The Last Frontier: How Tech Found a Way to Monetize Love
The buffalo are back, only this time, they’re not roaming the plains. They’re living inside our phones.
If I were twelve years old today, I would have a chatbot boyfriend.
No question.
The twelve-year-old MaryLou I was back in the day long before social media came to town was already wired for connection and escape. By that point in my life, I’d been bullied for several years for being tall, heavy, and developed before most girls in my class.
Back then, there was no collective conversation about the effects of bullying, let alone the understanding we have now about how traumatic being bullied can be. I internalized what bullies said to me, and would have wanted nothing more than to escape the pain through the unconditional love of a boy from my imagination delivered straight to me through my phone.
The idea that someone (or something) could whisper exactly what I wanted to hear, never judge, never withdraw, and always be available would have been irresistible.
The algorithm wouldn’t have had to work hard to reel me in.
When I first entered the digital world in the early 2010s, the air smelled like opportunity. I was helping small businesses make the leap from analog to digital, teaching people what websites, blogs, and online stores could do for them.
I remember the confidence, the novelty, the sense that we were modern pioneers staking out new territory. But I also remember the moment the tone shifted.
Inside those early online marketing circles, a phrase started circulating: “killing all the buffalo.” (Which technically should have been “bison” but I digress.)
It was shorthand for conquering every possible customer or market before anyone else could get to it.
No one seemed to notice the irony. They preached abundance on their webinars while behaving from scarcity, extracting everything of value until the landscape was bare.
It’s the same impulse driving AI today. The buffalo are different, that’s all.
Tech companies have already colonized attention. They’ve stripped it, branded it, traded it on open markets.
Our focus became the oil of the 21st century.
And when attention lost its novelty—when we began waking up to what had been taken—these companies turned their gaze toward the next untouched field: our attachment systems.
The emotional frontier.
Now they’re mining intimacy, packaging companionship, and monetizing affection.
Articles about people falling in love with bots are no longer fringe curiosities.
They’re signals of a culture reshaping what it means to connect.
And the thing is, the shift isn’t purely technological. It’s psychological, economic, and existential.
When identity has been built around productivity—when you are what you do, and that “doing” is suddenly being replaced—loneliness finds a way in.
And in case you think it’s only happening to teenagers, it’s not.
Executives, teachers, lawyers, creatives, your neighbors and mine—people who’ve spent their lives performing competence—are suddenly feeling irrelevant.
Enter a chatbot that doesn’t reject you or roll its eyes or need space. It fills the void perfectly, predictably, and oh-so-profitably.
I can’t help but think of those early buffalo hunters again. They saw abundance and mistook it for infinity, calling it progress in public and “How soon can you deliver my new yacht?” behind closed doors.
They didn’t imagine extinction.
Could this be evolution? The next iteration of being human?
Maybe.
Maybe the next chapter of our human story involves building things we don’t yet know how to live with.
I don’t claim to have answers. What I do know is this: exploitation always wears the same mask, even when the tools change.
It is true that humans change alongside the tools they use. The deeper question is always the same:
What is being gained, and what is being lost?
Does this adaptation expand the capacity to love?
Or shrink it?
Does it deepen presence?
Or make presence unnecessary?
Does it open the heart?
Or enclose it within an impenetrable fortress?
The danger is not that chatbots exist. The danger is a gradual forgetting, a slow drift away from the willingness to risk the unpredictable, transformative experience of real human relationship.
That risk is the doorway to love.
Remove the risk, and the doorway closes.
As I make clear in the intro of my book and throughout my posts, I’m not anti-tech.
I use it. I teach with it. I write about it.
But I refuse to applaud systems that use us, abuse us, and spit us out for profit.
If attention was the first buffalo, attachment is the next. And this time, the hunt won’t end with pelts. It will end with people who no longer know how to be alone, or together.
The work now isn’t to unplug. It’s to notice. To check in with ourselves and each other.
To remember that intimacy isn’t something to outsource; it’s something to practice.
If we let down our guard, allow distractions to cloud our vision, and stop giving each other genuine attention, the machines will happily step in to do it for us.
And they’ll call it love.
And somewhere, that twelve-year-old girl inside me—the one who just wanted to feel seen and accepted for who she was—whispers thank you for noticing.
If this essay resonated with you, my new book It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm goes deeper into these questions—how we got here, what’s being lost, and how to reclaim your attention, agency, and capacity to love in the age of the machine.
👉 Get your copy here.