The old days of Usenet and IRC and Bulletin Board Systems were a bit before my time. I read about people using it, and I will sometimes try and pretend that I know what it’s like to have been part of those discussions, but ultimately it is just a LARP.
Of course, I was part of forums like Something Awful, and Newgrounds, and a few others, so it’s not like they’re completely foreign concepts to me either, just that I ultimately think they’re different things. Something Awful and Newgrounds were gigantic forums with thousands of users, any of which could comment on whatever you’re talking about, often with an irreverant joke or meme.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but the impression that I have always gotten from reading about BBS’s and the like has always been one of closeness. These rooms were often pretty niche, with only a few dozen users, most of which you end up being pretty familiar with. You would have in-jokes private to people only in your group, you might confide personal frustrations with these people, you might consider these people your actual friends.
Which is weird, right? Because these people were ultimately strangers. While there were certainly real humans driving the computers, from each individual user’s perspective, the only thing that existed was text on a screen. Most of the time people wouldn’t meet, they wouldn’t even talk on the phone, they would literally just talk via text.
I bring this up because I realized recently that I think I found something that is analogous to the old BBS’s: Discord. Specifically, private-ish Discord servers. I am a member of a number of Discord servers; most of them are niche computer or video game things. While all of them, theoretically, have hundreds or even thousands of users, there ends up being a few “regulars” who hang out and chat with one another.
In these Discord channels, I will happily go on about the good and bad parts in my life, and the people on the other end will cheer me on, like regular friends would, and I think that they’re being honest in the process, as am I when I do the same, but it’s odd, because I don’t know any of these people. I don’t know their ages, I don’t know their real names, I don’t know their race, I don’t know what most of them do for a living. Hell, I don’t even know the gender to most of these people. They literally are only words on a screen and yet my brain does categorize them as “friends”.
I suspect that this phenomenon of AI psychosis is effectively the same brain weirdness. It is ridiculously easy to personify text; I think we evolved to recognize “communication” as a means of identifying fellow humans, and until very recently that was a reasonably good way to determine if something was a person .
I’m hardly the first to discuss parasociality. Hell, it’s not even the first time I have discussed parasociality, but I do find it interesting how humans can derive attachment and meaning out of literally nothing. We read some text on a screen, and we subsequently fill in the blanks about what we think the person is like.
Maybe we think the person is attractive, maybe we think they’re ugly, maybe we think they’re fat, maybe we think they’re bulimic. In a sense they are any of those. In a Heisenburgian sense they don’t exist until we collapse the uncertainty and dispell our assumptions, and since most of us don’t do that these people exist as weird caricatures in our head.
Maybe I am overthinking this.