Can you be my friend.com

Harry on the loneliness epidemic epidemic

This week Wired released a profile about entrepreneur Avi Schiffman and his new wearable AI product “Friend.” On the same day, Schiffman tweeted out a product trailer, which you can find here. 

Ok blah blah AI friendship is weird but blind techno pessimism is anti-intellectual, how on earth is Good Hang going to thread that needle?! 

I (may) get to that, but I need to start with this insane, borderline cosmic anecdote from the Wired profile. 

Boone Ashworth writes this about Schiffman:

“The feeling came to a head in January this year, as he traveled through Japan and found himself alone in a skyrise hotel in Tokyo, talking at his AI prototype that was supposed to do so much for him. He was going through a lonely spell and wanted somebody to talk to. Why couldn’t the AI assistant just do that?”

🚨This is the exact plot of Sophia Coppola’s movie about loneliness and love Lost in Translation🚨

Fine. Weird that Sofia Coppola made a movie about being lonely and this guy made a talking bolo tie but whatever. There actually more. Coppola’s partial inspiration for the LIT script was the dissolution of her marriage with director Spike Jonze. What’s crazier is that Jonze returned the favor years later, loosely depicting the dissolution of the marriage from his perspective. What sends this into a complete simulation collapsing Danger Zone is the movie Jonze made loosely about Coppola is called “HER” and is literally about a human X Ai companionship. ??!?!?! 

That is all SO crazy. I need Coppola, Jonze and Schiffman on the A24 podcast Pronto!!! 

Now to the topic of the actual service, a wearable pendant that purports to offer companionship. The knee-jerk bad faith interpretation is both vicious and simple.

I’ll briefly outline the case for why it sucks: 

1. Computers are not our friends and will not replace some ineffable human-quality 

2. A for-profit venture-backed company does not have my best interest in mind from a friendship perspective lol

3. The privacy issues of hanging an Amazon Alexa from your neck are immense

4. Insanely swagless

5. This meme

6. this great KRAZAM Sketch

But let me try to move past my knee-jerk hater mode. Welcome to :

So ok what does a good faith reading of Friend.com look like?

I think it starts with the idea that isolating some kind of Friendship support simulacrum is not Brand New. In my initial internal tirade against Friend.com, I found myself outraged at the notion that someone would dare simulate something as sacred as friendship. But there are elements of friendship simulation that already exist.

I listen to podcasts that make me feel a part of a community even though the hosts I listen to have no idea who I am. I’ve gone to therapy where a trained professional has intuited that what I need in that moment is ‘a friend’ and has contorted themselves as such. I’ve done cognitive behavioral therapy worksheets that put me through the literal exercise of hypothesizing what a friend would say to me in this position. I take Effexor every day, a pill made in a lab by a cabal of greedy pharmaceutical freaks, and it’s basically saved my life. This is all broadly ‘modern tech’. So who am I to turn my nose up at Friend.com because its attempting to take the next technological step? 

Unfortunately for Mr. Schiffman, my good faith ends there. And I broadly think this whole project is misguided. HOWEVER, I don’t see Schiffman or Friend.com as this uniquely sinister force. Rather a symptom of a drift in the way we’ve started collectively talking about “loneliness.” 

The Lonliness Epedemic Epedemic

A few years ago I started to hear people talking about Loneliness as a discrete topic. I was in my early to mid 20s struggling with maintaining a sense of closeness to my friends. A global pandemic didn’t help. So it was validating to learn about the dissolution of 3rd spaces, the so-called loneliness epidemic, and the possible theories and solutions people had about what we can and should do about it. I’d never thought so directly about notions of ‘closeness’ and ‘community’.

Recently though, I fear that this type of discrete, almost medical diction, we’re using to talk about loneliness is failing us. Loneliness (in some circles) is now talked about as a categorizable symptom, a fully self-contained Thing. That’s not really how it feels when you’re lonely through right? I guess maybe there’s a line between thinking of loneliness as something that can be noticed and interrogated, and loneliness as something that can be isolated and solved for…and the latter zone doesn’t sit right with me. And that last part ‘solved for’ typically is short for ‘solved for by the amazingly helpful and human free market economy’….

Are we undertaking the project of breaking down big giant ideas like ‘i feel weird and alone sometimes’ or ‘Why does life feel like its passing me by’ into smaller more manageable ideas because that’s a helpful framework to think about them or because its a helpful market framework to sell weird little solutions like fuckin headspace and better help and Hims dick pills?

Is friend.com a useful tool that could help people in some nebulous way? Possibly! There is a very fair interpretation of Schiffman as a young optimistic kid trying to solve a very real, albeit hard to grasp problem of loneliness. And I’m not even necessarily making an overarching argument that ‘the free market’ corrupts and ruins everything, but what I am saying is it seems like there’s a certain intractable uneasiness we all feel about being alive, and that flits between feelings of loneliness and feelings over being totally overwhelmed and feeling nothing and feeling scared and none of those things present in the same way each individual time we feel them, and the great trick friend.com and its ilk is attempting to do pull these flitting feelings, fully isolate them, and efficiently sell us back Solutions. This type of market siloing works wonders when selling SaaS, but i think when dealing with the human condition…making a movie about your ex-husband works better.