We are reaching an inflection point when it comes to how “inward” we continue to turn in every facet of our lives. We are all becoming increasingly more lonely, afraid of conflict, afraid of silence, vulnerability, commitment, communication – the list goes on. Of course, social media and the ease of information is to blame. I don’t ask a neighbor for butter because I can order it on instacart. I don’t go to a local trans support group because I think reddit is enough. I don’t have a relationship with my grocery store cashier because check out is automated and I don’t have a relationship with a physical trainer because my fitness trainer is an AI-powered app, I don’t ask my friends or family for advice, because I ask ChatGPT. I think I have friends, until I have no idea who to go to the movies with on a random Saturday, so I stay where I think my friends are – online, in the house, potentially not even real, but are AI in an app.

Social media– and increasingly AI– is turning us so inward that we don’t trust nor can we handle human connection. So what happens when the platforms we already go to get farther away from reality? When it’s not even humans, let alone our friends, that we see on the platforms anymore, but AI-generated content and AI influencers? Knowing exactly what to show you and when, to keep you on the platform, longing for more… empty, isolated, hungry inwardness. What happens when we get our coffee from robot baristas and order robot taxis and have robot romances and therapists, etc? What happens when AI knows us better than we know ourselves? And when we, on some level, know this truth, and trust this truth, when we’re sold AI’s “understanding” of us as some magic trick that’s supposed to be in our best interest, what happens then? What happens when we begin to see every problem in our lives as something that can be solved with more products, more apps, more AI over real connections?

This is what I am trying to say: Tech companies, and specifically AI, will succeed in making life so convenient that we will no longer desire, trust, or instinctively think to rely on anyone for anything. Any and every problem will be solved with digital products or “digital solutions” and the click of a button, even as we descend into socio-economic, climate-accelerated peril. But hey, at least, we’ll be able to order literally anything we’ll have been consciously and subconsciously marketed to believe will assuage our anxieties in a free two-hour delivery window with a minimum purchase of $25 or more. Sweet convenience will keep us in our place. In fact, we will be so consumed with our identities as consumers, that we won’t even stop to question if convenience should be the number one measure of satisfaction, quality or fulfillment.

So we’ll be trapped in this hole, this cycle, of deep, deep emptiness that we will maybe, on some subconscious level, will know requires real, human, physical connection. But we won’t know how to do that anymore and will be unable to imagine that anymore, in the same way that we can imagine the of the world before we can imagine the end of capitalism, keeping us trying to solve the problem, with the problem: a crippling, blinding, disabling reliance on AI and technology.

And as for the people who make these products? The tech billionaires who see themselves as kings and gods who give us what we think we want or need as consumers while funding PACs that strip away our rights and protections as individuals? Well, though we may know their names, we’ll never really think about them, boycott their platforms and technology or investigate beyond a headline that takes ten seconds or less to read. Because we will be so reliant, we’ll all rather turn a blind eye than face our complicity, our upkeep, our participation, in our own demise.

— Van Newman

Jeanette Winterson • 12 Bytes