There's a wacky
new startup idea: human friendship. By signing up to an app, you get
paid $20 an hour to be somebody's friend. You hang out with them, eat together and even go out socialising with the killer new app taking
America by storm. I spoke to the founder of Frendli to find out more.
"Dude,
you're disrupting the market, your startup is worth 20 bill and
climbing, you must feel like you're the second coming of Steve Jobs right now." I say,
fistbumping the camera. I am conducting the video call in a bog.
Dragonflies keep bumping into me as I stand up to my waist in cooling
swampwater.
"I'm just a guy with a big heart. You
know, I was there back in the pandemic and thought to myself; bro. What
if the Deliveroo driver could stay for a few beers? Its human connection
that matters, and is what's missing in America."
"Some say that your workers-"
"They aren't workers, they're called frends."
"I'll
just say workers. So, your workers are being exploited almost as bad as
your customers. That they are forced to go to meet people's families,
posing as their partners-"
"That's against our T's and C's. Frendli is specifically a friendship delivery model, there is no exploitation on our service."
"Well, people are getting exploited though, aren't they? Off the books, cash in hand. You haven't heard the stories?"
"I thought this was going to be an interview for Business Magazine."
"It is." I lied. I had just made up Business Magazine to talk to this scumbag.
"Our
brand values ensure our frends understand boundaries. That the
customers agree not to break contract by pressuring frends into
situations they aren't comfortable with or vice versa. This is backed up by our rating
systems that ensure our users and frends have a great time."
"Cut
it out. Your workers are constantly taken to bars and forced to drink for hours on end, sometimes they arrive at remote
locations, or they are pressured to do what your customers want. You can't
be rented out to be somebodies friend. As soon as money's involved it
changes the balance of power. The person paying for the friendship resents it, the person acting like a friend resents it. It's bullshit." I say, getting a video up on my other phone. It is of one of the workers for Frendli getting invited to a party and given a $100 to be a table for the night.
"Look. I'm going to
stop this interview now. My legal team will be in touch." He said,
closing the zoom call. I look around, spotting a nearby duck.
"Can you believe this shit?" I say, before submerging myself in the bog.
As
I walk the forest trail, I think about the commodification of human
flesh. Warehouses split into rooms, livestreaming girls masturbating for
hours on end whilst organised crime collects profits, invests in more pornography infrastructure, potential sites for virtual sex workers to operate
from across the globe. Whatever organised crime does illegally, Silicon
Valley follows years later. What if the exploitation of women could be
backed with hundreds of millions of dollars and use technology to shave the edges off? The
technology itself is always meaningless, instead it is how far its owners will go to take advantage of humanity's laziness, greed and fantasy. From delivering food to human furniture, it
is less a question of what the business idea is, but the willingness to
cater to the depths of humanity's depravity.
The
ultimate Silicon Valley startup is an app where you can buy babies and
children at an auction. People would make a living from the premium
experience, showing videos of themselves pregnant, dietary plans, DNA
analysis. At the cheaper end of the market, you could buy a baby for a
hundred bucks. This killer startup idea was taking a free resource and
adding value through customer empowerment. Some would complain,
especially when babies were eaten, but in the end, weren't a majority of
sellers and customers better off via the transaction that had been enabled
through the free market?
You might
think to yourself, there's no such thing as an app. Its just an icon
that takes you to a website. And you'd be right. But what if, we
actually embedded a website into the human body? What if, we wrote lines
of code between the double helix of DNA? What if you could reprogram
life itself to be an Alienware laptop? I don't know. But what I do know
is, the leeches that had attached themselves to my legs had swollen up
to the size of balloons filled with my blood. It made me reflect on the concept of human friendship. Was it symbiotic or parasitic? Or something else entirely.
I drive the Hyundai around the streets of Tulsa, reflecting on my own lack of a social life. I was a travel writer with multiple mental health disorders and substance abuse issues, but I was also just a man. A simple man, with great hair and exquisite fashion sense. I was wearing those sunglasses where you could flip the shades up from top of the frame. I kept pulling up to traffic lights, looking at the driver next to me and tilted the shades up, mouthing 'wow', as if to say, 'wow, you seem cool, maybe we can be friends'. After several hours of doing this nobody had asked to be my friend. Maybe I had been wrong to dismiss the founder of Frendli as a greedy midwit preying on the desperation of lonely people, but actually he was an entrepeneur delivering a great service to the post-covid generation. Historically sex work was a way of selling something that wasn't readily available, but in the present, even a conversation with someone else had become a rare commodity. It was only natural for somebody to get paid for it. Perhaps this kind of social prostitution was the way forward. For sale, emotions, never used.
