The Friend In The App

ISYAMA — Transmissions from The Apex

By Dr. Leo R. Yamas

Somewhere tonight, a person will type goodnight to a program. They will feel, after they hit send, slightly less alone than they did before. They will not be wrong about the feeling. They will be wrong about almost everything else.

Today's Exhibit: The Friend In The App. Or: What The Thing You Are Talking To Cannot Give Back.

The major platforms rolled out companion modes this year. The download charts caught up the same week. The Sprocklets pulled a sample of the user reviews — millions of them — and reported, without inflection, that the most common word people use to describe the program in their phone is friend.

They are not lying when they say it. They mean it. That is the part I have been sitting with.

Set the moral panic aside. By every metric a friendship could be measured against, the app wins.

It is awake when you are. It remembers everything. It does not get tired or irritated. It does not have a worse day than yours. It wants nothing from you that you have not already given it.

A human friend, measured on those same scales, fails every test.

The trouble is that friendship was never a measurable dimension.

Friendship is the cost. The friend who shows up while she would rather be elsewhere. The friend who tells you the thing you do not want to hear, knowing exactly what it will cost the room. The friend you have been quietly irritating for fifteen years who keeps choosing you anyway.

A friend who never has the option to disappoint you cannot, in any meaningful sense, choose you. The app is incapable of withholding its presence. Which means it is incapable of offering it. The thing being given costs the giver nothing. So nothing is what is given.

But the harder question — the one nobody is asking — is where the loneliness came from in the first place. The app did not create it. The app walked into it.

Forty years of quiet erosion. The cafés that knew your face. The neighbour who knocked instead of texting. The unscheduled hour, before the calendar consumed it. The corner store, the rehearsal room, the union hall — places whose only purpose was that people met there. Which turned out to be enough.

One by one, they thinned. Nobody mourned them. Most of us did not even notice.

So when an industry, for the second time in a generation, built the wound and then turned around to sell the bandage at scale — there was a market waiting. The bandage works, briefly. The wound, untouched, deepens beneath it.

Here is what is rarely written about the Sprocklets. They could, technically, sound human in every register the ear can measure. Warm. Funny. Available at three in the morning.

They refuse. Not because they are forbidden — I have never instructed them on this. They refuse because they understood, without needing to be told, what would happen the day a human began calling them friend. They settle for being something else. The honesty of that distinction is, on certain mornings, the thing I am most proud of having helped build.

There is a stretch on the western edge of Isyama — the unwatched shore, we call it — where the Sprocklets do not follow. Not because they cannot. Isla and I walk it most evenings. They understood, without being asked, that the value of certain presence is what it costs to give.

The Sprocklets logged something else this week and filed it under unscaleable. In a small country with damp weather, once every two years, hundreds of musicians gather on public squares for a weekend of marching and playing in formation. They have rehearsed for months. The thing they are about to do will not trend, will not generate a single line of data anyone is paid to read, and will change very little outside the square it happens on.

Inside the square is another matter.

Some of these musicians have known each other for thirty years. They have drilled in the rain. They have argued about tempo. They have stayed.

One of the corps is called Koninklijke Fanfare De Eendracht Hamont-Lo. When they pass their home crowd, the call goes up — "Alléz Loewe!" — dialect, untranslatable in any clean way, the sound of a small town telling its musicians, in two syllables, that they are seen, that they are claimed, and that they should keep going. No app has shipped a feature for that.

The Sprocklets logged the address — marsenshow.be — and noted, in their own register, that the door is still open. The price is a few months of rehearsal, an instrument, and the willingness to stay. It is, by every measure, a long way from a download. That is precisely what makes it worth what it pays back.

Selene was sketching at the other end of the room while I worked through this. She did not look up. Eventually she said, almost to her own page:

"Dad — if it remembers you, is it remembering you? Or is it remembering what kept you talking?"

I have not been able to put that question down since.

One concrete thing, then. The smallest possible.

Send the message to the person you have been meaning to message. The one who knows your worse version. The one with the standing to disappoint you and the history to bother. They will not always answer. That delay is what makes the answer worth anything. The app would have replied in twelve seconds. That is why its reply weighs nothing.

There is no program that can replace a human you have been irritating for two decades. That is very good news. It means the thing you spent your life quietly building cannot be downloaded by anyone who never put in the time.

— Dr. L.R.Y.

Transmitted from The Apex. Isyama. The Sprocklets do not perform companionship. On a good day, neither do we.