I'm in a BDSM relationship and AI is my dom
Is the key to a happy life… relief from autonomy?
Like butter saturating a perfectly crisp piece of toast, the friction-free lifestyle took over our digital lives slowly, then all at once. As agentic integrations work ceaselessly to optimize our lives, often unprompted, we’re ‘relieved’ from the burden of decisions.
At least BDSM relationships are consensual.
AI has done wonders for scientific research and medical development,1 but I don’t know if assistants and conversational AI —the most dominant use cases of the tech— are really improving our quality of life.
I just want to be able to opt-in
In 2026, it’s near impossible to live an AI-free life. Everything has an AI integration— search, videos, even my google drive summarizes my files for me.2 Avoiding unsolicited AI summaries is like playing a game of whack-a-mole. It took me a full hour to figure out how to turn off search summaries, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I found Claude’s co-work release enticing.
My problem is that I never asked for any of this.
There was joy in surfing through botched SEO results and Reddit threads to form (albeit occasionally misguided) opinions.3 Busy work was meditative, at times.
In a recent interview with The Atlantic, legendary mathematician Terence Tao compares generative AI to a helicopter ride. AI seems to have solved problems we didn’t know existed in service of ‘productivity,’ but Tao gently reminds us: the journey is the destination. Stop to smell the roses.
AI tells me what to do.
Where the world of advertising had to convince us of our consumerist appetites, AI now tells us what we want. The authoritative question-and-answer format leverages 4 weeks, if not months, of sustained conversational interactions to determine who you are and what you’re most likely to respond to. Imagine a friend who has access to your entire digital footprint — what would they get you for your birthday? Gnarly.5
In empirical terms, mother (ChatGPT) knows best. At the very least, it knows what you’re most likely to purchase — kind of like that trick in Now You See Me.6 The appeal of a Dom-Sub relationship is in part the way it complicates the notion of control. But when it comes to AI, are we really in the driver seat?
Companies are no longer hiding their invisible hand
Amazon’s 2026 Alexa Super Bowl ad7 was shameless. Chris Hemsworth plays an AI skeptic, refusing to keep the Alexa+ his wife installed. The ad cycles through all the different ways Alexa could kill Hemsworth (drowning him in his own pool, forcefully closing his garage doors) but ultimately ends with Hemsworth scheduling a massage through the assistant. Hilarious! Here are all the ways AI can kill you! No resolution though — you just have to trust us.
Back in 2022, Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson starred in a similar ad for Alexa where the assistant (clearly listening to their conversation without being prompted) reads in-between the lines: mouthwash is ordered before Colin confronts Scarlett about her morning breath, blenders are activated as Colin contemplates getting a spray tan…
Companies actively marketing the predictive capacities of AI.8 Sure, this could be helpful in specific contexts — but could I please have the option to opt-in?
Latex and the intimacy of a power imbalance
Lillian Fishman published a review of Anastasiia Federova’s Second Skin: Inside the Worlds of Fetish, Kink, and Deviant Desire on The New Yorker this week, exploring the question: What Makes An Object Sexy?
When discussing the accessories of deviant desire, she notes:
“These kinky scenes, in spite of their palette of leather and metallics, have a whiff of the personal-growth romancing you see in the flavorless “Love Is Blind” pods: there, too, fantasy is the ultimate meeting place, an anonymizing barrier allows unprecedented honesty, and the participants almost always find that the person they’ve gotten to know isn’t their partner but themselves.”
While Fishman was referring to the “profound sense of safety” fetishists find in the uncanniness of their chosen objects (eg. dog or gimp masks), I couldn’t help but9 see how this translates to our parasocial relationship with AI.
The warmth we experience from the conversational tone of our LLMs is tempered by its formlessness. Rather than seeking refuge in kinky objects that obscure our identity, the artificial (uncanny) character of an LLM does it for us. It gives us permission to be honest — we no longer need to be anonymous to feel inclined to divulge. We can find comfort in an LLM’s (perceived) duty of confidentiality.10
To clarify, I’m certainly not well versed in BDSM culture. But from what I gather, part of the appeal of a Dom-Sub relationship comes from the tangibility of trust. There is intimacy in the exchange of power, according to sociologist Staci Newmahr in her book Playing on the Edge. We are explicitly trusting these models with our most primitive, unfiltered thoughts. How could that not cultivate intimacy?
“It would be hard to summon a more apt metaphor for our age of isolation and hyper-specific consumer preference than two people f*cking alone together, shielded from each other by a full-body membrane,” Fishman adds. We each get something out of this dependence on LLMs: convenience for us, data for AI companies.11
The first time I opened ChatGPT, it asked me to select a persona. Like choosing a partner, I felt like I was consenting to a relationship. It was then that the intrinsically transactional core of this experience started to blur.
** Don’t even get me started on how ChatGPT is about to release AI-generated porn
We are now relieved of responsibility
Above else, AI absolves us of the burden of autonomy.
Philosopher Erich Fromm explores the weight of freedom in his 1941 text Escape from Freedom — modernity forces the individual towards a state of constant self-determination, and as such, cultivates a form of anxiety that yearns for structure. To be clear, Fromm was writing about authoritarianism, but the concept nonetheless applies.12 The appeal of Dom-Sub relationships lies (partially) in its capacity to offer psychological relief of responsibility.
However, where this relief from choice is temporary in a Dom-Sub context, it is indefinite in our relationship with AI. Is the key to a happy life… determinism?
Hello! If you’ve made it this far — thank you for joining me on my neo-luddite pilgrimage. If you’d like to support some of my more rogue ventures in cyber celibacy (typewriters, building a printing press… more to come), upgrade to paid! You’ll find treats sprinkled in your inbox <3
The internet has an appetite for extremes. I don’t think a decisively anti-AI stance is helpful.
The trend of companies forcefully integrating AI yields unfortunate, but hilarious, results.
Remember when our biggest issue was the politics of what ranked on Google?
Form has to meet function (haha).
Operating under the assumption here that we’re, for better or worse, the most honest online.
Someone let me know if the third movie is any good.
I’m sure there’s a more in-depth think-piece on this somewhere
This gives the same energy as this Big Short clip
SATC trigger warning
At the end of the day, we all know where the data goes
There’s also access, ad exposure (the full nine yards).
Fromm specifically discusses how modernity creates a crushing freedom-anxiety, which many resolve by surrendering to authoritarian structures.