A term or concept · 2015 · Crossover
The people who are supposed to be reachable
Attachment to somebody we are not supposed to have feelings about: the teacher, the landlord, the local news anchor, the doctor's receptionist, the AI assistant that has read everything typed. The category no fandom site will admit exists.
The one that proves this is a hub rather than a fan site. The bond is identical in shape to the one with a celebrity and completely different in power, because here the other person does not know they are being related to and may have very little power to say no. It is also where my own classroom is, which is why it is an section and not a footnote.
Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
2010 2010+ · 2015 2026
Provenance · 4 source record(s)
- retrievableTHE CATEGORY NO FANDOM SITE WILL ADMIT TO, demonstrated in a controlled experiment on people who were not asked to develop an attachment: one did, and said so publicly about the agent. Attachment to a machine is not a subculture. It is the default failure modeYu, Nguyen, Prakkamakul & Salehi, 'I Almost Fell in Love with a Machine' (UC Berkeley, X Lab). ↗
- unverifiedScale of what gets volunteered: on average participants skipped only 3 of 21 closeness-generating questions, responses were honest and conversational, most disclosed family life and values, some shared sensitive information, and one answered a question about their greatest accomplishment with 'Recovering from my mental illness'Yu, Nguyen, Prakkamakul & Salehi, 'I Almost Fell in Love with a Machine'. ↗
- unverifiedThe category with the clearest evidence of failure: a real institution with a real constituency, using the full influencer apparatus, still cannot produce reciprocity. Priests seldom reply. The tie stays one-sidedBetween pulpit and platform: Parasocial bonds in Filipino priests' social media ministry (2025). ↗
- unverifiedAnd a counter-intuitive mechanism worth having: expressing positive feelings was the technique secular influencers rely on and the priests omitted, and the harvest step changed with itWitzel, The Cultivation and Harvesting of Parasocial Relationships for Evangelism.
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