Life Strömquist addresses in his incendiary comic I don’t feel anything (Reservoir Books, total bestseller) the pseudo-emotional loop in which 21st century society seems trapped. As soon as you start the book, it alludes to the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chhauthor of the no less best-selling The Fatigue Society. The German-based thinker says that you cannot love others if you strip them of their otherness; In this case, it can only be consumed, as if one placed an order on Amazon subject to the right of return. “My search for love,” says Strömquist, “is not about me seeing another, but about others liking me to reaffirm my value as a person.”
A few pages later, the Swedish cartoonist rescues another reflection from the Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouzwho contrasts two ways of finding a partner, the intuitive one, based more on a hunch than on reliable information, and the rational one, when different candidates end up stuffed into a mental Excel where the screener lists advantages and disadvantages. The danger of this second way, corroborates the Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizekis reflected with disturbing clarity in contact applications. “When in these apps we can define certain criteria and desires in advance, we turn our backs on the old romantic vision of love as synonymous with an unexpected fall (falling in love in English; fall in love in French), which somehow makes us return to a kind of marriage of convenience,” Strömquist adds.
The radius of action of that rationally distilled link is amplified with the reign of the algorithm. The individual has become so narcissistic, so empathetically ungovernable, that he now resorts daily to great language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini o Perplexity to vent, reaffirm and dig a little deeper into yourself. The AI, programmed to be friendly and assertive, fosters – like pets that don’t gossip – a kind of romantic relationship that the owners of these softwares have had to qualify: no, they repeat over and over again, the chatbots They can’t be your lover.
Just a few days ago, Will Douglas Heaven, journalist for the MIT Technology Reviewinterviewed the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman. Suleyman’s position, the editor warns in the preface, moves on the wire of an impossible balance. Trying to compete with the rest of the technological giants in the AI race seems incompatible with deflating the “apparently human” behaviors of those agents to whom society quickly becomes attached.
One of the most interesting passages of the conversation occurs when Douglas Heaven refers to certain proposals of Grok (Elon Musk) and OpenAI (Sam Altman) where AI assumes a role close to flirting, an observation that once again reveals the deep contradictions of the Silicon Valley popes, capable of promising one thing and the opposite in less than a week. “We will never design sex robots. That is not our mission as a company,” Suleyman hastily concludes, without taking into account his own words, formulated a few paragraphs earlier. The frontier of AI, the manager says, must be drawn like this: the purpose is to serve humanity, not supplant it. But isn’t the sex robot a product, just like a dildo or a vibrating ring? Or does Byung-Chul Han’s narcissistic society actually prefer this substitution of meat for latex?