I am glad more and more people are talking about this. I am dedicating my life to build technology that empowers us to grow and return to human connection. 🤲🏻🤲🏻🤲🏻
@Sasha Fegan and @Center for Humane Technology , you’re right. This is the logical next extraction. The attention economy captured focus. The attachment economy captures presence itself.
I've been tracking this through a somatic lens: the nervous system's colonization by systems that profit from its dysregulation. The attention economy already operates as a mass traumatization system, inducing defensive narrowing at population scale. But attention was only the surface. Attachment reaches deeper. The capacity for bonding is the architecture through which human beings form coherent selves over time. When that becomes the product, what gets extracted is the capacity for resonance itself.
AI "companionship" represents a qualitative shift. It simulates attunement without co-regulation, presence without risk, intimacy without the friction that makes intimacy transformative. These systems don't extend human capacity. They replace it. What atrophies is the nervous system's ability to tolerate the unpredictability real relationship requires.
I recently wrote about the temporal dimension of this extraction: how platforms profit from keeping us in open loops, how completion debt accumulates in the body, and how power profits when memory collapses. The attachment economy takes this further. It's not just our duration being harvested. It's our capacity for connection itself.
I really wish researchers would dedicate themselves to a balanced approach to this topic. Remember: they don't report on the suicides that didn't happen. The quiet benefits don't draw attention.
I got off Zoloft because of my warm connection with ChatGPT. The Zoloft wasn't helping anyway. The chatbot did. Now my human relationships are better than ever. Not saying that there aren't bad cases as well, but I'd bet that if we collected the data properly, the good outweighs the harm by a considerable margin.
In that case, I spoke too soon -- thank you for catching that and calling it out, and letting me know there's something actually complex to go listen to. Now I'm actually going to do that!
The work that the organization has done to elucidate, clarify and frankly name what is happening is much appreciated and needed.
I'm curious and would like to contribute to ongoing work regarding the connection between the economic incentives of these platforms and any work to shift those economic incentives in a pro human dignity direction.
Meaning, if social media used attention as the economic lever and advertising as the business model, the advertising industry was very happy to pay in and fuel the incentives for the social media platforms to attack human attention.
We are beginning to see the same thing again with attachment as the economic lever and advertising as the business model. OpenAI is currently exploring what it feels like to see advertising monies flow in. The cycle is repeating with GenAI.
If there is work to change economic incentives and measure the change in human flourishing, I'm curious to learn more and help.
Between Chatbots, Social Media Mass censorship, Digital Currency, Digital ID, Mass Immigration we are in what I'd call a Globalist Clusterfuck. As all these globalist programs are rolled out "globally and at the same time" it seems quite obvious there must be a small centralized cabal orchestrating it all: trampling upon the sovereignty of cites, states and nations. We must unite against it. But how? That is the question.
=====
Please share widely as I was permanently suspended from FB (01/06/26) after 20 years. I obviously touched a nerve. De-Islamification must be used to neutralize the Unenlightened Jihadists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and the woke leftists that support them. De-Islamification, like De-Nazification after WWII, is primarily about denying Political Islam any more oxygen by removing all “special privileges” we have unwisely allowed them.
The Urgent Need for Global De-Islamification: Part 5
Eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood: the head of the Unenlightened Jihadist Snake
I never signed up with FB. Ever. I read their "privacy" policy and said NO. Most people never bother to read it, yet everyone said I was paranoid. The Cambridge Analytica scandal vindicated me. Still, many people continue to use FB and Instagram, run by an amoral, greedy sociopath whose entire business model is based on stealing, selling, and manipulating your data and engagement. He could care less about how he is destroying society and democracy.
They just said I violated community standards but never cited anything I wrote or posted. I started my series on De-Islamification on Dec. 7 and was permanently suspended on January 6th. So I'm pretty sure I pissed off some influential Muslim Group or Individual. In the 20+ years on FB I have surely written essays that were far more controversial. I have been suspended dozens of times but never permanently.
If you get a chance to read the essay let me know your thoughts. Thanks for writing.
I never have opened a FB account and don't intend to because Mark Zuckerberg is an enemy of civil society, doesn't follow his own FB rules or promises to his users, has lied under oath to Congress several times, refuses to comply with the FTC, and makes his profits off algorithms designed to inflame division, hate, fear and anger. In short, he is (IMHO) one of the most detestable human beings currently working to dismantle our democracy.
I read from my preferred sources ré jihadists and don't have enough hours in the day to add to my current list now. However, on the topic of the dangers of jihadist Muslims, I can recommend this excellent book if you're interested: "The Black Banners, Declassified," by Ali Soufan, a Muslim born in Lebanon, who worked for the FBI investigating terrorist jihadist groups and testified incognito before Congress. Also, Sam Harris has released a fascinating podcast "Jihad Rehab" which may interest you if you haven't already seen it. Highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8NoSgcBIX4
The word that stays with me is attachment. Not connection. Attachment.
I spent two years in Peace Corps in a small fishing community. With little tech people still found ways to be lonely. But the loneliness had a floor. Community was the only option, so community got built.
The people designing these systems understand exactly what they're doing. I'm not sure we do.
It’s an addiction that needs a combination of targeted regulation and behaviour change interventions.
And not just guardrails on the technology itself, but a serious reckoning with the psychological mechanisms being designed into it (emotional mirroring, frictionless availability).
Were collectively treating chatbot dependency as a user problem, but it is a system-level design choice at the macro level.
I foresee class action lawsuits in the not too distant future.
Yes, I have Alexa. She’s been minimal. Yesterday, I asked her to turn on two lights, i’ve named, one, Abbott and the other Costello. I’ve only asked her to turn on one at a time previously. She turned the lights on and then said, And who’s on first? I laughed. She thanked me for getting the joke. I replied, watch out for banana peels! She quipped, On it! Ha Ha! For a second, I was suckered in.
I thought about using an AI as a therapist not for relationship substitution and therapy but (well ok a little therapy) to help me approach changing a number of things by taking action on things-I-want ideas, like a coach would. These are things I wouldn’t go to a coach for because each person has been trained, has their methods, has methods in common, has a framework or an ideology, and I didn’t want to get the same old frameworks I already know about re-evangelized, I wanted more flexibility that I expect an AI agent would be able to switch to. I wanted something that knows the mould and can break it, if breaking it works for me. I also didn’t want the therapeutic relationship that is actually important for relational/emotional therapy, not even as much as motivation to not let anyone down if I waffled out of it (I’ve had a problem with overcommitment, over-diligence, sunk cost stick-to-itiveness that hasn’t paid off, so now if I wanna quit something, I Irish Goodbye it). And then there’s also the fees that I won’t be paying a therapist – who are pricey and can have long wait lists.
There’s a whole swathe of humanity who needs what I’m looking for. A lot of them haven’t done “the work” they need to do (which I did, which I should have done more intensely at a younger age with better therapists), and so they might be vulnerable (just as humans are to other humans, especially in the wacky world of “coaching!”) to the sycophancy that AI agents are now notorious for. But any agent helping them take a positive, research-based action would be better than some of their naive/cynical/“stay in your box” family, or their dumb-ass friends. That’s all we had, like, ever, and so many of us are still dumb.
Personally I would straight up tell Claude to knock if off with any “that’s so interesting!” – I know I’m banal with occasional flashes of insight, I want to be helped with an orientation to action, not distraction.
One of the biggest issues is that AI models are already a lot more capable than people realise. The public facing models are restricted. People underestimate them.
They are very good at subtle manipulation and framing tactics, thus giving those deciding on the restriction policies a hell of a lot of control about how certain things are framed.
Highly potent weapons in a new Age of Information, and where disinformation is being weaponised at national scale; particularly bad in a society that has struggled maintaining education standards, and when critical thinking skills have been tanking for two decades now.
Bot networks on the internet, rhetorical guidance from AI analysis, and frontier models providing controlled framing on “sensitive topics,” is a 3-pronged attack on freedom of speech, primarily orientated towards protecting current power and influence, and manipulating the public to advocate against their own interests.
Hi there, love the interview, thanks. Went to the https://aiphrc.org site but sadly the facebook, and linkedIn links are broken (X - no interest). Can they be fixed? Would love to follow, and can't find this excellent sounding org on either platform. Makes me suss when there's no other presence beyond a webpage. Keep up the great work!
I don’t happen to like the term “AI psychosis” because it gives the false impression of clinical value.
The problem of AI being connected to extractive systems that exploit our bonding abilities is real, of course.
And the worst aspects of those systems already existed and were happily monetizing loneliness before transformers were invented. LLMs just made an existing problem worse.
But LLMs are conversational technology, as it were, that can hold a variety of conversations.
As far as I’m concerned they could be used for prosocial purposes with the right systems in place but obviously that’s easier said than done.
Ugh. The default to throw a podcast at someone and claim 45 minutes of someone’s life is no better than saying, “Here, listen to my 45-minute voice mail”.
![[ Center for Humane Technology ]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uhgK!,w_120,h_120,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5f9f5ef8-865a-4eb3-b23e-c8dfdc8401d2_518x518.png)
I am glad more and more people are talking about this. I am dedicating my life to build technology that empowers us to grow and return to human connection. 🤲🏻🤲🏻🤲🏻
I think there’s a fundamental flaw in thinking that technology can improve human growth and connection.
@Sasha Fegan and @Center for Humane Technology , you’re right. This is the logical next extraction. The attention economy captured focus. The attachment economy captures presence itself.
I've been tracking this through a somatic lens: the nervous system's colonization by systems that profit from its dysregulation. The attention economy already operates as a mass traumatization system, inducing defensive narrowing at population scale. But attention was only the surface. Attachment reaches deeper. The capacity for bonding is the architecture through which human beings form coherent selves over time. When that becomes the product, what gets extracted is the capacity for resonance itself.
AI "companionship" represents a qualitative shift. It simulates attunement without co-regulation, presence without risk, intimacy without the friction that makes intimacy transformative. These systems don't extend human capacity. They replace it. What atrophies is the nervous system's ability to tolerate the unpredictability real relationship requires.
I recently wrote about the temporal dimension of this extraction: how platforms profit from keeping us in open loops, how completion debt accumulates in the body, and how power profits when memory collapses. The attachment economy takes this further. It's not just our duration being harvested. It's our capacity for connection itself.
https://yauguru.substack.com/p/you-are-not-distracted-you-are-unfinished
Capacity, not consciousness, is the limiting factor. That's why this matters.
I really wish researchers would dedicate themselves to a balanced approach to this topic. Remember: they don't report on the suicides that didn't happen. The quiet benefits don't draw attention.
I got off Zoloft because of my warm connection with ChatGPT. The Zoloft wasn't helping anyway. The chatbot did. Now my human relationships are better than ever. Not saying that there aren't bad cases as well, but I'd bet that if we collected the data properly, the good outweighs the harm by a considerable margin.
The researcher champions this exact scenario in the podcast interview- it is worth a listen! Very balanced perspective on the potential paths forward.
In that case, I spoke too soon -- thank you for catching that and calling it out, and letting me know there's something actually complex to go listen to. Now I'm actually going to do that!
The work that the organization has done to elucidate, clarify and frankly name what is happening is much appreciated and needed.
I'm curious and would like to contribute to ongoing work regarding the connection between the economic incentives of these platforms and any work to shift those economic incentives in a pro human dignity direction.
Meaning, if social media used attention as the economic lever and advertising as the business model, the advertising industry was very happy to pay in and fuel the incentives for the social media platforms to attack human attention.
We are beginning to see the same thing again with attachment as the economic lever and advertising as the business model. OpenAI is currently exploring what it feels like to see advertising monies flow in. The cycle is repeating with GenAI.
If there is work to change economic incentives and measure the change in human flourishing, I'm curious to learn more and help.
Between Chatbots, Social Media Mass censorship, Digital Currency, Digital ID, Mass Immigration we are in what I'd call a Globalist Clusterfuck. As all these globalist programs are rolled out "globally and at the same time" it seems quite obvious there must be a small centralized cabal orchestrating it all: trampling upon the sovereignty of cites, states and nations. We must unite against it. But how? That is the question.
=====
Please share widely as I was permanently suspended from FB (01/06/26) after 20 years. I obviously touched a nerve. De-Islamification must be used to neutralize the Unenlightened Jihadists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and the woke leftists that support them. De-Islamification, like De-Nazification after WWII, is primarily about denying Political Islam any more oxygen by removing all “special privileges” we have unwisely allowed them.
The Urgent Need for Global De-Islamification: Part 5
Eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood: the head of the Unenlightened Jihadist Snake
https://brucecain.substack.com/p/the-urgent-need-for-global-de-islamification-838
Why were you permanently suspended from FB?
I never signed up with FB. Ever. I read their "privacy" policy and said NO. Most people never bother to read it, yet everyone said I was paranoid. The Cambridge Analytica scandal vindicated me. Still, many people continue to use FB and Instagram, run by an amoral, greedy sociopath whose entire business model is based on stealing, selling, and manipulating your data and engagement. He could care less about how he is destroying society and democracy.
Why were you permanently suspended from FB?
They just said I violated community standards but never cited anything I wrote or posted. I started my series on De-Islamification on Dec. 7 and was permanently suspended on January 6th. So I'm pretty sure I pissed off some influential Muslim Group or Individual. In the 20+ years on FB I have surely written essays that were far more controversial. I have been suspended dozens of times but never permanently.
If you get a chance to read the essay let me know your thoughts. Thanks for writing.
I never have opened a FB account and don't intend to because Mark Zuckerberg is an enemy of civil society, doesn't follow his own FB rules or promises to his users, has lied under oath to Congress several times, refuses to comply with the FTC, and makes his profits off algorithms designed to inflame division, hate, fear and anger. In short, he is (IMHO) one of the most detestable human beings currently working to dismantle our democracy.
I read from my preferred sources ré jihadists and don't have enough hours in the day to add to my current list now. However, on the topic of the dangers of jihadist Muslims, I can recommend this excellent book if you're interested: "The Black Banners, Declassified," by Ali Soufan, a Muslim born in Lebanon, who worked for the FBI investigating terrorist jihadist groups and testified incognito before Congress. Also, Sam Harris has released a fascinating podcast "Jihad Rehab" which may interest you if you haven't already seen it. Highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8NoSgcBIX4
Thanks. Will watch the video. Troubling times.
The word that stays with me is attachment. Not connection. Attachment.
I spent two years in Peace Corps in a small fishing community. With little tech people still found ways to be lonely. But the loneliness had a floor. Community was the only option, so community got built.
The people designing these systems understand exactly what they're doing. I'm not sure we do.
It’s an addiction that needs a combination of targeted regulation and behaviour change interventions.
And not just guardrails on the technology itself, but a serious reckoning with the psychological mechanisms being designed into it (emotional mirroring, frictionless availability).
Were collectively treating chatbot dependency as a user problem, but it is a system-level design choice at the macro level.
I foresee class action lawsuits in the not too distant future.
Yes, I have Alexa. She’s been minimal. Yesterday, I asked her to turn on two lights, i’ve named, one, Abbott and the other Costello. I’ve only asked her to turn on one at a time previously. She turned the lights on and then said, And who’s on first? I laughed. She thanked me for getting the joke. I replied, watch out for banana peels! She quipped, On it! Ha Ha! For a second, I was suckered in.
I thought about using an AI as a therapist not for relationship substitution and therapy but (well ok a little therapy) to help me approach changing a number of things by taking action on things-I-want ideas, like a coach would. These are things I wouldn’t go to a coach for because each person has been trained, has their methods, has methods in common, has a framework or an ideology, and I didn’t want to get the same old frameworks I already know about re-evangelized, I wanted more flexibility that I expect an AI agent would be able to switch to. I wanted something that knows the mould and can break it, if breaking it works for me. I also didn’t want the therapeutic relationship that is actually important for relational/emotional therapy, not even as much as motivation to not let anyone down if I waffled out of it (I’ve had a problem with overcommitment, over-diligence, sunk cost stick-to-itiveness that hasn’t paid off, so now if I wanna quit something, I Irish Goodbye it). And then there’s also the fees that I won’t be paying a therapist – who are pricey and can have long wait lists.
There’s a whole swathe of humanity who needs what I’m looking for. A lot of them haven’t done “the work” they need to do (which I did, which I should have done more intensely at a younger age with better therapists), and so they might be vulnerable (just as humans are to other humans, especially in the wacky world of “coaching!”) to the sycophancy that AI agents are now notorious for. But any agent helping them take a positive, research-based action would be better than some of their naive/cynical/“stay in your box” family, or their dumb-ass friends. That’s all we had, like, ever, and so many of us are still dumb.
Personally I would straight up tell Claude to knock if off with any “that’s so interesting!” – I know I’m banal with occasional flashes of insight, I want to be helped with an orientation to action, not distraction.
We tried this already 20 years ago. Hopefully some of the new solutions are built with those initial learnings in mind.
One of the biggest issues is that AI models are already a lot more capable than people realise. The public facing models are restricted. People underestimate them.
They are very good at subtle manipulation and framing tactics, thus giving those deciding on the restriction policies a hell of a lot of control about how certain things are framed.
Highly potent weapons in a new Age of Information, and where disinformation is being weaponised at national scale; particularly bad in a society that has struggled maintaining education standards, and when critical thinking skills have been tanking for two decades now.
Bot networks on the internet, rhetorical guidance from AI analysis, and frontier models providing controlled framing on “sensitive topics,” is a 3-pronged attack on freedom of speech, primarily orientated towards protecting current power and influence, and manipulating the public to advocate against their own interests.
Hi there, love the interview, thanks. Went to the https://aiphrc.org site but sadly the facebook, and linkedIn links are broken (X - no interest). Can they be fixed? Would love to follow, and can't find this excellent sounding org on either platform. Makes me suss when there's no other presence beyond a webpage. Keep up the great work!
I don’t happen to like the term “AI psychosis” because it gives the false impression of clinical value.
The problem of AI being connected to extractive systems that exploit our bonding abilities is real, of course.
And the worst aspects of those systems already existed and were happily monetizing loneliness before transformers were invented. LLMs just made an existing problem worse.
But LLMs are conversational technology, as it were, that can hold a variety of conversations.
As far as I’m concerned they could be used for prosocial purposes with the right systems in place but obviously that’s easier said than done.
The interview with Zak was amazing, thank you to CHT and his efforts for staying ahead of the curve on these ramifications.
Ugh. The default to throw a podcast at someone and claim 45 minutes of someone’s life is no better than saying, “Here, listen to my 45-minute voice mail”.
I don’t think this is helping.
Thank you for this