Fake Connection

The sales pitch of various “social” websites is that they provide you with human connection in the form of “friends,” “followers,” and so forth. I definitely bought into this idea once upon a time, but I no longer buy into this narrative.

The thing about the Internet is that you can be whatever you want. You can put anything you’d like on your LinkedIn profile, and most people aren’t going to run a background check to verify that any of the bullet points you list are actually true. It’s long been a meme that people tend to embellish their resumes, but on LinkedIn it’s dialed up a few notches. Research confirms this intuition: 34% of LinkedIn users admit to lying on their profiles, with 11% confessing their profile is “almost entirely made up.”¹ When it comes to resumes more broadly, a staggering 64.2% of Americans have lied at least once.²

The funny thing is, nowadays if you try to get a job and you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, you’re considered a weirdo (or not a real person at all). LinkedIn is seen as authentic social proof, yet reality couldn’t be farther from the truth.

What is Human Connection? #

We humans are social creatures who crave deep connection. Connecting with others means different things to different people, and there are various forms of human connection. We can generally divide it into two major categories: physical and non-physical connection. Physical connection includes presence, touch, eye contact, smell, and so forth. On the Internet, you cannot experience these forms of connection.

Okay, with video you can sort of do eye contact, but it’s not the same—you’re looking at a screen, and you can’t look at a screen and into the camera at the same time. Having the camera in the screen creates only the illusion of eye contact.

The non-physical forms of connection are trickier to define: we usually feel this kind of connection through conversations with people, but sometimes we feel it from a distance as an observer.

For example, you might feel a sense of connection to an actor playing a character in a TV show or film. To you, this connection feels real, but it’s non-reciprocal: it only exists in your mind. The character on the screen isn’t real in the sense that you can interact with them—it’s just a recording of someone pretending to be something for a little while. It’s also extra fake because the way characters are dramatized and how they behave in TV and film is often unrealistic. These parasocial relationships are surprisingly common—52% of people report having at least one strong parasocial relationship, with participants rating these one-sided connections as more emotionally fulfilling than weak in-person relationships.³

But still, it might feel real, at least in the moment you’re watching that show. The various social websites are essentially the same thing: a recorded fake interaction between someone who’s playing a part (acting) and you receiving the output of that performance. It might be a Reddit comment, an Instagram photo or video, or a LinkedIn post. But in the end, it’s all the same: fake connection, with actors playing some role in their heads, and you receiving some version of it.

This is completely unlike the kind of connection you have with real people in real life—people you actually physically interact with, converse with, and exchange ideas with.

Outside of the physical space of connection, we can divide non-physical connection into two categories: passive (one-sided) and active (two-sided). The majority of fake Internet human connection is of the one-sided passive variety, where you either blast your ideas out into the universe or consume someone else’s performances. We’re spending an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes daily on social media⁴—that’s 35.8% of our total online time devoted to these largely performative interactions.

Two-sided active connections do occur online, though they represent a vanishingly small percentage of what actually happens in practice. Even when some random person on the Internet “engages” with you, replies to your comment, or smashes the like button, this is only pseudo-connection. You don’t really know this person—it’s essentially an anonymous entity that might very well be an LLM. And sure, you may know people in real life, and you might sometimes smash the like button on their Instagram vacation photos, but this isn’t genuine connection either. You’re just trying to stay on their radar by giving them a drip-feed ego boost so you can call upon them for real connection sometime later. This is what the social rules of Instagram dictate. It’s like paying the Internet attention fee to your “friends” so you can stay relevant in their strange social system.

And what if you’re just engaging with automated social media management tools which many of the big accounts use (i.e., bots)? The bot problem is worse than most realize: bad bots now constitute 37% of all web traffic, with some estimates suggesting Twitter/X could be up to 64% bots.⁵ Instagram alone has 95 million bot accounts, about 4.75% of all accounts.⁶ And those statistics are only the “bad” bots—that doesn’t even include the “good” bots (i.e., the ones that are used by the big accounts to manage their accounts and “engage” with their followers). Sometimes those bots are actually humans who are hired to manage the accounts (“social media managers”), but they’re not really any different from the software bots in terms of the authenticity of the connection.

It’s Not All Fake #

But here’s where nuance matters. Despite everything I’ve just described, the Internet can be used for real human connection. You can have FaceTime calls with people. You can use the Internet to make plans for real physical interactions. Personally, this is how I use the Internet—not as a way to collect friends and make the numbers go up, but as a way to actually interact with people in a non-performative way.

I suppose this blog serves as a counter-example, though given that I don’t collect statistics, have comments or likes, or measure anything, I don’t think it really counts as “social media” or the like. This is more like a journal for myself that I also put on the Internet because I think it might be interesting or useful to others. I simply enjoy writing, and I think some of what I say might be helpful. Is my blog real or fake? That’s for you to judge, but I try to write as authentically as I can.

Perhaps I’m still doing some sort of performance: while most of what I write here is stream-of-consciousness style writing, I do polish it enough to avoid putting things on the Internet that a current or future employer (or whatever) might find and use against me, simply because I too have to exist under capitalism and play by an unwritten set of rules about which thoughts and feelings are acceptable and which are not based on the current social norms. Research shows that 62% of university students report a significant gap between their online persona and reality,⁷ experiencing mental stress from maintaining these dual identities. I’m at least aware of my own gap.

I have friends I’ve known for several decades, and we keep in touch through the Internet. We all mostly live in different parts of the world, and we occasionally see each other in person, but most of our interactions stay in cyberspace because that’s what’s practically available. I generally consider these connections to be real, but none of us use any social website to keep in touch—we just have group and individual chats, with FaceTime or phone calls. If Facebook or LinkedIn were deleted tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect any of these connections.

A Test for Connection #

That previous thought leads to a simple test to determine whether a connection is real: if the website, app, or platform you’re using suddenly disappeared, would you still interact with that person? Is your “connection” simply a product of the particular venue, or is the connection a real thing outside the medium? If you delete your Facebook account, how many of your “friends” are you going to keep in touch with? How many will reach out to you? How many will you reach out to?

For example, I use iMessage and FaceTime to talk to my sister, but if Apple suddenly imploded or decided to shut down its chat products, I wouldn’t stop talking to my sister—I’d just find another way.

Are your Reddit buddies going to follow you to different websites? Probably not. Research on platform migration shows that within 2 months of switching platforms, users cease communication with nearly 50% of their former contacts.⁸ Are your Instagram pals going to follow you over to LinkedIn and continue liking your LinkedIn posts about how much you love your job? Doubtful.

But Will You Miss Out? #

Many people feel crippled by FOMO (the fear of missing out). In fact, 69% of Americans have experienced FOMO, with 73% of millennials spending money they don’t have to avoid it.⁹ I’ve never felt this way, which I suppose is why I don’t worry about not having an Instagram account. I don’t feel the need to go on vacation and post the photos to let everyone know that I went to Bali for the pics. I did previously have an Instagram account where I posted my vacation photos, and it never led to any meaningful connections or interactions. It was just a bunch of bots (both literally and metaphorically) clicking buttons trying to grow their own followings.

Granted, my experience isn’t representative of everyone’s. I know people who have actually made real friends or gotten dates from random people messaging them on Instagram—that just hasn’t happened for me. This probably has to do with not signaling the normal cultural signals that people want to see in their Instagram buddies. And, frankly, I’m not particularly photogenic, so I don’t “bring anything to the table” in terms of what people want to see from their Instagram buddies in their ad stream.

Some people do legitimately see value in these social websites for creating real connection, but they simply don’t work for me. Nobody swipes right on me on dating apps, so I don’t see the point in using them. Nobody tries to slide into my DMs, so I don’t bother staring at ads for 12 hours a day just to stay relevant in the fake social dynamics of Instagram hoping I get a message from the sort of person I want to get a message from. I simply don’t care about the worthless currency of follower and like counts and choose not to invest in it. I’d rather buy Bitcoin or the S&P 500 with my money.

Some people have used these websites as tools to extract real gains: some have used them to become somewhat famous and make real money, or level up in the corporate ladder dynamics by job hopping or selling some widgets with the help of their LinkedIn clout. But the people who are insanely successful at this are a tiny percentage of the overall population—97.5% of YouTubers don’t earn enough to reach the U.S. poverty line,¹⁰ and only 4.27% of Instagram users that consider themselves “influencers” can live entirely on their platform income.¹¹ Those stats also don’t account for the inherent survivorship bias, where successful accounts are likely to stick around and unsuccessful ones will quickly churn (see also the Lindy effect). Most of us have to actually do something useful in real life to make money.

Generally speaking, the best way to earn a living is to have a normal job and build real connections with people. And for the people who do find success on YouTube, Instagram, or whatever: I can assure you that very few of them are fully authentic. They’re actors playing a part, performing, and telling you what you want to hear within their particular vertical and they have become experts at generating the niche content that is necessary to make their numbers go up. Sure, some might be more authentic than others, but to succeed you often must become a watered-down version of a caricature of a human playing a character. That is the only way to appeal to a wide audience with a wide variety of tastes and interests.

Watering the Grass #

One of my favorite aphorisms is the following: the grass isn’t actually greener on the other side—it’s greenest wherever you water it. This is especially true of human connection: it comes down to passivity versus active connection. Many people simply don’t want to take risks (fear of failure) or have become accustomed to so much attention they feel they can simply sit back and let things come to them.

Reality doesn’t work that way. To develop real, deep connection beyond some shallow superficial existence, you need to be an active participant in your life and your relationships. You need to be in the driver’s seat, and drive through reality rather than the metaverse. Like the delicate flowers of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, authentic beauty and connection require physical presence, patience, and care. Someone has carefully cultivated these beautiful specimens. You can photograph a flower, but you can’t capture its scent, the feeling of soil between your fingers, or the satisfaction of watching something grow under your attention. The digital representation is always just that—a representation, a shadow of the real thing. I suggest you visit your local gardens to touch (where appropriate), smell, and see for yourself.