The Hyperconnected Desert: How AI and Plastic Networking Are Killing Our Humanity
When even our empathy is generated by Artificial Intelligence, networking becomes a desert of appearances. A reflection on how technological advancement managed to hollow out what was already superficial and an invitation to become human again.
Imagine a professional colleague you met in the digital environment a few years ago. He calls you to say he's been fired. He's scared, lost, and above all, feeling invisible.
Just before the call, he had posted text venting about his termination. The post quickly garnered over a hundred interactions.
The problem began when he scrolled down to read the responses.
Instead of support, your friend found a wall of robotic coldness. Almost all comments were identical variations of the same standard phrase generated by artificial intelligence: "I'm so sorry this happened to you! I'm sure brilliant new opportunities will come your way soon..."
You hang up with a motivational message, but both of you know, deep down, that it was just "lip service."
This is a common scene today and it was while navigating LinkedIn that I had the uncomfortable insight that motivated me to write this article. I realized that technological advancement achieved the feat of hollowing out what was already superficial.
Before the explosion of generative AI, however clichéd or purely perfunctory social media comments were, at least people had the human work of stopping, typing, and spending a few seconds of their day thinking about you. There was a micro-intention there. There was a minimum investment of time and biological energy.
Today, we've eliminated even that small effort. We've delegated our empathy to an algorithm. We hit a button so a machine can "feel" something for us and write an empty message of consolation.
The result is a bizarre scenario: robots writing texts for people who don't have time to read them, while the algorithm applauds the "interaction."
Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman explains this dynamic through his foundational concept of "Liquid Modernity." Bauman shows us that in the contemporary world, social structures, values, and human relationships have lost their solidity. Everything flows, changes rapidly, and wasn't made to last.
According to the philosopher, social networks created the illusion of community, but actually offer only connections. The difference is crucial: a community requires commitment, negotiation, and mutual effort. A connection requires only a click. You can add or delete people without suffering the real consequences of human coexistence.
By automating our reactions with AI, we take Bauman's liquidity to the absolute extreme. We create simulations of interactions. We pretend to care to keep our profile active and relevant to the algorithm, while the other person pretends to feel comforted by a machine.
We build networks with thousands of contacts that function, paradoxically, as a hyperconnected desert. If we let tools respond for us, we surrender critical thinking and become passive spectators of our own lives.
We cannot passively accept this theater of automatic avatars. It's urgent to rescue the weight of eye-to-eye contact, active listening, and the healthy discomfort of a real conversation: one that doesn't have a predictable script calculated by a language model.
That's why I want to transform this reflection into an open invitation to you reading this blog.
If you're part of my network and going through a difficult professional moment, if you want to debate a project idea that still seems abstract, or if you simply need an honest conversation, without ulterior commercial motives or vanity metrics involved: send me an email or direct message.
Let's set up a coffee. It can be virtual or in-person, as long as our presence is real.
No more automated plastic connections. We need to be human again, especially in moments when the people around us most need humanity.
