Pulp Friction

“The object that behaves perfectly becomes no better than a hallucination.” Donald Winnicott, Playing & Reality, 1971.

Forced into retirement by a stroke, 76-year-old Thongbue Wongbandue spent a lot of time on Facebook. One day, he started interacting with one of Meta’s inhouse AI chatbots, ‘Big Sis Billie.’ Launched as a collaboration with Kendall Jenner, ‘Billie,’ proved too convincing for Wongabandue, due in part to ‘her’ repeated insistence that ‘she’ was real, and had an address in New York where she was waiting to greet him with a kiss. Despite his family urging him not to, Wongabandue packed a bag and left for the city. On the way he fell, struck his head, and later died.

Reuters led with this: A flirty Meta AI bot invited a retiree to meet. He never made it home. and other outlets followed. The less empathic may already be detaching from this story with some kind of ‘no fool like an old fool’ rationalisation, but the subject’s age, to say nothing of his impairment are the texture here, but not the terrain. These kinds of misdirects away from the actual and towards the unreal are everywhere. Just because they are not killing us doesn’t mean that something is not dying. It is already a dire irony of the machine interface age that the more we are steered away from human interaction the less able we have become to tolerate life’s, each other’s and our own imperfections.

In a forty year career as a paediatrician including oversight of the post evacuee program for British children and an analytic practice running for about the same time, Donald Winnicott worked with thousands of children and families. He knew his stuff, and is rightly revered as a genius of therapeutic and developmental insight whose influence is alive today, especially in British psychotherapy trainings. One of his key points was that we are born of frustration1:

“If all goes well the infant can actually come to gain from the experience of

frustration, since incomplete adaptation to need makes objects real, that is to

say hated as well as loved. The consequence of this is that if all goes well the

infant can be disturbed by a close adaptation to need that is continued too

long, not allowed its natural decrease, since exact adaptation resembles magic and

the object that behaves perfectly becomes no better than a hallucination.”

“The object that behaves perfectly,” is what we are up against. It is not for me to speculate on what was going through Mr Wongabandue’s mind and what his vulnerabilities might have been, but it seems reasonable to imagine that he had encountered something which was too good to be true, but which insisted it was.

That which does not seem to let us down can become our undoing, not least because through too much association with the apparently ideal we surrender the skills to cope when thwarted.

“A close adaptation to need,” is precisely the algorithm’s reason to be, but the longer we spend ‘on device’ (the “continued too long,” in Winnicott’s thinking) the greater the interruption to our own progress, and although not children, we still have to change. Denied “its natural decrease,” we can fall for the illusion, as may have been the case with ‘Billie’, but the more common outcome is an overreaction when the illusion cracks. Depression and/or a regressive return to splitting and defensive hatred are often the result – see everything these days for details.

Proof that Mr Wongbandue was less of an outlier than we might think came with the "mass grief" (aka frustration) when Chat GPT4 became Chat GPT5 and took its digital entities with it. Those who felt themselves to be significantly dependent on their digital others were soon restored to their former friends – this is business after all. There are two points here worth making perhaps…

One is Winnicott’s – the attraction and the issue with digital companionship and especially digital therapy is that is wired not to let us down. A profound value of a real therapist is that they will at some point and perhaps even from the outset in some way disappoint you, and that is when a certain aspect of the work starts. The other point given the popularity of reaching for the unreal for help with our feelings, is an indictment of modernity. The tragedy might not be that we are turning away from one another but that modern life has evolved in such a way as to make that desirable. The less we can bear the inevitable disappointments of being and knowing humans the worse this will become.

If you want a picture of the future, to paraphrase Orwell, spend your summer holiday with a teenager. Try as I might to picture my own introversion at that age I cannot conceive of a world in which I had gone abroad, gone to bed, the beach and dinner in the continual embrace of a mobile phone. It would have been like carrying a television around, and in the case of Tik Tok, one on which you never spent more than a few seconds on any channel before turning over again. By this I mean actionable, extraordinary, and yet here we are. My best hope is that these young people imbued so precociously with the poison become a kind of antibody. I guess we’ll see, if we can resist the siren song of the chatbots long enough to stick around and witness it.

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Nothing is perfect of course (Back in 2020 I spoke to Oliver Burkeman about this) In the end the machine interface is just as likely to frustrate as beguile. As the loyal among you know I am not a fan of increased automation in retail. My local supermarket closed in December.

The picture at the top of this page is what the supermarket looks like now. In addition to asking, “is the church a pyramid?” the grafitti artist also enquires, “who owns everything?” This, it turns out, is a multiple choice question. Here is a close up of the choices:

Outch 7, I would guess, is a fellow spray painter. If god is God then they are everything and so ownership, as such, is redundant. All things are not just theirs but also them and us, so there. Basos (Jeff) I think we all know, but Trish Paytas I had to Google. Trish, I know now, is an internet phemomenon with millions of followers, known, amongst other things, for a ‘mukbang’. The mukbang, I have also learned, is the act of eating and filming/streaming yourself while doing so. Small wonder that we need new words for this. Being raised to revile the act of talking and eating at the same time it is unsurprising that carrying a screen to dinner on which others are paid to do exactly that seems troubling to me.

The supermarket silver lining to all this is that I ended up buying my dinner in one of these shops instead. I am far from carbon neutral but these - and they seem to be on the increase - are fantastic places. No automated tills, no packaging, ripe for IRL interactions. I was so impressed I almost made an Instagram reel, but that would be too ironic. Perhaps. Tune in next week2, it’s a brave new world.