Parasocial Relationships Online
Bibliography of links on the evolution of parasocial relationships online: more than social media acquaintances or influencer-consumption, less than true social relationships, typically with money involved somewhere; implications for the future of human relationships/media and artificial intelligence?
“Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance”, 1956 (Lonesome Gal)
AIBO; ilo“The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care: Many facilities are using nostalgic environments as a means of soothing the misery, panic, and rage their residents experience”; “What Robots Can—and Can’t—Do for the Old and Lonely: For elderly Americans, social isolation is especially perilous. Will machine companions fill the void?”; “My Parents’ Dementia Felt Like the End of Joy. Then Came the Robots”
“11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”)”, Tim Feriss
Targeted Individuals: “United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers”
Munchausen Syndrome: “The Lying Disease: Why Would Someone Want to Fake a Serious Illness on the Internet?”; The boy who convinced his friend to murder him via false online identities
Stans: “Obsessed Benedict Cumberbatch Fans Tried to Have Me Fired: My encounter with internet fandom, and the rise of the celebrity relationship conspiracy theory”; “How a Fake Baby Is Born: For years, women on the internet have been writing conspiracy theories about celebrity pregnancies. What sparks them?”; “[Adam Driver Standom] Adam Driver Makes Fun of a Fan’s Gift in the New Yorker”; see also the British monarchy, “Babygate”/Sarah Palin
“Violence and the Sacred: College [and mimetic desire] as an incubator of Girardian terror”, Dan Wang
“What to Make of Rod McKuen?”; “The Instagram Poet Outselling Homer 10 to 1: Meet Rupi Kaur, author of the ubiquitous Milk and Honey”
Economics:
Cameo: “How Cameo Turned D-List Celebs Into a Monetization Machine”; “How Cameo Blew Up During Quarantine” (but then struggled); “How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party: For the very rich, even the world’s biggest performers—Beyoncé, Drake, Jennifer Lopez, Andrea Bocelli—are available, at a price”
Eugene Wei: “Status as a Service”; “TikTok and the Sorting Hat”; “Seeing like An Algorithm”
Turner Novak: “The Rise of TikTok and Understanding Its Parent Company ByteDance”, “Pinduoduo and Vertically Integrated Social Commerce”;
“Making is Show Business now”, Alex Danco
Reaction video: “Why do people like videos of other people reacting to videos?”
Streaming:
“The Blurred Lines of Parasocial Relationships: The disappearing divide between ‘followers’ and ‘friends’”; “Why Can’t We Be Friends: Podcasts and other forms of “parasocial” media reframe friendship as monetized self-care”
“Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer”
“The Chinese Farmer Who Live-Streamed Her Life and Made a Fortune”
“The app that lets you pay to control another person’s life”
Virtual Youtuber: “The overworked humans behind China’s virtual influencers: Hidden behind the perfect faces of China’s $16 billion virtual celebrity industry is an angry, overworked labor force.”; Kizuna AI/Hololive Production/Nijisanji/VShojo (“It’s rare to hear <70% female for chat products…”); “How Chinese influencers use AI digital clones of themselves to pump out content: Questions over honesty and legality as livestreamers, particularly in online shopping, use avatars to boost their earnings”
Gambling: “An NFL linebacker quit football to sell Pokémon cards, now he’s making millions”
Chess: “How Magnus Carlsen Turned Chess Skill Into a Business Empire”/“The New Economics of Chess”; “Chess.com finds streaming success”; “The Most Popular Chess Streamer on Twitch: The former chess prodigy Hikaru Nakamura was widely disliked on the professional circuit. Then he started streaming”; “The [Alexandra] Botez Gambit: An enterprising chess streamer finds her opening”
Porn:
Mirrors and computation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.
ASMR: “How A.S.M.R. Became a Sensation: The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon.” (cf. Lonesome Gal); “Inside the secretly vibrant business of porn MP3s: Video sites like Pornhub and OnlyFans get all the attention, but audio smut is a surprisingly profitable enterprise.”
AI Dungeon; Replika (eg.); “How it feels to have your mind hacked by an AI”; Xiaoice (eg.); “A 23-year-old Snapchat influencer used OpenAI’s technology to create an AI version of herself that will be your girlfriend for $1 per minute”; “A Failed AI Girlfriend Product, and My Lessons”; “AI Boyfriend”; “She Is in Love With ChatGPT”
“In Defense of Chatbot Romance”, Kaj Sotala
Only Fans: “Porn Takes On a Personal Touch in the Pandemic”; “When Influencers Switch Platforms—and Bare It All”; “A day in the life of an OnlyFans creator [Aella] who makes up to $100,000 a month off explicit content”; “The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans: Clever marketers have figured out how easy it is to simulate online intimacy at scale, ventriloquizing alluring models with cheap, offshore labor”; “The Sugar Babies of Stanford University: from overnight social media fame to sugar-baby side hustles, America’s elite young women are changing the rules of sex and class”; “Dispatches from the Rap Wars: My 18 months inside one of Chicago’s most notorious gangs”; “This Is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale: Hired as customer service reps, these freelancers were instead tasked with luring in the lonely and lovestruck through a network of dating and hookup sites”; “Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream—The fast-growing platform represents the creator economy at its most bluntly transactional, where sex is just another unit of content to monetize”; “I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty”; “Dan’s the man: Why Chinese women are looking to ChatGPT for love”; “Onlyfans Figured Out How To Scale Connection”
One can note that the result of 2022 Stable Diffusion democratizing human-level art & porn has been many artists (existing & new) adopting it secretly to save their labor, and angry fans/commissioners exposing them. But as the tools get better, “Homo hypocritus” will find a way, whether it’s ‘farm-to-table’, ‘bean-to-bar’, ‘extra virgin virgin olive oil’, ‘fair trade’, ‘sustainable’ anything, ‘CO2 credits’, fitness instructors, muscled Hollywood actors, pro wrestling/cycling/baseball etc. They’ll pretend to be ‘hand-made’ premium mediocre goods, and we’ll pretend to pay anywhere close to what that’d actually cost to be so good. (Do not summon up that which you are unwilling to put down!)
“Livestreaming monetisation models, aka, What do camgirls have in common with Twitch streamers?”; “Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling”; Mia Malkova
“God-Shaped Hole”, 0hpl
See Also: “Littlewood’s Law and the Global Media”, “The Melancholy of Subculture Society”, “GPT-3 Creative Fiction”