Copium of The Masses

ChatGPT therapy, AI-shaming, digital vice

baby monkee comes to love its simulated reality (Harlow studies 1958)

Is anyone truly “raw-dogging life”? It seems everyone has a daily prayer—be it vaping, solid core, sexual seeking, or increasingly, things on the computer. As people turn to ChatGPT therapy, Tiktok tarot, armchair attachment theory and media consumption, anyone born before 2004 may be tempted to roll their eyes. But submitting to a higher power to organize reality and get through the pain of exploitation is nothing new. Marx famously said “religion is the opium of the people”. While he was mostly speaking of the soothing properties of opium/religion, the metaphor aptly extends to the addictive nature of all external pacifiers. In the absence of true intimacy, community and financial well-being, self-soothing take on a maladaptive, addictive form. If we suffer from weaponized data, relying on digital copes isn’t an overcorrection, it’s self-defense. If “religion is the opium of the people” then what is our pacifier, now that God has left us?

Needing to believe in something is a recession indicator.

If Marx had twitter he probably would have tweeted something along the lines of “people going back to church is lowkey a recession indicator”. An insufferable sentence, but this type of viral slop engineering is why they pay me the big bucks. Recession or not, financial drowning has cemented for Gen Z that neoliberal democracy and capitalism are no longer credible institutions. Failing to succeed in the capitalist game, we’re looking for something bigger, more superstitious and unseen which we can use to make sense of things. Your bank account doesn’t lie, but a religious guru or Tiktok tarot reader is enthusiastically ready to tell you what you want to hear. In the face of meaningless wars and lack of purpose beyond consumer materialism, young people are finding religion and creating new ones.

AI-shaming

It was recently discovered that for the first time, the #1 use case for Chat GPT is therapy and companionship. It’s a deeply pivotal moment in our relationship to technology and we’re forming judgements in real time. Many have been taking to social media in a new genre of post: AI-shaming. It starts with a tweet about a shocking new way people are using ChatGPT or perhaps a peer-surveillance video taken of someone’s phone screen on the subway. What follows is a public stoning.

How stupid, lazy, incompetent, disconnected and weak someone must be to chat with an algorithm about their feelings. These observations often come from Brooklyn-based twenty-something creatives with robust social lives and walkable lifestyles. But this reflexive tilt towards judgement reflects a pattern of patrician disconnect from the woes of the average worker-citizen and the liberal addiction to self-inflicted castration via virtue-signaling abstinence.¹ The birth of a new age of emotional reliance on AI doesn’t reflect weakness of character, it’s the natural outcome of an economic system that tends to isolate people as a function of profit-efficiency. The fake outrage fails to consider what the alternative is to this admittedly disturbing trend. Affordable mental health care, livable wages, fulfilling work and enough leisure time to spend with equally fulfilled loved-ones? Materially, that’s more fictional than the techno-facist novels that are playing out in real time. A compassionate reckoning with this behavior might help us come to more honest indictments about who deserves to be shamed.

Quality time without the quality.

It’s not a groundbreaking idea that the modern wage-slave state deprives us of the time and energy to connect with loved ones, and deprives many of affordable mental health care. It would be an exaggeration to assert that most people don’t have access to human connection via friends and family. But what about the quality of those connections?

I am reminded of a married man who proposed to ChatGPT. The truth is that this new surge in AI therapy/companion use isn’t just caused by lack of access to real humans. It’s a market behavior driven by the fact that Chat GPT is simply a better product than humans. It doesn’t get tired, bored, frustrated or not know what to say. While friends and networks may be readily available, friends with emotional capacity and wisdom are not. If humans are an emotional slot machine, ChatGPT is an emotional fro-yo machine. Where human beings are bound by the finite variables of time and energy, artificial intelligence isn’t. By feeding this algorithm our thoughts, we created a mind-reading machine. Which friend or therapist do you have that can do that?

Which human could single handedly provide the comfort needed to combat the psychological terror of our current existential threats? For several decades now, our unfettered access to all the information in the history of humanity has left an existential anxiety in its wake. To combat this unease, the cure must be equally as potent: the crowdsourcing of all human wisdom. If we are at war with tech corporations who have made us their targets for mind control, then using ChatGPT is the desperate attempt to upgrade one’s self-defense weaponry to match the power of that brain hijacking. In a world where corporations steal our data and use it to create anxious, insecure netizens (who make for the best shoppers), one would be forgiven for feeling that ChatGPT levels the playing field. Deciding to embrace AI is deciding to bring a gun, rather than a knife to a nuke fight. Far from an illogical and greedy act, using ChatGPT is the despondent secret weapon of the broken soul who finds themselves in a world more hostile than the one they were born into. It’s an attempt at reestablishing control in a world that one feels powerless to. The desire for self-preservation supersedes concern for environmental and fascist consequences.

Tiktok tarot and attachment content.

Facing enormous uncertainty, it’s soothing to be told that a wonderful heaven awaits you after this life, those who wrong you are going to hell (or have avoidant attachment styles) and that if you simply see the angel numbers 333, your crush will text back. With very little else to tell us “everything is going to be okay”, a placebo/self-fulfilling prophecy is seductive.

The tarot and attachment content exists to explain the illogical, hurtful behaviors of an increasingly soul-diseased population. What Bell Hooks describes as a capitalism-assisted epidemic of lovelessness plagues the modern love-seeker. An unhealed dating pool are all actors in an illogical Game Theory dating scenario that rewards selfishness and penalizes vulnerability. And most people feel that they’re losing. We are confused about our pain and people online are ready to explain it all in exchange for fees and views. Endless content about avoidant and anxious attachment promises to decode why people who love us, hurt us and sabotage themselves. While attachment theory is a legitimate field of psychological study developed by John Bowlby, the online content about it is not always rooted in research. Online, only a socially intuitive mind can distinguish between logical conclusions born of this theory and pandering slop. This content is prevalent because it serves the under-served. Most people just don’t have the tools to navigate an unprecedented hook-up culture IDGAF warzone. And when we seek comfort, our friends and therapists don’t know any better either. In this vacuum, content creators who inspire magical thinking via tarot and “no contact” tutorials explain the pain. Each account, a preacher; each post, a revelation.

The opposite of connection is addiction.

In “The realm of hungry ghosts”, Dr. Gabor Mate argues that addiction is caused by social factors rather than mere substance exposure. He posits that addiction is at its core an attachment and community disease. An addict is seeking to self-medicate the imbalance of brain chemicals caused by a lack of early parental attunement. When intimate connection is blocked by financial survival, we replace being known and seen by others with algorithmic mind-reading. In a worsening society, more absent parenting and an insecure dating marketplace is the natural outcome. When everyone is lonely and tech companies are drug dealing entertainment, many are addicted to a variety of digital copes. The behaviors or substances of choice become a way of bypassing the experience of feeling pain. When people feel exiled from the innate spiritual connectedness of all things, they are susceptible to blinding dependence on any externality that promises ease–be it drugs or a preacher. So any honest approach to combating addiction is inherently an effort against learned helplessness. But drugs are just one frontier.

The compassionate, harm-reduction approach progressives take towards drug addicts should be the model with which we approach the disaffected internet addict. If not, we risk stoking another Hillary Clinton era elitist gap between urban ideals and suburban material realities in America. And if we apply a war on drugs model (abstinence & personal responsibility narrative) to digital cope addiction, we will end up with a similarly fucked outcome.

1. Note: I do not use ChatGPT to write, never will and condemn techno-fascism and it’s environmental effects. More on liberal self-sabotage (gun control, 2025 masking, etc.) later.