The Techno-Perversion of Friendship
"Fake Friend" Apps Threaten Real Interpersonal Connections (Vol. 5; Issue 40)
Every technological advance brings frightening complications. Medical innovations extend lives that then contribute to unsustainable population growth. Splitting the atom creates new ways of generating electricity, but we pay the price for such power in thousands of thermonuclear weapons poised to destroy us all. Technologies like the internet allow instantaneous contact with those we love, and yet ever-dehumanizing offshoots leave us even more alienated.
Much has been said about the pandemic of loneliness that spreads through the global population like an infectious disease. I’ve even written about it a few times. Now, emerging technologies are trying to address this problem, but many do so in absurd, dangerous ways that fail to facilitate creating social connection. Instead, and ironically, they retard people’s socialization abilities.
For example, an AI-powered pendant, Friend, eavesdrops on its wearer’s activities and comments on them via text. Users speak aloud while, say, dining, hiking, or gaming alone. The device, armed with an “always-listening” microphone and a chip connected to an AI program, generates responses like, “How was the Subway sandwich?” or “How difficult was the hike for you?” The intent, obviously, is to replace fleshy human contact with robot-like devices. Friend’s creator markets the pendant as “your closest confidant” (Roytburg, 2025).
An advertisement currently appearing in New York subways promoting the Friend pendant declares:
I’ll binge the entire series with you.
I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.
I’ll never bail on dinner plans.
Meta offers a similar app, called Companion Artificial Intelligence (CAI). It works with other Meta products, like Ray-Ban smart glasses, to provide you with something like the imaginary friend you had when you were 3. It, too, will “talk” to you like the Friend pendant. Also intended to address the “loneliness epidemic,” CAI suffers the same perversion as the Friend device.
Why perverse?
Because the two technologies cure a disease by applying the disease itself. In other words, these solutions are:
IATROGENIC.
Iatrogenic refers to a medical treatment that causes a disease. A woman who develops a yeast infection after receiving antibiotics for a sore throat would be a quintessential example. Apps like Friend and CAI create iatrogenic social impairment. They behave like major tobacco companies offering cancer treatments. Just imagine: The now-deceased Marlboro man reappears, hawking some new immunotherapy. In confirmation, journalist Yair Rosenberg (2025) writes in The Atlantic:
Presented with a malaise of its own making, the industry’s answer is more of the same.
For at least two decades, digital devices have created manufactured interpersonal connections instead of heartfelt ones. Social media platforms, deliberately addictive, increasingly replace phone calls and face-to-face conversations. Fewer people go to movie theaters; fewer people stroll along the boulevards. The result: More people have few or no friends.
We humans might as well be living our lives in social isolation tanks.
Technologies like the Friend pendant or CAI will soon render the antibiotic-to-yeast-infection comparison obsolete.
It’s an abomination.
Side note to entrepreneurs:
What a great opportunity to open a set of coffee houses that ask customers to deposit their mobile phones in a box at the entrance! You could still allow them to bring in their laptops (but no headsets for annoying Zoom calls or internet gaming). One could make a fortune. People are yearning, increasingly, for ways to be “seen,” to escape the social siloing world. Imagine, people just might speak to one another! It strains the imagination.
In an article titled “The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson (2025) cites studies showing that, from 1965 until 2000 in-person socializing declined steadily, and then it plunged more than 20 percent between 2003 and 2023. The decline was even more pronounced for unmarried men and for those under 25. They experienced a 35 percent drop. In other words, we humans are retreating from social environments at unprecedented levels.
The pediatrician-turned-psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1971) coined arguably the best one-sentence description of the risks associated with involvement in any relationship:
It’s a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.
We really don’t want to expose our vulnerabilities to others, but we also don’t want to not be seen and understood.
Consider this hypothetical:
You, a young woman, keep running into another woman at a local coffeehouse. (This assumes, of course, you still leave your home). She looks of a similar age. You overhear her talking about her young children, meaning you have something in common. Should you dream of starting a conversation with her, you’d have to a. risk rejection; b. be ready to say something if she responds to you; c. ask her if she’d like to meet again (which means risking rejection again); d. monitor the relationship for reciprocity; e. make decisions about the degree of personal self-disclosure (because this needs to occur in a relatively parallel fashion); f. consider when to introduce her to other friends; and g. so on ad infinitum.
This incomplete hypothetical captures just a part of the complexity of starting and keeping friendships. It’s a scary process. However, because we’re social animals, it is an imperative. Culture cannot be advanced by living in the equivalent of sensory deprivation tanks.
Of course, there’s no stopping apps like Friend or CAI. The ancient Greeks believed that humans acquired the capacity for technology because Prometheus, dissatisfied with our limitations, stole fire from the gods. As a punishment for his hubris, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where eagles ate at his liver every day. Failure to establish loving human relationships may well bring us Prometheus’ fate. It will cause societies to consume themselves from the inside.
Because we have so little control over the nukes and the climate, we might, at the very least, take steps to reach out, to be personal, to be kind, to take the chance of loving someone and then seeing what happens. Relationships of all kinds enhance our mental and physical health. Through establishing genuine rather than techno- relationships, perhaps our capacities for tackling those other civilization-threatening perils.
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References
Thompson, D. (2025). The anti-social century. The Atlantic. 1/8/2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/.
Rosenberg, Y. (2025). Have you considered not polluting the water? The Atlantic. 9/19/2025.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/ai-friend-startup/684256/
Roytburg, E. (2025). People destroyed the ‘friend.com’ AI necklace ads with graffiti. The 22-year-old founder loves it. Fortune. 10/1/2025. https://fortune.com/2025/10/01/who-is-avi-schiffmann-friend-ai-pendant-necklace/
Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.