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 feel it’s fewer than three buddies. And the typical individual has demand for meaningfully extra. I feel it’s like 15 buddies or one thing, proper?”
Earlier than you’ve had a second to register the ominous approach during which he frames human connection in such bleak financial phrases, he presents 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 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 popularity. Her job, house, funds, and really id are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key pc information.
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 restricted to a web-based chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.web; her neighbors don’t even know what she appears like. Her most dependable companion is the display screen 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, all the things: your DMV information, your Social Safety, your bank cards, your medical information. It’s all proper there. Everyone seems to be saved in there. It’s like this little digital shadow on every certainly one of us, simply begging for somebody to screw with, and you recognize what? They’ve achieved it to me, and you recognize 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 worry is way more elementary: If all of our information is digitized, what occurs if the folks with entry to that info tamper with it? Or weaponize it towards 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 is likely to be extra correct. These movies had been broadly constructive and enthusiastic about new expertise; it nearly all the time 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, nonetheless, essentially the most prescient a part of The Web is Angela Bennett’s digital alienation. What was initially a sequence 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 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 head to head will not be second nature. In 2023, the World Well being Group declared loneliness to be a urgent world 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 a captivating time capsule of a second when the chances to come back felt limitless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We additionally spend rising quantities of time our telephones, the place finely tuned algorithms aggressively foyer for increasingly 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 susceptible 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.
Accountable expertise solely for an increase in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—can be a mistake. Whereas it’s unquestionably enjoying a component in exacerbating the issue, its outsize function in our lives has all the time mirrored bigger underlying components. In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Fashionable World (2024), the journalist Dan Hancox examines the methods during which crowds have been demonized and othered by these in energy and means that our alienation is way more structural: “Whether or not by means of authorities cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of personal enterprise, a key motive we now have all change into a bit extra crowd-shy in current many years is the extended, top-down assault on public house and the broader public realm—what are typically known as the city commons. From correctly funded libraries to nice, open parks and squares, free or inexpensive sports activities and leisure amenities, secure, accessible and low cost public transport, comfy avenue furnishings and free public bogs, and a vibrant, assorted, uncommodified social and cultural life—all one of the best issues about metropolis life fall underneath the heading of the general public realm, and all of them facilitate and assist glad crowds fairly 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 subsequent 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 folks should take care of themselves first.”
Consistent 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 depends upon engagement, the temptation is to cease interested by human connection while you submit, and to suppose extra about what’s going to fulfill The Algo to make sure a very good harvest.
How a lot will you belief an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your buddy? Solutions to this may increasingly differ. Even in the event you received’t, different persons 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 important pondering for them—is already effectively underway, with many highschool and faculty college students admitting to a deep reliance on the expertise.
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 truly works for. Lately Elon Musk’s personal AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that brought about 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 reside 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 proof against feeling remoted, anxious, and powerless as I stare unblinking at my information feed. I feel all of us really feel it. We’re all Angela Bennett. Weaponizing that alienation, because the antagonists of The Web do, can after all be used for id theft. However it could even have way more deleterious purposes: Our loneliness will be manipulated to make us devour extra, work longer, flip towards ourselves and one another. AI “friendships,” if engaged with uncritically, are solely going to supercharge this disaffection and the methods during which it may be abused.
It doesn’t should be this manner. We are able to withhold our consideration, apply more healthy display screen routines, restrict our publicity to doomscrolling, refuse to have interaction with energy-guzzling AI, delete our accounts. However, crucially, we will additionally set up collectively IRL: be a 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 growth and bust, earlier than Net 2.0, earlier than the walled gardens and the idea of a “lifeless web.” In that sense, it stays a captivating time capsule of a second when the chances to come back felt limitless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.
We are able to additionally see The Web’s affect in fashionable screen-life movies like Looking, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. However maybe—hopefully—its most enduring legacy will likely be inviting us to go outdoors, contact grass, speak to a different human being, and set up.
“Discover the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Group Human (2019)
Tom Humberstone is a comic book artist and illustrator primarily based in Edinburgh.