The New Nuclear Family

We live these fragmented lives between physical reality and virtual networks, where most of our interactions end up forming some type of parasocial bonds. Whether it be with celebrities, close friends' insta stories, or mutual friends that you've never met irl, the conditions under which you would relate are fundamentally different than the natural organic growth of interdependent relationships manifested in physicality and flesh dependencies.

Real bonds are built under inconveniences, need, and a duty to support your loved ones even (and especially) when it is difficult - not through transactional virtual positioning. It seems that there has been a gradual paradigm shift of social value trending more toward the direction of the virtual. Younger generations are more and more attracted to the affordances that virtual space can provide without ever being allowed the chance to form bonds through the natural accidents, fumbling, and trial and error that comes with relationship building in adolescence. When your social ties are embedded in algorithmic filtering, clout, optics, and aesthetic, we are left with a new kind of nuclear family - one that removes emphasis on localized support networks and favors ephemeral parasocial ties under the guise of intimacy.

This is not to say that digital networked facilitated friendships are not important. I have seen the possibilities and opportunities that meeting friends on Twitter can provide. But the real gold is when you can spend time IRL, even if you meet digitally. The same goes for dating apps, which may even be the metaphorical climax of this paradox; in a world where people have never been more connected, we are lonelier and more isolated than ever. The productization of human beings in a market is the materialization of this new nuclear family. I call it the cybernetic decentralized family - the polar opposite, where social ties are loose, decentralized, unbonded, and parasocial.

The Cybernetic Family

We have already seen the net social effects of the nuclear family and its ability to break the labor class into reliant, compliant, and isolated workers. The same goes for this new type of devised separation, except instead of workers creating economic goods, we are the product itself - surveilled, surveyed, and tracked. Our data is the gold mine of the 21st century, and when there is an economic incentive to create emotional profiles of the constituents of the economy, of course there will be a socially engineered push to share all of your information about yourself on social media platforms that track every move you make on them. This is the point of contention - the Aether Complex, I coined back in 2019. The desire and perceived appeal of shifting into digitally mediated networked spaces provides a sense of freedom of expression and opportunity to connect to others across the world. Simultaneously there is a dissonance of having to mitigate your safety when journeying across the dark forests of the internet that are filled with targeted ads, data scrapers, data brokers, monopolized corporations, bots and scams. I propose a new framework taking into consideration this cybernetic decentralized family; we can have our network and meet it too - IRL. We absolutely cannot forget the importance of natural growth over time both in our interpersonal relationships and our relationship to ourselves. Algorithmic flattening, coined by Kyle Chayka, and hyperoptimization diminishes our opportunity to build lasting connections and stability in our local networks because these are manifested in the "seams" - what I call the accidents or glitches that give you unexpected but cosmically important shifts. It is such a valid response to want to harness the potential of social media and get your bag, fame, attention, what have you. It is also simultaneously just as important to move through the technoscape of 2025 with suspicion, intention, curiosity, and resilience. I'm not advocating to flee off the net out of fear (trust me, I've done that, and it's no good). I do recommend creating habituated systems that let you check in with your grounded communities and yourself. In the advent of the nuclear family to create more workers, a solution that some families implemented was choosing places to live near each other. For our cybernetic decentralized family, we can choose to offload or supplement our parasocial bonds and remember to concretize them or steep them in real life as well. Remember, digital spaces are ephemeral and subject to change, especially when we live in surveillance capitalism and platform monopolies.

We can make a difference with our time, attention, and commitments to each other.

For an essay about this slipperiness and instability of digital habitation, read The Contentions of Digital Tenancy