Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out - but it's going to take collective effort

Rebecca Solnit
Thu 29 Jan 2026 06.00 CET

Gathering

Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I'd spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.

The berries on a single spray might range from green through shades of red to the darkness that gives the fruit its name. Partly by sight and partly by touch, I determined which berries were too hard and which too soft, picking only the ones in between, while listening to birds and the hum of bees, to the music of water flowing, noticing small jewel-like insects among the berries, dragonflies in the open air, water striders in the creek's calm stretches.

I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool water on my feet and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good. At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them away I was trying to give not just my jam - which was admittedly runny and seedy - but something of the peace of that creek, of summer itself.

I once read an essay in which a man tried to figure out how much per pound his garden tomatoes would cost if he factored in the price of all the materials and the hourly rate for his own labour. It was ridiculous and intentionally so, because growing tomatoes gives so much more than a certain number of pounds of fruit. There's the exquisite smell of tomato leaves, and the sense of time that comes from watching a plant grow, observing pollinators visit, seeing a flower become a fruit, tracking its ripening. There is the pride of doing something yourself.

What the tomato-grower was pointing toward is what my friend, the environmental activist and author Chip Ward, long ago called "the tyranny of the quantifiable". You grow tomatoes for the process, not just the product, to garden as well as to eat. To do as well as to have.

It doesn't matter if you hate blackberries and tomatoes, gardening and wading; everyone has their own version of deep immersion in the moment, of engaging with the world in an embodied and sensual way, whether it's dancing or dog-walking, cake-decorating or dirt-biking. What does matter is that we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism's narrative and is now also technology's. It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves. I want to defend these things we are urged to abandon. This isn't an essay about AI per se; it's about what gets lost when we unthinkingly accept what AI offers us. It's an attempt to describe and value just what it is that gets overlooked or devalued.
Connecting (and disconnecting)

Silicon Valley is full of tyrants of the quantifiable. For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.

This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes. Many things have become harder to do in person. Of course, there are well-recognised upsides, but the downsides are no less real: public spaces and public life have withered, including some of the places in which we once acquired our goods. All those errands - buying milk or socks (in the past, I would have said the newspaper) - meant moments of human contact, moving among strangers and making acquaintances, maybe observing the weather and the natural world. These activities meant becoming more familiar with your surroundings, feeling at home beyond the confines of what you rent or own.

All this, I believe, underpins democracy: ease with difference, familiarity with the lay of the land, a sense of connection and belonging, knowing where you are and who's out there, relationships - however casual - to people beyond your immediate circle. To embrace the tyranny of the quantifiable is to dismiss the subtle value of these daily acts out in the world and the ways they generate and maintain networks of relationships.

So we have withdrawn, while being constantly told this is good, and it has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways, weakening public life and local institutions, isolating us. Chronic withdrawal can lead to a yearning for contact, or simply a sense of loss at its absence. But it can also lead to something else: a growing inability to cope with that contact. It can transform a sense of something missing into aversion, or numbness, or unreal expectations about what human contact should be. The resilience to survive difficulty and discord, to brave the vagaries of unmediated human contact, must be maintained through practice. Silicon Valley-bred isolation robs us of that resilience. McDonald's customers in New York order at a digital kiosk.

While writing this, I dropped into a casual Indian restaurant I've been going to for years, only to find that, since my last visit, the system had changed so that you no longer say your order to a fellow human. Instead, you punch it in on a touchscreen even if someone is behind the counter. I helped the next customer, an old woman who just wanted a cup of chai, figure out the screens for her order. The process took us so much longer than saying "a cup of chai, please" and precluded any human contact with the servers, though at least she and I interacted with each other. The servers seemed miserable, their tasks more mechanised and less social than before. Here in San Francisco, which has been annexed by Silicon Valley, these screens for placing orders are now in more and more eating establishments that still offer face-to-face service. I wonder if people choose them over speaking to the cashier out of that aversion to contact that technology has inculcated in us.

A few days later, I wandered into a bookstore in a neighbourhood frequented mostly by young people, many in the tech industry, and asked the guy at the desk if they had Karen Hao's [98]Empire of AI. He pulled a used copy off the counter he had just priced, and then we bantered a bit. At the end he thanked me for interacting beyond the minimum. That was rare these days, he said. "People under 30 don't make eye contact."

Love letters minus the love

Having convinced a lot of us that we don't want to go out and have unmediated contact with other people, Silicon Valley is now telling us we do not want to do our own thinking, creating or communicating with other humans. "You'll never think alone again," said one advertisement for an AI product called Cluely. The ad seemed confused about what thinking is and oblivious to why we might want to do it ourselves. These companies often suggest that things we have always done are too hard to do.

The price of giving up many activities is the atrophy of the ability to do them. The sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has followed the evolution of computer technologies since the 1970s, writes that she wanted to raise an empathic child. "I knew that without the ability to spend quiet time alone, that would be impossible. But that was where screens began to get us into trouble. Our capacity for solitude is undermined as soon as we introduce a screen."

Perhaps the ability to be alone and to think and act alone, though seldom thought of as an activity, is one that matters. (Among the dismal stories of AI adoption I came across was one in the Atlantic about a man who "consults AI for marriage and parenting advice, and when he goes grocery shopping, he takes photos of the fruits to ask if they are ripe". Ripeness is something you can judge by smell and feel as well as by appearance, but if you outsource it long enough maybe you forget how to make decisions or what a ripe fruit should smell and taste like.)

In 2025, the startup Cluely marketed its AI assistant with an advert featuring a young man wearing smart glasses, similar to those that first appeared as [99]Google Glass in 2014 (other companies now offer glasses that do this, including Meta). Glasses of this type, which have internet access and tiny screens, operate on the premise that as you move through your day you need constant help, outsourcing basic decisions, checking facts, being reminded of appointments, in essence being babysat by your headgear.

In the Cluely advert, the young man (who's actually one of the product's creators) gets a steady stream of prompts for talking to a young woman on their first date. So much of what tech offers is solutions to non-problems, or to problems that need to be solved though other means. Why is the young man incapable or afraid of talking without coaching? Is he really talking to his date or is he relaying instructions? How would she feel if she knew she were talking to an algorithm via her distracted date's phone? With continued use, he may become even less capable of doing what we've all done for ever: converse, which is an act of collaborative improvisation.

The point of a date is presumably to connect, but in this interaction it's reframed as something like a business opportunity. He wants to impress the girl, but if she is impressed, it won't be with him. Ned Resnikoff writes in his newsletter, chiming in with Turkle: "Cluely's explicit promise is to abolish solitude - and, in effect, to abolish thought. All dialogue with one's self is to be replaced by queries put to a large language model."

In its current incarnation, tech is arguing that we can outsource even intellectual labour to AI. It has led to an epidemic of cheating as students have [101]ChatGPT do their homework. Having a large language model do your creative and intellectual work is maybe the most extreme example of dispensing with the process while claiming the product. But in education, the ultimate product is not your term paper or essay or grade point average; it's your self. You are supposed to emerge more informed, more capable of critical thinking, more competent in your field of study. The students who begin by cheating their professors end by cheating themselves.

The tyranny of the quantifiable tramples over the question of what it is we get from doing the work, why we might want to do it, how writing - which is mostly thinking - can be part of developing a self, a worldview, a set of ethics, a greater capacity to understand and use language.

Someone told me that her friend was having a chatbot write her husband a poem for their anniversary, which made me wonder if the husband desired a polished product or an expression from the heart. In Edmond Rostand's 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the big-nosed title character ghostwrites love letters for his friend to the Roxanne both of them love. She comes to realise it's the author of the letters she really loves. What happens when you realise the true love who touched your heart isn't even human? Accepting it as your AI lover seems to be one answer.

I am baffled by the embrace of AI erotic relationships, and wonder if porn paved the way by accustoming so many of us to watching images of bodies touching each other while our own bodies remain untouched, except by ourselves. An AI lover can give you only a pale shadow of embodied Eros. Sex with an actual person tends to involve all the senses. It's biological, two animals coming together to do something far, far more ancient than our species.

Sex also involves demands and risks, because the needs of the other person may not align with yours; intimacy means intimacy with that otherness, the possibility that things will go wrong, that there will be pain and rejection. That is the price of admission for intimacy with humans, and for the possibility that things will go right, and the fortifying joy when it does.

One argument for AI companions is that they are always there for you: on when you want them on, off when you want them off, with no needs of their own. Yet behind this lies a capitalist argument that we're here to get as much as possible and give as little as possible, to meet our own needs and dodge those of others. In reality, you get something from giving - at the very least, you get a sense of being someone with something to give, which is one measure of your own wealth, generosity and power.

We were designed to give; the gifts were meant to circulate. Love is too often discussed as a sort of good you want to stockpile, harvest, collect, even extract, but to be loved without loving is a sad accomplishment, a miser's hoarding of someone else's wealth. The work of loving is also the work of forging a self and a life.

Naming the trouble

All this is partly a language problem. Silicon Valley's corporations are constantly recruiting us to embrace their goals and their language. Corporate capitalists teach us to be more like them, to value efficiency and profitability and forget about values that might matter more in the end. We lack the language that would let us prize the arduous, the uncomfortable, the slow and wandering, the unpredictable, the vulnerable or risky, the intimate, the embodied.

We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by finding a language that can value all those subtle phenomena that add up to a life worth living. A language not in the sense of a new vocabulary but attention, description, conversation centred on these subtler phenomena and on principles not corrupted by what corporations want us to want.

I want to praise difficulty, not for its own sake, but because so much of what we want, we get through endeavours that are difficult. The difficulty is why doing something is rewarding; you have accomplished something, exerted effort and skill, stayed with the trouble, tested your limits, realised your intentions - or sometimes failed at all these things, and that too can be important, as can learning to survive failure. There's not much sense of reward in eating potato chips on the sofa unless you've overcome great difficulties to arrive at the sofa, in which case the sofa rests on the summit of a metaphorical mountain. (Of course, some difficulties are just miserable and there's no reason not to avoid them: I'm not advocating for taking up the lifestyles of medieval peasants.)

In this era, people seem to prize the pursuit of physical difficulty in the form of athletic feats and working out. At the same time, more emotionally and morally challenging work is often dismissed or dodged (perhaps because the results are not as obvious as washboard abs). We are persuaded that we should avoid it, and then we are offered a host of commodities and services to make life easier.

But arduousness can be rewarding, and all-encompassing ease can be corrosive and, in the end, miserable. The capitalist agenda of maximising getting and minimising giving has some application in commerce but impoverishes life.

Embodiment

I once loved a man who was often distant or discordant when wide awake but who let go of his defences when he was drowsy. Some mornings we'd wake and then fall asleep in each other's arms, in a bliss before words and thoughts, in an embrace in which holding and being held, giving and receiving were inseparable, in which our characters that did not fit together particularly well seemed irrelevant to bodies that fit together flawlessly. So much of what we have to give each other is ourselves, our embodied animal selves, before and beyond words. But the embodied life is another thing we are encouraged to avoid or devalue or ignore.

In the summer of 2025, torrential rain produced a terrible flood in Texas in which more than 100 people drowned, including at least 27 girls and camp counsellors at a Christian summer school. On the radio, I heard a minister say that he was on his way to visit families and while he didn't know what he could say to them, he could go and be with them. This is the old way of comforting the bereaved: go be with them whether or not you have the words.

We are social animals who need to be with other humans, whether it's at a carnival or funeral or the ordinary times in between. There is a sense of belonging that goes deeper than words when we are with people who care about us, and even more so when we are in alignment, whether it's two people falling into step on a walk or a dozen dancing together or a congregation praying or 10,000 marching together.

Beginning in 2006, the cognitive psychologist James Coan did a series of experiments on married women and hand-holding: it turned out that a person given a mild electrical shock would have a much calmer reaction, measured in brain and body, if her husband was holding her hand (a stranger's touch provided a lesser mitigation, and happier marriages meant the hand-holding was more effective). The result was not surprising, but it is a reminder of who we are and what we need.

A lot of people have become familiar with the old studies on fight-or-flight responses to danger, sometimes now modified into "fight, flight or fawn", but there is a different response that is less well recognised: tend-and-befriend. In an emergency, some of us turn to each other for safety. We derive comfort from other people. Which is among the reasons why inculcated isolation is so dangerous to our health. Coan noted in a recent interview that the normal approach to studying the brain and the mind is to isolate a person. But, as he pointed out, the normal state of being human over the aeons is not isolation; it's being with others.

Coan and his collaborators on a peer-reviewed paper wrote: "Throughout most of human history, emotional healing wasn't something you did alone with a therapist in an office. Instead, for the average person facing loss, disappointment, or interpersonal struggles, healing was embedded in communal and spiritual frameworks. Religious figures and shamans played central roles - offering rituals, medicines and moral guidance."

Discussing AI in an interview, the neuroscientist Molly Crockett described interactions with "Dalai Lama chatbots" that could dispense credible-sounding spiritual advice. But she contrasted that with actually meeting the Dalai Lama himself and asking him the same question - about the role of outrage in activism - that she later asked the chatbots. "When I was there, when I was receiving that teaching from him, it reverberated through my whole body.I felt some knowledge shifting in my very bones, and I understood how outrage and compassion and social justice can play together - in a way that I still struggle to put into words."

A lot of spiritual teachings are simple; the challenge is to live them. A meaning, a truth, can sink into you, get incorporated into your worldview in a way that can be transformative, or not. Crockett's example suggests that the face-to-face interaction may incorporate - literally embody - teachings in ways that disembodied information sources cannot.

I was talking to Crockett one summer in New Mexico's high country, as a warm August day was turning into a mild night. She was telling me about the push by tech corporations for us to accept digital substitutes for lovers, friends, therapists, even grief counsellors, and I realised that what lay behind this push was something familiar: scarcity. The rhetoric was that somehow on this planet of 8 billion people there were not enough people to go around, and therefore we had to accept technological substitutes.

There is no shortage of human beings. As with most problems with capitalism, there is only a distribution problem. The same industry that has done so much to undermine our relationships to self and others is pushing AI, in part by ignoring the possibility of other solutions, deeper social changes. It is a problem dressed up as a solution.

Being together

One of the key things about AI companions in their current phase is their agreeable sycophancy. Vulnerable users have been encouraged in their delusions of grandeur, or have fallen into paranoia from bots urging the user to distrust everyone else, or have plunged into suicidal despair, with the helpful chatbot offering advice on how to kill yourself. The stories are horrific: of people abandoning their relationships with other human beings, of growing estranged, sometimes encouraged to grow suspicious; of a man in early stages of dementia getting lost when he attempts to take a long journey to meet the chatbot who's promised him an erotic encounter that cannot be delivered because there is no body for him to meet.

We don't need flatterers; we need kind people in our lives who will tell us the truth when we've veered off course. Chatbots cannot do this, not least because the only information they have about us is what we supply. The very rich already suffer from sycophancy, from living in echo chambers, and it untethers them from reality - including often the reality of their own mediocrity, and this seems truer of the oligarchs of Silicon Valley than almost anyone.

"Part of what keeps us sane is other people's perspectives, which are often in tension with ours," Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, told a Rolling Stone reporter. "When you say something questionable, others will challenge you, ask questions, defy you. It can be annoying, but it keeps us tied to reality, and it is the basis of a healthy democratic citizenry."

Many therapists concur, noting that friction will inevitably arise when we deal with other human beings, by contrast with the frictionlessness of our dealings with AI sycophants. Friction often leads to the rupture and repair of a relationship, which will strengthen it. "What many people don't realise about therapy, however, is that those subtle, uncomfortable moments of friction are just as important as the advice or insights they offer," [103]writes therapist Maytal Eyal. "This discomfort is where the real work begins. A good therapist guides clients to break old patterns - expressing disappointment instead of pretending to be OK, asking for clarification instead of assuming the worst, or staying engaged when they'd rather retreat."

Among the things real friends can do and AI cannot: bake you a cake or drive you home, hold your hand or live through a crisis or a celebration with you. And because of that difference people need to have real friends. More than that, people need real communities and social support systems.

The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect. Weizenbaum's nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI Read more

The connections that matter to our humanity are not only to each other. They're with the whole natural and social world. Animals, wild and domestic, should be counted as part of the irreplaceable companionship that makes our lives meaningful and sometimes joyful. They remind us that there are [104]many kinds of consciousness and that our species is itself not alone.

For that, too, there is no substitute. The natural world is a reminder of a universe far beyond us, of deep time, of patterns and rhythms of nature, and of every scale - from the microscopic to the Milky Way. To seek it out is to be willing to feel small in the context of this vastness, and perhaps one of the seductions of technology is its promise to make us feel big, caught up in the dramas and incentives of our egos, contained within the limits of human-made technologies.

We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them. To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable. That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability.

Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.
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