Click, like, share, and subscribe have become the new currencies of rent-seeking digital capitalism, where the rapid consumption of content is driven by the number of views and subscribers of video shorts and clips. The relationship between digital content and its consumers is shaped by quick browsing and the pursuit of instant fun, infotainment, pleasure, utility, satisfaction, or rejection. These ideals in everyday life influence interpersonal human relationships in the real world beyond the digital sphere. Social life and relationships are becoming like instant coffee.
These essential aspects of relationships are not new; they have existed throughout all stages of human history. Human beings have historically sought relationships both to survive and to avoid loneliness. This very need forms the foundation of the desire for all forms of relationships.
Friendship is a social, emotional, cultural, religious, moral, and ideological bond rooted in the aims, aspirations, needs, desires, and values of human beings. A relationship based on friendship promotes trust, understanding, and mutual support in everyday life. Friendships are often formed and sustained through shared hobbies. The idealism of friendship moves beyond the narrow silos of class, caste, gender, race, sexuality, religion, nationality, and territorial identity. It breaks these barriers to uphold the values of timeless friendship.
Friendship can exist within all types of relationships and can also transcend them. Both sinners and saints have friends, highlighting the universal and indispensable nature and power of friendship. The nature of friendship shapes the character of society and the relationships within it. Whether a society is democratic, feudal, patriarchal, capitalist, hierarchical, egalitarian, or progressive, it is friendship that ultimately defines its nature, essence, and spirit.
Philosophically, Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, addressed friendship systematically for the first time. He identified three interconnected types of friendship: those based on utility, those based on pleasure, and those rooted in virtue. The first two—friendships of utility and pleasure—are essential yet foundational in human history, evolving according to mutual needs. Such friendships can be temporary or enduring, depending on the benefits individuals derive from them.
In contrast, friendships based on virtue tend to be longer-lasting and more stable, though they can also change if the underlying virtues change. Regardless of type, every form of friendship plays a crucial role in holding human relationships together. For this reason, the 13th-century natural theologian and Dominican priest Thomas Aquinas regarded friendship as a habitus of charity—the very core of human life and society.
The rise of private property and the subsequent agricultural, commercial, industrial, colonial, and digital forms of capitalism—with their cultures of commodification—have eroded the collective foundations of friendship by atomising societies, individuals, and their needs, desires, and competing aspirations as consumers with their supposed free choices.
This transformation has been further accelerated by deepening digital capitalism, where social media connections and online presence form the basis of digital life, rendering friendships as transient as browsing through web pages on different platforms. The instantaneous nature of these online friendships mirrors the short attention spans of digital consumption—click, like, share, and subscribe—driven by utility, pleasure, and profit. Organic bonds of friendship are largely absent in these spheres.
Yet digital platforms hold the potential to transform such fleeting connections into meaningful human relationships, provided that impersonal algorithms and corporate logic do not dominate them. All forms of domination undermine friendship; therefore, meaningful, democratic, egalitarian, and progressive friendships cannot exist under feudalism, patriarchy, or capitalist conditions.
Earlier forms of capitalism and their barbaric cultures persist within digital capitalism, which further deepens everyday alienation, atomisation, and the commodification of human life and its relationship with the natural world.
Capitalism creates monetised and marketised social, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual conditions that are unsuitable and inhospitable to meaningful friendships. Capitalism and friendship are fundamentally incompatible. Every effort to sustain meaningful friendship is, in essence, a struggle against capitalism and its inhuman and anti-social values.
Friendships in the age of digital capitalism combine instantaneous connections based on utility, pleasure, and certain virtues, but they do not constitute perfect Aristotelian friendships. Seeking friendship in the digital world of capitalism is like trying to find drinking water in the salty ocean—the more one drinks, the thirstier and lonelier one becomes.
Friendship can never be founded merely on commodity pleasures or transactional, market-led relationships. Therefore, it is crucial to reclaim collective ownership of the digital world from platform capitalists and democratise digital society, creating meaningful friendships rooted in utility, pleasure, and virtue—grounded in the celebration of the collective foundations of human life, love, livelihood, and society.
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