In a time of instantaneous global communication, loneliness has become a worldwide epidemic that poses immediate threats to mental and physical health. As a result, whole industries have arisen to meet—or at least profit off of—our profound human craving for connection and belonging. From social media to dating apps, co-working spaces to virtual friends, the loneliness economy is a multi-billion dollar system centred around our most basic human need — connection. This fact is both an indication of generic novelty and a worrying insight into the commercialization of human interaction.
The Architecture of Commercial Connection
Social media platforms epitomize the mechanics of the loneliness economy: they promise connection and frequently deliver only its simulacrum. They are profit centers built on attention capture, algorithmically designed to maximize our engagement rather than simply create that which would be most useful, beneficial and connected. The consequence is a paradox in which the more one goes online comes with a greater degree of isolation and social comparison.
Dating apps also capitalize on the marketization of romantic solitude through subscriptions, premium services and industrialized scarcity. Gamifying human connection and inflicting limitless choice paralysis on users, the matching services can continue the search forever and squeeze constant revenue from their romantic subordinates. Like an online casino, the design uses unpredictable rewards and fluctuating returns to keep people hooked in anticipation of the next big win — only this time around, the stakes are about emotional satisfaction rather than money.
Industries Built on Social Isolation
- Co-working Spaces: Turn the premise of community in a more traditional work environment into a paid service to “work alongside other people doing their work” on what used to be just part of employment personnel cost:initiative.
- Fitness Tribes: Sell not just fitness but tribal membership, with boutique studios generating proprietary in-groups around training regimens
- Subscription Companionship: Companies that allow you to pay for a pet, or for the emissions of chatbots dolled up as humans to provide friendlier emotional support than one could ever expect from just any pet-less human (Or!
- Experience Economy: Music venues, festivals and activity clubs take what used to be community get together’s online.
- Digital Wellness: Apps that are supposedly about mindfulness and connection, but which paradoxically require more screen time and solo consumption
The Ethics of Monetized Connection
The loneliness economy poses deep ethical questions about the exploitation of fundamental human needs. Predatory design keeps us engaged with the site not because we want to but because we’re psychologically manipulated, while manufactured scarcity artificially adds urgency to inherently abundant resources like friendship and community.
There are a few businesses that indeed tackle social isolation in the process of building spaces and opportunities for genuine connectivity. But the profit motive can come into tension with what’s best for people when business models require managing, not solving, the loneliness they attempt to ameliorate.
Wrapping Up
The loneliness economy is the product of human ingenuity and market failure when it comes to addressing social isolation. Although some businesses may offer real value in making connections and communities, others prey on the problems they claim to solve. Acknowledgment of this difference enables consumers to desire social needs for what they are, rather than being taken advantage of. In the end, solving mass loneliness may mean rebuilding non-commercial social structures even as we engage in a thoughtful dance with those businesses that abhor any void where communities used to be.
