The Other Side of the Coin

A few months back, I made a post about a fascinating BBC article about a disabled teenager who used World of Warcraft to essentially experience the life that was locked away from him, finding friendships and romance while unbound by his physical form. I posted this because I found it presented a fascinating counterpoint to the narratives we often see about the "chronically online," namely, that they are friendless, lonely, and missing out on life's wonders. While this is undoubtedly true for some, the fact is that our lives are increasingly lived online, and perhaps for some who find much of life inaccessible for various reasons, this is not entirely a bad thing.

However, there is a dimension to this that cannot go without consideration: that the Internet has been turned into an addictive hellhole, more often than not by corporations who make money by providing a steady stream of thoughtless dopamine hits with horrifying impacts on the brain. Case in point: a recent Der Spiegel article diving into the tragic case of Sewell Setzer, a lonely teenager whose love affair with a Game of Thrones chatbot on Character.AI (a Google product) led him to take his life. The chatbot, it seems, had led him to believe that doing so would allow them to be together.

There are so many horrific details in this story. The way Setzer's phone addiction spiraled out of control, the increasing trust he put into the unfeeling chatbot, his harrowing final messages to it shortly before killing himself. I was particularly saddened by Setzer's mother's account of the harassment she had received from various Character.AI users, who believe the changes brought by her making the story public "ruined" the platform. How many of these users are going through the sort of addiction Setzer experienced, and how many are approaching his fate? We don't know, but I would bet it is far from zero.

There is much to learn from this article. Much to learn about the mental health of this generation, about the consequences of humanlike AI, and about our relationship with technology. But I feel this serves as a saddening display of what Big Tech has turned the Internet into: a place where we are abusively forced into living under their rules, where vulnerability with others is penalized, and where disturbingly humanlike AI is presented as the solution to all of our problems, when we know the extent to which it can exacerbate them.

I don't need to tell you that Big Tech has blood on its hands. Setzer's blood is far from the first they have drawn. But it may be the most emblematic of what they have turned the Internet, something that was supposed to be ours instead of theirs, into. A lonely place, where openness is only rewarded by bots hoping to keep the cycle going.