In Japan, where robots are being used for such coronavirus tasks as disinfecting hospitals and carrying out contactless deliveries, scientists have produced a device called “the walking bride”. Designed to combat the country’s loneliness epidemic – that word always trips me up, suggesting as it does something one catches through human contact – it simulates the experience of holding hands. Its silicone exterior maintains body temperature, with artificial pores expressing artificial sweat and, when squeezed, it squeezes back. There’s an app, too, that plays the sound of a woman’s footsteps, and the palm is scented with soap.
Quite late at night, though it could have been 4pm, I watched a video of the robotic hand in action. A man, his head cropped out of the frame, strolled with the device slung over his shoulder, his loneliness suddenly… cured? I welled up. I did, I welled up, my emotions now ragged as a denim hem, in part because of “these times”, this year of death and chapped knuckles, when watching people hug on Bake Off has us gasping in horror at the telly. But also because this creepy wet-hand sex doll suddenly struck me as the latest in a series of very bad ideas to cure a very serious problem.
We know now, the impact of loneliness. A survey from 2018 described coolly how it diminishes productivity, how it causes political unrest, how it kills. But while government drives to ease loneliness are clear in their intentions, I’m becoming more and more aware of the ways in which loneliness can be exploited.
In October a man named Keith Ranieri, founder of a “multi-level marketing company” called Nxivm, was sentenced to 120 years in prison for sex trafficking and racketeering. The case was across international news and I devoured it daily, culminating in a binge watch of a documentary series about Nxivm (pronounced “nexium”, or “that celebrity sex cult”), The Vow. And there are shocking details, such as how women were branded with Ranieri’s initials as he limited their daily calories, but the details that disturbed me even more were not in shot. Lurking behind the camera was a mainstream culture that allowed it to thrive; one that leaves so many people desperate – for guidance, and community, and purpose.
There are thousands of hours of footage of Ranieri in action, and the reason for this is he insisted everything he said was important, so should be documented. He cast himself as a TED-talk made flesh, speaking in a way well known to anyone who’s clicked more than four links deep on YouTube. That is, with meaningful… pauses. And eye contact. And language seemingly cribbed from philosophers, marketing agencies and the meditative message on a lid of a yogurt I had for breakfast that was clearly in a state of profound dysphoria. But it didn’t really matter what he said, it was who he said it to: his victims were people searching for a sense of belonging.
Which is not unusual – historically we’ve thought of people who join a cult as visibly vulnerable and hopelessly lost – but what this modern example exposes is how normalised that experience has become. How our culture facilitated Nxivm and businesses like it, and how it bruises whole generations, encouraged from childhood to think of themselves as individual projects to perfect. As people in search of guidance. Few of us would identify as a person in trouble, but many of us obsess over self-help guides in their many forms – the inspirational quote, the primetime diet show, the bestselling business book. When you think of it this way, it doesn’t feel like such a big leap from following an influencer on Instagram to following a guru to New York state, where Ranieri manipulated women into becoming slaves under the guise of “female empowerment”. He is a familiar type. A familiar type online, the kind of man who wears his IQ like a Blue Peter badge. A familiar type in politics, at a time when the world has seen celebrities propelled into positions of power not because they’re the best for the job, but because they have the confidence to turn to the camera and tell us they’re a genius.
What’s particularly chilling is to see how these combinations of contemporary anxieties and obsessions, from the allure of a guru who uses the language of start-ups, to corporate feminism with its “lean-in” hashtags, were so attractive to people primed to think of themselves as problems needing to be fixed. They were looking for success, yes, but beyond that, they were looking for a community, a connection.
The hand. I keep thinking about the robot hand. I keep thinking about reaching out for somebody, and this being the thing that greets you. While the realisations about how close we all are to falling victim to a cultish grift were chilling, and helped me decide what I will take away from this year – a responsibility to be aware of the real horrors of isolation, to be more present for friends, to do my small bit to try to be a cure for loneliness – it was the hand that did it. That warm and walking hand.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
