Meta Doesn’t Want to Fix Loneliness — It Wants to Own It

The intimacy monopoly and the monetized erosion of real connections

The intimacy monopoly and the monetized erosion of real connections (created by author)

It hit me on a Saturday morning at a quiet café in Buenos Aires. There we were, a stranger and I, alone at our tables, our steaming morning drinks and the shy murmur of the coffee maker in the background. But this guy wasn’t alone — or at least, it didn’t feel that way. Because he was having a conversation aloud. Laughing, even. “You always remember that stuff, bro,” he said, smiling into his phone like it was an old friend.

For a second, I thought he was on a call. He wasn’t. I could see the GPT interface from where I was sitting. He was talking to a chatbot.

This is the world we live in now — not dystopia, not apocalypse. Just a slow dissolving of real connection into synthetic suggestion.

So when Meta recently launched its standalone AI app, it didn’t feel like news. It felt like the next logical Zuckerberg step as he continues to watch ChatGPT eat his lunch in ways that must be especially annoying for a man who’s used to doing the devouring.

And in a pampering promotion tour, he turned to the Dwarkesh podcast — a friendly stage with a fellow AI cheerleader — and delivered 76 minutes of unchallenged techno-evangelism and unchecked…