Tech oligarchs want AI friends for you, not them
The ruling class hoards human connection like they hoard everything else
It might be enjoyable to think about the sad end of Charles Foster Kane's life and his final desire for the simple pleasures of childhood—his rosebud. We also love tuning into successive seasons of HBO's White Lotus to revel in how miserable wealthy people seem to make themselves. In 2022 a trio of films were released showcasing the vapidity and many afflictions of the ruling class: Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, and Glass Onion.
We also love watching in real time as Elon Musk courts his eventual demise with the dissociatives he uses to avoid having to experience being himself.
But miserable fictional oligarchs like Kane and friendless real-life pieces of shit like Musk are probably more the exception than the rule. More likely, the lives of most people in the ruling class are wonderful. Their lives are probably full of authentic connection with other humans. With their ample leisure time and immense resources, most oligarchs can maintain many relationships and give their families every possible advantage.
In fact, a rich network of friends is essential to the reproduction of the ruling class. Harvard doesn't cost $82,000 a year for the quality of its instruction. The purpose of elite institutions is to reproduce the ruling class by providing a space where successive generations of elites meet and develop affinity for each other. Elite university eating clubs and fraternities are spaces to meet the people that will become business connections and then confederates in exploitation and extraction. Without these relationships, the ruling class could not maintain the conspiracy by which a small sliver of humanity rules over the great masses.
The atomized working class has no such need for a network of relationships to simply reproduce itself. Traditional institutions of community like the church, the neighborhood association, or the sports league may give the proletarian life meaning but they have been found to contribute nothing to production, so under late capitalism they have been jettisoned. The gig worker does not produce more because of their friend group. Your network is your net worth is the battlecry of strivers but with class mobility largely a thing of the past in advanced capitalist countries there is simply nothing to it for most workers.
What, then, is the value of narratives about the rise and fall of oligarchs, real or fictional? These narratives can help us understand that our goal as the workers is not to become oligarchs ourselves, as that path is no guarantee of happiness. Looking up at our social betters and judging them harshly can also demystify their power and galvanize us against them. But these stories about how the oligarchs' seemingly beautiful lives are actually shallow can also be an opiate. As Theodor Adorno observes of the cathartic in social artwork, "Catharsis is emancipatory and participates in the truth of the artwork to the extent that it articulates the claim that there ought to be reconciliation, that suffering ought to be redeemed. But catharsis then participates in the bad infinity of enlightenment when it claims that suffering is redeemed."
Recently Mark Zuckerberg publicly proposed that most people should have AI "friends," whatever that would mean. “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,” he says. The diagnosis is correct: Americans are lonely. But typical of Silicon Valley thought, Zuckerberg's goal is to monetize the symptom rather than address the root cause.
Building community takes time and energy. When would a member of the precariat have time to do so? Working hours in the US have remained more or less stagnant since the 1970s even while productivity has skyrocketed. Where would a typical American develop affinity with 15 friends? Membership in communal organizations is in a long-term decline. To the tech oligarch, a worker should spend all of their time working gig jobs to pay their unaffordable rent, with any remaining leisure time spent engaging with digital content and the corresponding ads. If the worker feels lonely between their 18th and 19th DoorDash delivery of the day, they can have a chat with an AI girlfriend.
This is not the future elites want for themselves. They will go on vacations with their real friends. Their class position will continue to depend on affinities developed through elite institutions. Their kids will have playdates with real friends, not AI friends. Like education, wealth, and housing, the property-owning class will hoard the experience of life itself. Capitalism will continue to create scarcity out of abundance until it is overcome.
But it does not have to be this way. Like every other kind of wealth, there is more than enough capacity for human connection for everyone. We can envision a world where the riches of our species are shared among all those who create them. In such a world we would have time for real friends; AIs need not apply.