Zuckerberg's OnlyFans for Friendship Future
I want live human friends thank you very much
This week Mark Zuckerberg opined on the loneliness epidemic:
“The average American has fewer than three friends,” he said. “The average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends or something.”
His solution? AI friends! Fake friends!
The world will adjust to the demand for AI friends, he said, and we will “find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are doing these things, why they are rational for doing it and how it is adding value for their lives.”
I had to laugh.
It reminded me of some of the early pushback I got when we started working on Maxwell during the pandemic — I had techies assert that IRL interaction was over. Virtual event companies like Hopin raised at billion dollar valuations, sure that group conference calls were going to replace IRL events, only to implode a couple years later.
It all struck me as so absurd, and the type of tone-deaf reasoning that lends credence to the out-of-touch tech guy stereotype.
Now giving Zuckerberg a little benefit of the doubt he did go on to say the following about the value of IRL:
“There’s a lot of questions that people ask of stuff, like, ‘Okay, is this going to replace in-person connections or real life connections?’” he continued. “My default is that the answer to that is probably no. I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections, when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don’t have the connections and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”
Zuckerberg is directionally right that people DO have very few friends, but the solution isn’t fake friends anymore than porn is a solution for romantic relationships or cocaine is a solution for true happiness.
And what Zuckerberg is talking about something even more noxious than porn.
It’s OnlyFans.
OnlyFans for Friendship
What I find most depressing about OnlyFans is not the porn part of it, it’s the fake intimacy. Users regularly tip the stars they subscribe to and pay a premium to be in chats, to get happy birthday messages and more.
To feel a connection.
It’s a pitiful imitation of the intimacy that you would have gotten from a real romantic relationship packaged up for you. At least with traditional porn no one is fooling themselves, but OnlyFans has broken the 4th wall and by engaging with the audience, enabled the most vulnerable among us to dive deeper into our romantic delusions.
“The Stripper ACTUALLY likes me I swear”-as-a-service.
Zuckerberg’s vision would do the same for non-romantic relationships.
I’ve never been a hater of Facebook/Instagram or social media in general — I think they can be wonderful tools to stay connected to friends, discover beauty and humor in the world, and a lot of criticism leveled at them is better leveled at humanity as a whole — Reddit did not create the shitheads that started a crusade against a TikTok Cancer survivor.
We have a tendency to blame our worst impulses on external enablers instead of recognizing the dark underbelly of humanity that periodically comes out regardless of whatever technology is available at the time.
But I believe there is a line between enabling more connection, which I think social media largely has done, and faking connection.
In the same way that we understand that drug inspired dopamine hits are not the pathway to long term happiness, or wanking it to a cam girl/guy isn’t a pathway to romantic fulfillment, we need to understand that AI friends won’t be a substitute for real friendship,.
It’s just community masturbation.
If you don’t want to live in a world where an AI friend is psychologically jacking you off feel free to apply for our Summer cohort!
David & The Maxwell Team