Through their ever-flowing stream of messages, each offering a simulation of connection, social platforms promise to alleviate the sense of loneliness they provoke. Turning social interactions into symbolic transactions, they reconstruct society on a foundation of anomie. Bots fit seamlessly into such a society, upping the monetization potential substantially.
When Facebook’s News Feed introduced us to what Zuckerberg termed “frictionless sharing,” we learned, or should have learned, that friction is the essence of sharing. Freed of any investment of effort, time, or care, sharing loses all meaning. It becomes mere transmission. The frictionless friendship offered by chatbots, by removing the need to adapt one’s self to another self, to make room in one’s life for a different being, will be similarly empty.