An Unmistakable Modern Trend
It is a trend that says much, not only about China, but about the modern world.
Older readers may remember the Tamagotchi craze of 1997 and 1998, wherein young people across the world acquired virtualized pets – essentially carrying around in their pocket a simple virtualized cat that had to be fed, petted and generally looked after. If the device was not taken out and attended to at certain times of the day, it would “die”. This extraordinary development was broadly seen at the time as a passing craze. In reality, it became a core part of the modern world.
The smartphone, it might be argued, is the heir to the Tamagotchi. It demands its owner’s attention, it beeps when it requires tending to and it provides a steady stream of activity without ever really managing to be a substitute for genuine human connection. In the online world, where dating apps have replaced the pub or the nightclub, the absence of connection to a real human being has become almost the norm.
What is interesting, then, is the manner in which this is being reversed with the virtual parent trend: the virtual parents are real human beings. They are just not the person’s actual parents.
The parent-child relationship, of course, is the most fundamental and indissoluble in all of nature. Studies show that mother and child produce powerful bonding hormones in very early childhood. In most settings, the relationship between a child and his or her parents will be the most formative of the child’s life.
For the parents' part, the urge to reproduce and have children is the most powerful evolutionary instinct the human race has – one that has caused countless fictional and real wars, let alone millions of heartbreaking sacrifices on the part of parents to save or advance their children’s lives.
What has taken place, then, when – as the BBC reports – hundreds of thousands of Chinese adults have become so dissatisfied with their own parent-child relationship, as children, that they seek a facsimile of it with complete strangers in adulthood?
Part of the problem, of course, is specifically Chinese. Back to Vincent:
“The Shanghai-based web developer says he finds the weekly calls with his parents stressful. They often criticise his career choice because they believe a government job would be more stable. And they ask him when he's bringing a girlfriend home. ‘From the moment the phone call begins, all my actions and choices are wrong, and something to be corrected by them.’”
“I believe that a little bit of warmth is better than nothing”, Vincent tells the BBC.
China’s fiercely competitive culture – it is the nation that gave the world the concept of the tiger mom – combined with its communist ethos which for years regulated families into the one-child policy, cannot be ignored. It is certainly arguable that when you, for years, force parents into having one child only, the pressure on that child to succeed and the investment made into them by their parents is magnified in such a way as to pile the pressure upon them.
Yet to blame Chinese culture alone would be too easy, especially in a West where similar trends are emerging.
The Rise of the AI Boyfriend
If the Chinese example is instructive in any way, it is perhaps in that it allows us to observe that for the young people seeking virtual parents, the virtual reality is superior to the actual reality in which they must deal with complicated human relationships. In the West, many young people are doing the exact same thing via the rise of the AI boyfriend or the AI girlfriend.
These relationships with computers posing as people have an obvious appeal to those who engage in them: the person with the AI boyfriend or girlfriend gets the perfect partner, the absence of physical closeness aside. The AI relationship is one of one-way support and reassurance. The partner does not have a life crisis, or dying parents, or lose their job, or suffer depression. The relationship is not balanced but provides unconditional support and reassurance in one direction only.
The parallel with Vincent’s virtual parents is obvious: They provide him with the praise and the moral support he seeks, but by contrast he will have no obligation to visit them in a retirement home or change their diapers when they become incontinent.
Tamagotchi's Children
In many ways the story of Vincent Zhang and his virtual parents is a natural evolution of the Tamagotchi craze of almost three decades past. What defines these relationships is one-way control: the Tamagotchi was never going to run away, or get the neighbor’s cat pregnant, or bite a child, or get rabies. Its behavior was predictable: feed it at 10 p.m., or it dies. Pet it before midday or it gets lonely. Predictable inputs resulted in predictable outputs, without any of the mess of an actual relationship either with an animal or a human.
A quote attributed (dubiously) to an American sex worker goes like this: “He’s not paying you for the sex, he is paying you to leave when it is over.” The appeal of the prostitute has always been in part that for the customer, the physical interaction comes without any of the emotional obligations to another person that have always formed part of human interactions. This same phenomenon applies to the increasingly virtual world and the virtual relationships within it: they permit relationships where one person “takes” and the other entity “gives”.
The doom here is being clearly manifested around us: falling fertility rates indicate a declining hunger for our most primitive and essential instinct. Falling marriage rates indicate a decline in the desire to partake in two-way relationships. The sex recession amongst young people in the West indicates a generation that are unable or unwilling to perform even the most rudimentary courtship rituals, instead subsisting on a virtualized world or pornography.
It is not hard to see in which direction all of the civilizational arrows are pointing. Vincent Zhang’s real parents might well be challenging to deal with – but they are at least real. His relationship with his virtual parents is just that – virtual. It is not very encouraging for people who are instinctively pessimistic about our civilizational trajectory.
