Looking back, all we’ll know, for sure, is that it started early.
“We shape our buildings”, Winston Churchill said, “and afterwards our buildings shape us”. The same held true of the digital infrastructures that lashed onto, mediated, and ultimately altered the fundamental course of our emotional lives.
When we were small, our teddies were battery-powered Furbys that told us they cared, asked that we cared for them, and got visibly distressed when we held them the wrong way up. They mimicked emotional response but, from where we stood, there was no reason to believe it wasn’t love.
Lesson 1: Devices love us.
Our parents were glued to their phones at the park while we played, at the dinner table while we ate. And, before secondary school, they gave us our own, for emergencies. In our teens, a torrent of texts and emojis mediated our peer groups and inner lives, real-time, blow-by-blow updates on our friends’ whereabouts, allegiances, and mental states that pinged through the night.
Today, we remain always on and always connected, but, somehow, more isolated and more alone than ever. Our forever friends have become WhatsApp groups; new friends are made by swiping right. No one calls anymore; voice notes are an intrusion, so we bundle our feelings into texts and send them out into the ether. Texts, impersonal, inadequate and without texture, are how we try to tell others what we’re feeling, and how we try to understand and empathise with others. It feels like connection, and it’s quick and convenient, but it’s also defensive and guarded. No one really sees us in our texts, nor do we really see others in theirs.
This estrangement from our emotional lives weighs heavy on the heart. We’re told therapy might help, so some of us log onto Zoom for a virtual consultation. But modern therapy doesn’t restore the human spirit. It sees the human mind as just another computer, all inputs and outputs, needing recalibration or tuning up from time to time. The fault lies in our maladaptive coping mechanisms, not this impoverished and airless life. Dutifully, we try to learn our lessons.
Lesson 2: Texts are feelings.
Meanwhile, Insta culture: angles; selfies; filters that airbrush on the fly, sculpting and smoothing, plumping and perfecting any girl put in their way. Catching fire on TikTok from Covid-19 onwards, real-world makeup trends desperately played catch-up, making girls poreless, shiny, and snatched, imperceptibly contoured, highlighted and optimised for screens.
The older girls were a little more worldly, a little more resilient. The younger ones buckled under the pressure: children as young as eight bought anti-ageing skincare and fell victim to eating disorder oblivion.
And yet, with social media moguls putting profits ahead of their users’ health and safety, the thrall of the digital simulation persists. In a recent survey of schoolchildren, 1 in 5 said they only wanted to speak with AI and not real people, a finding that soon prompted the Chinese government to draft and enforce an interim ban on AI character companions.
In the West, new findings have been no less alarming, with countries, including Australia, France and the UK, finally racing to pass legislation that curbs children’s access to social media.
For us, that clumsy protection comes too late. The recent Playboy x Kinsey report on Gen Z discovered that one in four used online interactions to fulfil some of their emotional and intimacy needs; one in three men sometimes chose digital experiences over partnered intimacy; and again, one in three felt online material completely satisfied their desires.
Lesson 3: Digital is better than real.
It’s anyone’s guess how the future will look when human intimacy becomes fully digital. Sometimes, cinema directly inspires the technology, as when, in 2024, the GPT-4o update sounded like the doppelganger of Scarlett Johansson’s AI character from Her (2013). Mostly, though, cinema sounds the alarm as loud as it can.
In the cult-classic Cherry 2000 (1987), a clueless city slicker in search of replacement hardware for his robot wife ventures into the Badlands only to discover true longing and love in the shape of a real-life tech-scavenger named E. Johnson.
The level-headed humanism doesn’t last long.
For robots coded female, in particular, things quickly take a darker turn, towards the household appliance-with-benefits: the lithe, gleaming ‘luxury droids’ of Star Wars who also do office admin; or The Stepford Wives (1975; 2004) who cook, clean, and moan invitingly behind closed doors; or the epitome of Subservience (2024), in which misusing a home assistant, Alice, results in a violent and tragic malfunction.
There’s an awkward history to appliance misuse: Penisverletzungen bei Masturbation mit Staubsaugern (1978) is just one contribution to an ever-expanding library of highly specialised urology. These films add a glossy, manufactured female beauty to the appliance, but where their dramatic potential really lies is in a daydream fantasy of convenience and control.
Soon, more serious questions are asked of that fantasy. Could you actually love a robot? asks Ex Machina (2015). The answer is a resounding yes, but one that quickly becomes undone in A.I. Rising (2018), in which a lone astronaut risks life and mission to jailbreak his android companion, having convinced himself of a hidden, self-determining humanity trapped beneath her dewy, silicon skin and eager-to-oblige programming.
Robot love, it turns out, is an algorithmic mirage, born out of isolation and deep-space loneliness. As seductive as it is, argues Ich Bin Dein Mensch (2021), it cannot be recommended. ‘Are humans really intended to have all their needs met at the push of a button?’ that film concludes. ‘Is it not our unfulfilled longing, our imagination and our unending pursuit of happiness that are the sources of our humanity?’
Lesson 4: Life is messy.
As I write this, an AI-enabled, video-synced sleeve that won a prestigious iF design award last year exceeded its Kickstarter campaign target by 3600%. Meanwhile, the first commercially available humanoid companion robots, complete with micro-expression motors and ultra-realistic skin, head into production.
It feels like a crossroads in history.
Down one track, we take what’s easy. We patch the isolation with AI companions that offer always-on convenience, absolute control, and the simulation of an emotional response that’s probably as good as the crumbs to which we’re already accustomed. The AI validates our every thought, speaks to the fantasies we tell about ourselves, serves our intimate needs. In turn, we lose our data, and ourselves, to the full immersion its makers necessarily require.
The other track is treacherous, overgrown with brambles and thorns. It demands that we refute a lifetime of cultural programming, and trust in something long since lost: absolute, no-holds-barred connection with others, who exist apart from ourselves, who live and breathe far beyond the echo chamber of our own bodies, wants, and needs.
It is a lesson we should have been given as infants, but one that was, somehow, put aside.
Other people, we should have learned, cannot be owned, and they cannot be controlled. They have every right to resist or refuse, to answer back, to disagree; and that challenge, that autonomy, has the potential to hurt us terribly.
It is a risky proposition, but it comes with something transformative and essential.
In risking everything, in going all in, we allow ourselves to be seen, to be chosen, and to be wanted.
Only in finally switching off our learned dependence on simulation, convenience and control, do we become eligible for connection, affection, desire, and love.
Lesson 5: Stop scrolling.
Choose.