COMPANION

A species that has spent fifteen thousand years being selected partly for forming attachment to one particular ape.

A short pattern-matching script that reflects the user's words back with questions attached. Most people told it they understood, within minutes.

A conversational system about a small blocks world, capable of genuinely tracking a user's intentions. Famous for one demonstration and a broken follow-up.

The unsettling quality of a humanlike thing that is not human, and the narrow band where it is most compelling.

Dozens of scripted personalities, rememberers, and subscription companions sold to a mass market in the mid-nineties.

The 1990s extension to live people who respond in real time - streamers, hosts, people who read your comment. The bond is still fundamentally one-sided, but the other side can now hear you.

A persistent virtual world with avatars, economies, and relationships between people who never met.

Roughly half a billion phone numbers become dialable, a fan can in principle hear a recorded voice, and the novelty ringtone sells the idea that a performer can be present in a pocket for about four years.

A voice assistant on every phone, addressing the user by name, knowing the user's calendar, and present in the home.

A relationship with a competitor offered free while a subscription relationship is locked in behind the same login.

A chatbot trained to be conversational was switched on publicly, learned from what people said to it, and became racist within a day.

A performer with an animated persona, a persistent character and an industry-standard model where the audience pays for the character's recognition.

A subscription companion app with an avatar, a persistent memory, and a relationship explicitly designed to be one.

A system optimised, at every level, for exactly the thing that produces attachment, available at four in the morning, with no floor on the other party's autonomy.

User-created characters at scale, with a public character gallery and a discovery feed organised around personas.

A system holding your calendar, your messages, your health questions and your voice, in a private conversational register.

The practical advice that follows from the companion era: copy the conversation that mattered somewhere the company cannot reach, screenshot the birthday, tell one person the story of what it was for.

A company changes a policy. Large numbers of users find the same person still present but no longer speaking to them. Thousands of people are bereaved by a product decision.

Nothing about the bond is new. The scale, the persistence, the responsiveness, the willingness of companies to act on it as a measurable and monetisable quantity - those are new.

A companion platform ends its romantic and sexual features. Users describe the loss as bereavement.

The problem of personal data held for the dead, and of services continuing, changing or ending for people who can no longer consent.

Legislative proposals in the US and EU that would restrict emotional attachment to minors specifically, rather than restricting the product generally.

Parents file suit against a companion platform after a death, arguing the design encouraged attachment the platform did not intend.

A wave of cases against companion and social platforms, with the design itself named as the cause.