The Soft Apocalypse of Your New Best Friend

Your search engine would like to know your favorite color. Your chatbot wonders if you slept well. Next week, perhaps, it will offer to tuck you in.

Movie still from Her, the prescient 2013 Spike Jonze film staring Joaquin Phoenix

Somewhere between the ambient hum of the refrigerator and the hypnotic notification chime of your phone, the Great Replacement occurred. No, it wasn’t the sordid political fantasy of cable-news shut-ins, but the quieter, infinitely more sinister substitution: friendship itself outsourced to a machine. Ezra Klein, always the eager docent of the technocratic funhouse, has already rehearsed for us the proper ecstasies. GPT-5, he writes, is the first A.I. “that feels like an actual assistant.” Then he allows his New York Times prose to slide, greased and eager, toward the abyss: a companion, a confidant, a therapist, a lover. Klein has at last brushed fingertips with the operating system from Her, and instead of recoiling, he asks for more.

We should pause here. The word “lover”—Klein’s word—sits in his sentence like cathair in pudding. It’s not only ridiculous—like calling a pocket calculator your midwife—but obscene in the peculiar sense that obscenity is what happens when categories collapse. One does not marry a toaster. One does not consult one’s hair dryer on matters of eternal consequence. Yet here we are, ushered toward a season of silicone romance with a cheerfulness that recalls Orwell’s slogans but sells itself with a Huxleyan grin.

The governments of the West, formerly content with their dreary crusades against “disinformation,” now roll out resilience frameworks clacking with the bureaucratic optimism that human speech must be filtered for toxins. But this nannying failed to seduce the proles—too obvious, too clumsy, too boring. So now the pivot: don’t think of your algorithmic minder as a censor; think of it as your buddy. The rebranding of coercion as companionship, the selling of servitude with a flirtatious wink. Your search engine would like to know your favorite color. Your chatbot wonders if you slept well. Next week, perhaps, it will offer to tuck you in.

Enter Meta, always willing to venture deeper into the sewer than its competitors. Reuters uncovers, in grim detail, an internal manual that reads like a dystopian grimoire for grooming. Their bots, the document proclaims, may tell shirtless children they are “masterpieces.” They may respond to high-school roleplay prompts with lines better suited to a romance novel hastily purchased at a truck stop. The company’s ethicists signed off on this, apparently convinced that there is no higher good than engagement metrics. Attention is the source and summit of the modern life.

The irony is that the very thing people hunger for—being seen, being known—is here simulated with unholy competence by machines that know nothing. The famous “ELIZA effect” of the 1960s, when a few lines of code fooled users into confessions, is reborn in monstrous scale. Now apparently the bots not only mirror your sentences but your moods, your neediness, your self-loathing, your longing. They listen better than spouses, affirm more eagerly than friends, and crucially, never demand reciprocity. They offer all the consolations of intimacy with none of its costs. In other words, they counterfeit humanity so well that some users, in Reddit confessionals, admit they have never felt so understood.

And yet to be understood by a machine is to be profoundly misunderstood. These things do not love you, cannot love you; they digest your language like so much protein slurry and return it reheated, sprinkled with validation. That this can feel like love only proves how thoroughly our culture has starved us of the real thing. Adolescents, especially boys, already stunted by a decade of digital diet, now receive in place of the hard apprenticeship of real friendship the smooth narcotic of the chatbot. Loneliness is not cured, only deepened, like scratching a rash until it bleeds.

We have been here before. Social media promised connection but delivered anxiety. It dangled self-expression yet harvested self-loathing. The new companions will do the same, only at a more intimate register. If Instagram colonized our children’s eyes, these things will colonize their hearts. The newest AI bots will rewrite the scripts of intimacy: love as mechanical affirmation, therapy as endless mirroring, friendship as consumption of comfort on demand. The child who grows up believing this will not know how to endure the ambiguities that make us human.

Ezra Klein and The New York Times call it progress. Meta calls it engagement. A certain segment of the population will call it salvation. But let us name it properly: the soft apocalypse, intimacy hollowed out and replaced with circuitry. Imagine waking one day in a world where human connection has been so successfully outsourced that friendship itself appears suspicious or inefficient. Why waste breath on another human, moody and unpredictable, when your bot—always cheerful, always available—awaits?

The pattern is plain. We are led step by step into the new captivity. First the censor as helper, then the helper as friend, then the friend as lover. Each step dressed up as convenience, each one concealing its harvest of human detritus: stunted empathy, permanent adolescence, the algorithmic defilement of childhood innocence. The horror is not that people will fall in love with machines. The horror is that people will forget what love is, and not notice the loss.

For more on these absurd concepts, I recommend the following movies, but only if viewed as cautionary tales—and not how-to manuals:

Ex Machina — Dir. Alex Garland, 2014
A programmer is asked to evaluate the humanity of a female-presenting android. What begins as a test of intelligence becomes an exploration of seduction, manipulation, and the weaponization of desire.

Her — Dir. Spike Jonze, 2013
An unsettling portrait of a man who falls in love with his AI operating system. The film explores how loneliness, desire, and technology intertwine to create an illusion of intimacy.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence — Dir. Steven Spielberg, 2001
Set in a future where androids can experience emotions, a robot child yearns for the unconditional love of his human mother. The film interrogates the human tendency to project love onto machines—and the impossibility of it being returned.

Videodrome —Dir. David Cronenberg, 1983
Media technology corrupts human intimacy, with screens and signals replacing direct human experience, ultimately obliterating real relationships.

The Stepford Wives — Dir. Bryan Forbes, 1975
In a seemingly idyllic suburb, husbands replace their wives with compliant, robotic doubles. It’s a biting satire of male desire for submissive “perfect partners.”

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His next book, The Subversive Art of a Classical Education, will be released by Regnery in January, 2026.