and laptop nerd for rent named Angela Bennett, who unwittingly uncovers a sinister laptop safety conspiracy. She quickly finds her life turned the wrong way up because the conspiracists start systematically destroying her credibility and repute. Her job, house, funds, and really id are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key laptop data.
Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, maybe—effectively positioned for this id annihilation. Her mom, within the throes of dementia, now not acknowledges her; she works from house for purchasers who’ve by no means met her; her social circle is proscribed to a web based chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.web; her neighbors don’t even know what she appears to be like like. Her most dependable companion is the display in entrance of her. A wild, unimaginable state of affairs that I’m certain none of us can relate to.
“Simply give it some thought. Our complete world is sitting there on a pc. It’s within the laptop, all the things: 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 realize what? They’ve accomplished it to me, and you realize what? They’re gonna do it to you.”
—Angela Bennett, The Web
Whereas the villain of The Web is in the end a nefarious cybersecurity software program firm, the movie’s preoccupying concern is way more elementary: If all of our knowledge is digitized, what occurs if the individuals with entry to that info tamper with it? Or weaponize it in opposition to 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 is likely to be extra correct. These movies had 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 larger 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, nonetheless, probably the most prescient a part of The Web is Angela Bennett’s digital alienation. What was initially a collection of believable sufficient contrivances to make the theft of her id 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 era of younger individuals who lived by way of that, socializing head to head will not be 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 Web 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 probabilities to come back felt countless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend growing quantities of time 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, and so they 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.
In charge 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 function 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 through 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 have now all grow to be a bit extra crowd-shy in latest a long time is the extended, top-down assault on public house 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 amenities, protected, accessible and low cost public transport, snug avenue furnishings and free public bogs, and a vibrant, diversified, 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 glad crowds reasonably than unhappy, alienated, stay-at-home loners.”
Almost half a century in the past Margaret Thatcher laid out the neoliberal consensus that might body the subsequent a long time 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 individuals, and folks 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 will depend on engagement, the temptation is to cease excited about human connection while you submit, and to assume extra about what’s going to fulfill The Algo to make sure a superb harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your buddy? Solutions to this will differ. Even when you 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 essential considering for them—is already effectively underway, with many highschool and faculty college students admitting to a deep reliance on the know-how.
Past the apparent concern that AI “buddies” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that can by no means problem you in the best way an actual buddy may, it’s additionally value 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 forged doubt on the Holocaust and speak about “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we would have liked it, that these techniques 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 companion and have a good neighborhood of buddies. However I work at home and might spend the vast majority 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 Web do, can in fact be used for id theft. However it will possibly even have way more deleterious purposes: Our loneliness may 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 through which it may be abused.
It doesn’t must be this manner. We are able to withhold our consideration, apply 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 set up collectively IRL: be part of a union or an area membership, ask our buddies if they should speak. Hopelessness is what these in energy need us to really feel, so resist it.
The Web 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 Internet 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the speculation of a “lifeless web.” In that sense, it stays an enchanting time capsule of a second when the probabilities to come back felt countless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We are able to additionally see The Web’s affect in fashionable screen-life movies like Looking out, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy can be inviting us to go exterior, contact grass, speak to a different human being, and set up.
“Discover the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Crew Human (2019)
Tom Humberstone is a comic book artist and illustrator based mostly in Edinburgh.
