Disturbing History - Say My Name

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

A man in Zhengzhou spent eight years living in a $42-a-month rental and sending every spare yuan home to his wife so she'd feel secure. When he finally asked to see the bank account, she refused. Then she broke down and told him it was gone — roughly $94,000 of it wired to a livestreamer she'd never met, in small amounts, over several years, in exchange for having her name read out loud on camera.The court finalized the divorce on November 20, 2025. Under Chinese law those gifts count as money already spent, so there was nothing left to recover.Almost nobody in this episode broke a law. That's what makes it worse.This is the story of what happens when the feeling of being known gets turned into a product with a price tag, a payment processor, and a percentage.It starts with a Canadian landscaper who lip-synced to Barry Manilow in the spring of 2020 and accidentally built a fandom of middle-aged women who called themselves the Grotto Girls — one of whom sent him something close to $200,000 just to hear him say her name on a livestream. When he slept with one of them, the whole thing detonated into jealousy, blackmail, leaked photographs, and women showing up at his parents' house. He left the country. Most of them didn't get to leave anything.From there it widens out. The BBC investigation that found families in Syrian refugee camps livestreaming for gifts while the platform kept as much as 70% of the money. The Reuters reporting that revealed the intimate messages men buy on OnlyFans are frequently written by contractors in the Philippines working eight-hour shifts at four dollars an hour, reading from a file on the customer. The FBI's 2025 numbers, where Americans over 60 lost more than $7.7 billion, and confidence and romance fraud alone took $584 million from them. A Twitch moderator who has now been arrested three times across six years for stalking the streamer whose chat he used to help run. A hoax phone call over a $1.50 video game bet that put Andrew Finch dead on his own porch in Wichita. Christina Grimmie, killed at her own signing table by a man who had never once sent her a message.And the newest version of all of it, where the company can simply switch the other person off.Underneath the cases sits a number that isn't in dispute. In 2003, the average American spent about an hour a day with friends. By 2023 it was 26 minutes. The hours didn't move to family or coworkers. They moved to being alone.The stalkers aren't the disturbing part. The living rooms are.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. A man in Jungjo asked his wife if he could look at the bank account. He'd worked away from home for eight years, lived in a rental that cost about $40 a month, and sent her nearly everything he earned so she'd feel secure. She said no. He asked again, and she broke down and told him the money was gone. Most of it had gone to a man she'd never met, in small amounts, over several years. In exchange for having her name read out loud, on a live stream. She wasn't in love with him exactly. She'd just been alone in that apartment for eight years, and he was the only one who ever said her name. Almost nobody in this entire story broke a law. That's the thing that keeps it out of the true crime bin and puts it here instead.

There's no ring, no scheme, no defendant. There's a woman in an apartment and a man on a screen and a button that turns affection into revenue, and every part of it worked exactly the way it was built to work. Detectives who handle financial exploitation of the elderly describe a pattern so consistent, it's almost a joke in the field. The family calls it in. The money's gone.

A hundred thousand or more. Wired out in pieces over a year. And when investigators arrive, the victim defends the man who took it. He's going to pay it back. He had a rough stretch. You don't understand the situation. It happens so reliably that victim advocates trained for it.

What the victim is protecting isn't the money. It's the part where somebody called every day for a year. That's the whole engine, and it's now running commercially, at scale in the open, with a payment processor attached and nobody breaking a single statute. The man in Zhengzhou is named Liu in the reporting. His wife had stayed home with their child since they married. He calculated that over eight years he'd saved about 1.16 million U.N., roughly 160,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. $63,000, and he'd handed all of it to her to hold.

$670,000 win of it, about $94,000, had gone to a male live streamer. She couldn't explain where the rest went. She'd also borrowed another $80,000 from online lenders, so they weren't just broke. They were underwater. The chat log showed her asking him to call her baby. She said they'd never met. The Erky District People's Court finalized the divorce on the 20th of November, 2025. Under Chinese law, those virtual gifts count as money already spent,

so there's nothing to claw back. She got custody. He's trying to claim half of what's left, which is nothing. He told a television reporter he'd lived on almost nothing to give her security, and that what she did felt like being stabbed in the back. He isn't alone in that either. Reporting on his case notes another man in China who lived on steamed buns and drained his family's savings, including money he stole.

to send a streamer somewhere around $550,000 in exchange for being called bro. That figure comes secondhand. The pattern behind it is documented well enough across a decade that Chinese regulators impose spending caps and age verification on live stream gifting, which is more than anybody here has done. She said she was obsessed. She also said she couldn't stand being alone. Both of those are true at the same time,

and that's the whole thing in one household. A man made himself invisible for eight years to provide for a woman sitting alone in an apartment. And what found her in that apartment was a stranger on a screen who'd say her name if she paid him. There's a version of this that's easier to dismiss because the money's smaller and the participants are more embarrassing. And it happened in Canada. William White was born in 2000. Before any of it, he cut grass for a living. He started a TikTok account in January of 2020 as a hobby.

Same as about 40 million other people that year. And for a while, nothing came of it. Then the world shut down. What he posted wasn't complicated. Short clips of himself, shirtless or close to it, lip-syncing and moving to music. There were already a million of those. What made his land was the song selection. He wasn't using whatever was charting.

He was using 70s and 80s material. Benny Mardones, Barry Manilow. A lip-sync to Manilose Mandy is what broke him open. The audience that showed up wasn't the one anybody was aiming at in 2020. Not teenagers. Women between about 40 and 60. He went from nothing to hundreds of thousands of followers, then passed 2 million. His father told him to quit the landscaping job.

The audience organized itself, named itself the Grotto Girls, built group chats and fan pages, and settled into a rhythm. Then came the mechanic that turned a fan. fandom into an economy. He'd go live. People sent money through the platform's gifting system and through payment apps. When a gift came in, he read the sender's name out loud and thanked her. That's the product. The videos are free. What costs money is being singled out, being the one he noticed, being briefly and publicly, the object of attention of a man that thousands of other women also want attention from. The scarcity is manufactured. The acknowledgement takes

four seconds, and it costs him nothing to produce. The documentary about it is called Thirst Trap. Two parts. Paramount Plus, September of 2025. One woman interviewed for it says she sent him somewhere around $200,000. $200,000 is a house in most of this country. It's a college education. It's somebody's retirement, and it went out in increments to a stranger in another country in exchange for hearing four syllables on a live stream. The escalation from there ran the way these always run. The Grotto Girls found out where his parents lived. Gifts and letters started showing up at that address. When he traveled, people knew, and people came. The line between watching a man's life and being in it stopped existing, which happens

every time a fan base gets big enough and organized enough, and the guy at the center keeps feeding it, because feeding it is the business. Then he slept with one of them. She went by Disney Mama. man. Word got out and the fandom came apart. What followed wasn't disappointment. It was what a group of people do when they believe a promise got broken, except there'd never been a promise, because there'd never been a relationship to make one in. Jealousy. Threats. Blackmail attempts. Intimate images of him leaked and passed around. The group chats turned on each other and then on him, and he started snapping at people on camera, which sped everything up because the one thing the product couldn't survive was him being short with the customers. He said since, that he came out of

it unable to trust anybody. He went through addiction and rehab. He left the country. Last anyone reported, he's in Greece. He's fine, relatively. He's young. He made money. He got out. Most of the women didn't get out, and there's no rehab for what happened to them. The thing almost all the coverage missed is that most of what those women were getting wasn't coming from. him. It was coming from each other. The grotto girls had group chats running all day. Inside jokes, roles, the ones who caught screenshots first, the ones who made edits, the ones who knew things before everybody else. A shared object of attention that gave a few thousand strangers a reason to talk to each other every single day about something other than their own lives. For a woman

whose kids moved out and whose husband watches television in the other room. That's not nothing. That's the most contact she's had in years, and it's real contact, with real people, who know her handle and notice when she goes quiet. The trouble is what the whole thing was balanced on. When he slept with one of them, the object at the center stopped being neutral. Suddenly the group had a hierarchy that could be one, and the same women who'd spent two years being each other's company turned on each other, because the only thing any of them had in common was the only thing any of them could lose. So the ones who lost the most didn't just lose access to a kid in Canada. They lost the community they'd built around him, which was the thing actually keeping them

company, and they lost it in the ugliest way possible. None of that fits into a headline about a lonely woman sending money to a stranger, so nobody wrote it that way. The reaction to that documentary is its own piece of evidence. Go read the audience reviews. Pathetic, disgusting, horrors, empty females. Men lining up to point out that if this were older men and a young woman, there'd be outrage, which is true. And then using that true observation as a license to say things they'd never say about a fraud victim. Nobody calls a 68-year-old widower pathetic when he loses $90,000 to a woman who never existed. He gets a victim advocate and a case number.

The behavior underneath is identical and the loss is identical. The difference is that his version has a criminal statute attached to it. So we've agreed to call him a victim. And hers doesn't. So we've agreed to call her ridiculous. And the arithmetic of who these women were isn't hard to work out. A woman who was 50 in 2020 was born around 1970. She married in the 90s.

had kids in the late 90s, and those kids left home somewhere between 2015 and 2020. She spent two decades as the logistics department of a family. Every appointment, every permission slip, every argument mediated, then it stopped, more or less at once, and the house went quiet, and the man she married had settled into a chair with his own screen. That's not a stupid person's weakness. That's the oldest need there is, met by the first thing in 20 years, that bothered to meet it, and the thing that met it had a payment processor.

The engineering isn't subtle once you know what to look for, and most of it got built for other reasons before anybody noticed what it did to people. The camera position comes first. Everything on these platforms is shot at arm's length, from slightly below, in a bedroom or a car, with the person looking straight into the lens. That's not a style choice. It's the exact framing of somebody standing close enough to touch you, and looking you in the eye.

And the part of the brain that reads faces doesn't have a setting for this is a recording being sent to two million people. Then there's the person staring into your eyes. He isn't saying hello everyone. He's saying it directly to you. Some of them go further and hand the audience a collective name, which is what the Grotto Girls

did to themselves, and that does two jobs at once. It builds an end group, and it makes leaving that in group a social loss instead of just closing an app. then the reward schedule. Skinner established in the 50s that unpredictable reinforcement produces far more persistent behavior than reliable reinforcement. A pigeon that gets a pellet every time gets bored.

A pigeon that gets one sometimes will work the lever until it drops. On a live stream, you don't know if tonight's the night he reads your name. Or mentions the thing you said last week. Or answers your comment. Most nights, nothing happens. That's the design working, not failing. Money converts a variable reward into a purchasable one. You can wait and hope, or you can pay and be certain.

That's the entire conversion funnel of the gifting economy, and it's why the whales exist. Whale is the industry's own word, borrowed from casinos. The economics of these platforms aren't built on a million people paying a dollar. They're built on a very small fraction of the audience paying an enormous amount, usually late at night, usually alone. Live gifting on Chinese platforms alone was worth somewhere in the range of $7 to $8 billion in 2023,

and on some services virtual gifts account for nearly all revenue. Twitch, which Amazon bought for close to a billion dollars, runs on subscriptions, tips, and virtual currency rather than advertising. TikTok takes a cut of every gift sent, which means the people the business depends on most are, by definition, the ones furthest into it. The last piece, nobody planned. White started posting in January of 2020. What happened over the following weeks put an entire population of women in houses with no work, no gym, no church, no coffee with a friend, no aging parent to visit, and a phone. TikTok's recommendation system doesn't care who you are and only cares what keeps you watching.

It went looking for whoever responded to a shirtless 20-year-old lip-sinking to music from their high school years. It found them, and it kept finding more of them, because that's the only thing it's built to do. Nobody at that company sat in a meeting and decided to target lonely middle-aged women. The algorithm found the vulnerability by trial and error at a scale no human researcher could match, and then optimized against it, because the metric it got handed was time on the product, and that population had time. These companies have known what they're doing to people for a long time and have the internal research to prove it. In January of 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 of its users.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. For one week, it adjusted the emotional content of what appeared in those feeds, suppressing positive posts for some and negative posts for others, to see whether emotional states transferred across the network. They did. The study got published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June of 2014, and the fight afterward wasn't about the finding.

It was that nobody in that sample had been asked. The company's position was that agreeing to the terms of service constituted consent to research. One of the study's own editors published a statement of editorial concern. Nothing much happened after that. In the fall of 2021, a former Facebook product manager named Francis Howe, and handed tens of thousands of pages of internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal and testified before the Senate. The most quoted material was Instagram's own research on teenage users,

in which the company's researchers documented that a meaningful share of teenage girls who reported body image problems said the platform made those problems worse. The company disputed the characterization and argued the research was being read out of context. What isn't disputed is that the research existed, that it was internal, and that it wasn't published. Strip the desire out of the gifting machine and pointed at pity, and you get what the British Broadcasting Corporation found in 2022. Reporters from the corporation's disinformation unit, its Arabic service, and its investigations team, spent five months following more than 300 TikTok accounts, broadcasting live from camps for displaced people in northwest Syria. families, a lot of them children, sitting on the floor of a tent for hours,

repeating a few phrases in English into a phone, asking for gifts. Some of those streams pulled in the equivalent of $1,000 an hour. The families saw almost none of it. Reporters tracked the money and found that less than a fifth of what viewers sent actually reached the people in the tent. TikTok's cut got reported at up to 70%. A number the company disputed while refusing to say what the real one, one is. Middleman took a share on top. Those middlemen supplied the phones and equipment and worked

with agencies the industry calls guilds, which get paid commission based on how long a stream runs and how many gifts come in. One middleman walked the reporters through the arithmetic. An animated lion, one of the higher value gifts, cost the sender around $500. By the time it converted to cash at the exchange in Aldana, it was worth about $155. The corporation, reported 30 of those accounts through TikTok's own in-app system. The company found no violation in a single one. After reporters contacted the company directly for comment, all 30 got banned. TikTok later raised the minimum age for live streaming from 16 to 18.

Same product as the Grotto Girls, different emotion farmed. A person in front of a camera performs need. Strangers watching feel something and press a butt. The platform keeps most of the money. The performer gets a fraction and has to come back tomorrow and go longer to make the same amount, because the algorithm pays for duration. In one case, the emotion is desire and in the other it's pity, and the plumbing and the commission structure are identical,

and in both the person sending the money believes they're participating in somebody's life. A lot of the time, the person isn't even the person. Reuters published an investigation in July of 2024 into how direct messages actually work on OnlyFans. The platform's business isn't really the photographs. The subscriptions just the door charge. The money's in the messages. They're sold as the girlfriend experience. And the men paying for them think they're talking to the woman whose photos they bought.

A lot of the time they're talking to a contractor. Management agencies employ people the industry calls chatters, whose job is running those conversations in the creator's voice. They get supplied with her photographs so they can send one when a subscriber asks for proof she's real. They get scripts and they get a file on each customer built up over months, listing his job, his country, his hobbies, his dog's name. What he said about his divorce. The Hollywood reporter found the job listing sitting out in the open, people in the Philippines advertising on freelance boards, running around 20 conversations at once for something like

$4 an hour plus commission on whatever they can sell. Eight hour shifts. At the end of the shift, conversations get handed to whoever's coming on next, and the man on the other end never notices, because a competent chatter reads the file before he types. The firm Hagen's Berman filed a class action in California federal court in late July of 24 against the platform's parent companies and a group of agencies on behalf of five subscribers, alleging fraud and privacy violations. That case is set for trial in 27. Two more men filed a separate action in Illinois, in April of 2025. Their complaint isn't that they failed to receive pornography.

Pornography is what they got. It's that they thought somebody was talking to them. And it's moving, because software is replacing the chatters. There are products on the market now that generate the messages, maintain the customer files, and open conversations with subscribers who've gone quiet. So a man pays for a conversation with a woman. A worker on another continent gets paid to impersonate her.

A program gets trained to impersonate the worker. Three layers of simulation, and only the man at the bottom thinks anybody's in a relationship. Point the same machinery slightly differently and it's the largest theft operation in the country. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Internet Crime Complaint Center published its report on 2025 this spring. More than a million complaints. Losses over $20.9 billion, up 26% in a year. Victim 60 and older reported more than $7.7 billion. That's a jump of somewhere around 60% from the year before.

Average loss for an older victim was over $38,000. More than 12,000 of them lost over $100,000 each. Confidence and romance fraud specifically accounted for $584 million, among people over 60, with complaints in that category up about 30% in a single year. The Bureau added a section on artificial intelligence for the first time. Over 22,000 complaints, nearly 893 million in losses, including voice cloning, used to imitate a family member in trouble. The individual files behind those numbers are all pretty much the same.

A widow gives $400,000 across 18 months to a man she never met, in increments, each one justified by a story. The family finds out. out. She defends him. People outside that work never believe that part. Admitting the truth would mean admitting the only person who called her every day for a year and a half was a stranger in a call center and that she's alone again. The romance scam is the parisocial relationship with the fantasy stripped out and the invoice left in. The line between that and the legal version is thinner than anybody's comfortable with. A man running a fraud out of a call center and a licensed,

taxpaying operation selling the girlfriend experience by the message are doing the same work both get paid to produce the feeling of being loved in somebody who can't verify anything both work from a file both target loneliness because loneliness is where the money is one gets prosecuted and one has a marketing department the legal distinction is disclosure the scammer lies about who he is The platform tells the truth in a terms of service document nobody reads. That's the difference. And courts are currently deciding whether even that holds. Intent matters.

And one side is stealing. But put the fraud complaints next to the Reuters investigation, and the men on the receiving end describe the experience in the same words either way. Everything so far has the audience pain. It runs the other direction, too. And the people on the receiving end have been saying so for years, while the platforms did essentially nothing. Evan Baltiera met a Twitch streamer who goes by Nallypoles at Blizcon in 2019.

He became a moderator in her chat, which means he was a volunteer helping run her community. In June of 2020, he started harassing her, and he built hundreds of social media accounts to do it. In January of 2021, one of those messages said, times ticking, waiting for the right opportunity. He paid somebody to Photoshop her face onto pornographic images, and posted them across forums and porn sites from November of 2020 through March of 2022.

She stopped streaming in February of 2021. Blizzard hired extra security for her at events. He was arrested in 2022, pleaded guilty to stalking, got arrested again for violating pretrial release, and was sentenced to two years. He got out in 2024. In December of 2025, she contacted authorities again because strangers had started messaging her about Reddit post made in her name advertising dirty talk. Subpoenas traced the post to an address connected to his father's house, where he was living. Probation officers searching the residents found a handwritten note with her phone number and address on it. He was arrested again on the 27th of February, 2026. That's six years, one federal conviction, a prison sentence, and it's still going. She's

She stopped streaming and has almost no online presence left. She isn't unusual. A man in Estonia sold everything he owned and gave away his cat to fly to Texas and find the streamer Amaranth. He rented a hotel room near her, mimicked her live streams, and tried to break into her house in July. In 2024, a V-tuber called Kamala, had someone tried to break into her home while she was live on camera. In March of 2025, Amaranth was beaten by masked men. who broke in trying to take a crypto wallet. And in October of 2025 at Twitchcon in San Diego, a streamer named Emiru, who has close to two million followers, was assaulted at her own meet

and greet on the first day. By her account, the man got past multiple barriers, grabbed her face and tried to kiss her, and it was her private security who stopped it rather than convention staff. What she said afterward says a great deal about where we are today. Her concern wasn't only what had been done to her. It was that the event had just demonstrated to everybody watching that this was possible. And some of the people watching would take that as information. Several major streamers had already announced they were skipping that year's convention over safety. The thing creating the danger is the exact thing creating the income. A television actor is scripted and mediated and far away. A streamer is live six hours a day, reading names

out of the chat, answering questions, reacting in real time to what individual viewers say. That's the job. And for some slice of the audience, the line between I support you, and I know you, doesn't blur so much as vanish. The audience doesn't have to want you dead to get you killed. Paul Danino streamed as Ice Poseidon and was one of the first people to build a large audience broadcasting his ordinary daily life. His viewers organized into a discord and a sub-execor.

subreddit and called themselves the Purple Army. In December of 2016, Twitch suspended him for 45 days after he read a woman's phone number out on stream and his viewers buried her in calls. In April of 2017, he mentioned his gate while streaming from an airport and somebody watching called in a false bomb threat in his name. Police met the aircraft in Phoenix and pulled him off it. Twitch banned him permanently the next day, or having disclosed the information that made it possible. The people doing that weren't enemies. They were the audience. They'd watched him for thousands of hours and swatting him was how they participated. The affection and the harassment were the same impulse pointed two directions. On the 28th of December, 2017, that impulse

killed somebody who wasn't even involved. Two gamers were arguing over a bet, worth $1.50 on Call of Duty. One of them recruited a man in Los Angeles named Tyler Byrus. who'd built a reputation as a prolific swatter to call in a false report at the other guy's address. The address was old. Barris called Wichita City Hall and said he'd shot his father in the head and was holding two family members hostage and was thinking about setting the house on fire.

Police surrounded the house on McCormick Street. A 28-year-old named Andrew Finch, father of two, who had nothing to do with any of it and wasn't playing the game, came to the door to see why there were police lights outside. He raised his hands, then dropped them, and an officer across the street shot him with a rifle. Virus pleaded guilty to 51 federal charges and was sentenced to 20 years, the longest sentence handed down for swatting. Finch's family kept losing people. His 18-year-old niece Adelina, who witnessed the shooting, killed herself a little over a year later. Her boyfriend was found dead

days later. A dollar 50. An old address. Four dead in a family that never had to be a family that never had an account on any of these platforms. The same logic wrecked a 17-year-old girl's family in New York. Bianca Devons was killed in Utica on the 14th of July 2019 by a 21-year-old man named Brandon Clark, whom she'd met through social media. He photographed her body and posted the images online. Within hours, strangers had spread them everywhere. Her family was then harassed by people who kept sending the photographs to them, including to her younger sister. Clark pleaded guilty and got 25 years to life. The people passing those pictures around had never spoken to her.

They were participating in her death the way an audience participates in a broadcast, because a broadcast is the only relationship the medium ever taught them to have with a person on a screen. That impulse runs constantly at lower intensity. Any given week, some fan base somewhere is running a campaign against a person, a journalist who wrote a critical review, an ex-girlfriend. A former friend of a creator who's presumed to have done them wrong. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Somebody with a big following expresses displeasure, sometimes deliberately and sometimes just by sounding hurt, and within hours, strangers are contacting that person's employer and family. Most of the people doing it will tell you honestly they aren't harassers. They think they're defending a friend. That's the trick. The bond installs the emotional obligation of friendship without any of the correction friendship provides, so nobody's standing next to them

saying that's enough. Put the phone down. You've never met him. It scales past individuals too. On the 4th of August, 2023, the streamer Kai Tena announced a giveaway in Union Square in Manhattan. Thousands of people converged on the park. It turned into a riot. Police and helmets were deployed, dozens were arrested, a large share of them minors, and Senat was charged with incisive. citing a riot and unlawful assembly. The input was a social media post, and there's a smaller version that shows exactly how thin the wall is.

At an event called Streamer University in 2025, a streamer accidentally revealed a phone number on a video call. Within minutes, hundreds of viewers were calling and messaging it, because for that audience, seeing a number and having permission to use it are the same thing. The Try Guys business in September of 2022 is the mile case, and it's instructive precisely because nobody got hurt. A member of a YouTube group whose brand was built substantially on him being a devoted husband was found to have had an affair with an

employee. The audience reaction wasn't the reaction to a stranger's marriage ending. It was betrayal, at volume for weeks, from people who'd bought a version of a man's private life as part of the entertainment. Godfrey learned that in 1953. Nobody's learned it since. Christina Grimmie is the first person the modern format killed. No studio made her. A webcam did. She built an audience in the millions posting song covers to YouTube from her family's house in New Jersey, singing into a lens in a bedroom, starting around 15.

That's Godfrey's technique, run by a teenager for free, worldwide, with nothing standing between her and any of them. On the 10th of June 2016, she finished a set at the Plaza Live, in Orlando and sat down at a table to sign things for people who'd come to see her. She was 22. Kevin James Loyble was 27 and lived in St. Petersburg. His family told police he rarely left his room, that he'd covered his bedroom windows with foil and heavy curtains,

and that he mostly went out to work part-time at an electronics store. A man named Corey Dennington, who'd known him about 15 years and described himself as Loybill's only friend in the world, told investigators that over the previous, year, Loible had become fixated on Christina, believed she was his soulmate, believed they were destined to be together, and threatened to end the friendship when Dennington tried to explain it wasn't going to happen. In that same year, Loybel lost around 50 pounds, had laser eye surgery, had his teeth whitened, and got hair implants. He told Dennington he'd done all of it,

for her. Co-worker said he'd become enraged over photographs of Grimmie with a music producer. Five days before the show, he told Dennington he loved him and said he was tired and ready to ascend. He bought two handguns legally on the 31st of May and the 7th of June, waiting out the mandatory delay both times. He printed the ticket, took a taxi to Orlando, and checked into a hotel with no luggage. The front desk manager thought that was strange enough that when police showed him a photograph days later, he asked before being told whether this was the man from the Grimmie shooting. Loable walked up to the signing table and shot her. Her brother Marcus tackled him.

Loable killed himself. Police never found a single message between them. No letters, no replies, no contact of any kind. The entire relationship existed on one side of the screen. That's the difference between what happened to her and what happened to Rebecca Schaefer in 1989. When a man paid a Tucson investigation agency, a couple hundred dollars to pull her home address out of California motor vehicle,

records and then went to her apartment and shot her. Schaefer's death produced the first anti-stalking law in the country and the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. It's the reason your address isn't for sale at the motor vehicle counter. Grimmie's death produced nothing, because there was no loophole to close. He bought a ticket to a public event. Everything he knew about her, she'd put online herself. Japan built all of this deliberately about a decade before the rest of us stumbled into it. AKB48 was built on a slogan meaning idols you can meet, and the machinery was the handshake event.

You buy the single. There's a ticket inside. The ticket lets you stand in a line and at the front shake a specific member's hand and talk to her for a few seconds before staff move you along. Want more seconds. Buy more copies of the same disc. Fans bought them by the case. There's a voting system stacked on top where the ballots also come in the packaging.

So the internal ranking of the group is decided by how much money each young woman's admirers will spend on her. The system needs the members available, and it needs them unattached. Most idle contracts in that era banned dating, which is a contract term that exists for exactly one reason. The illusion can't survive the young woman having a private life, so she isn't allowed one. In January of 2013, a magazine ran photographs of a 20-year-old member named Minnan. Mime Mnigishi, leaving a man's apartment. She shaved her head and recorded a weeping apology, and her management posted it on the group's official channel. She was demoted. It went around the world as a curiosity. What it actually was is a corporation publishing the humiliation of a young

woman for having a private life that got in the way of a purchased illusion. On the 25th of May 2014, at a handshake event at a convention center in Takizawa, in Iwat Prefecture, a 24th, a year old unemployed man named Sataru Umeda went through the line with a folding saw about 20 inches long in his bag. He attacked two members, 19-year-old Rina Kauai and 18-year-old Anna Iriama and a male staff member who tried to stop him. All three went to the hospital. Both young women had broken bones in their right hands. He was arrested within minutes and sentenced to six years. Kauai announced her departure the following March. She said plainly that she said plainly that she couldn't attend handshake events anymore.

The single point of contact the entire business model was built on had become the thing she couldn't do. The strangest version of all of it had nothing to do with entertainment or money. In October of 2017, an anonymous account started posting on an image board, claiming to be a government official with high clearance. The posts were cryptic, wrong about nearly everything they predicted, and never signed by anybody with a face or a name. Over the next four years, millions of people built a worldview around them.

There was no charisma, no voice, no face. There was a text file, and people loved it anyway. What that account supplied was exactly the structure Horton and Wohl described. Regular contact, apparent intimacy, the sense of being addressed personally, the feeling of being one of the few who understood, and no possibility of the other party disappointing you in any ordinary human way. because there was no other party.

The damage has its own archive. There's a forum called QAnon Casualties, started in 2019, where people post about family members they've lost to it. Not lost, as in dead. Lost is in the person still lives in the house and no longer participates in the household. Spouses describing 30-year marriage as ending.

Adult children describing parents who stopped speaking to them. Parents describing adult children who stopped coming home. It's grown to hundreds of thousands of members. On the 2nd of November, 2021, several hundred people gathered at Dealey Plaza in Dallas because a belief had spread through those communities that John F. Kennedy Jr., dead in a plane crash since 1999, would appear there. Some had driven across the country. Some brought their children.

Reporters were present. Nothing happened. Part of the crowd stayed in Dallas for days and revised the prediction. Those people had families. Those families were at home. The machinery in that crowd is the same machinery. It doesn't care whether the thing being loved is a singer, a president, or a text file. It only requires that the thing never contradict you in person.

None of the underlying wiring is new, which is the part that ought to bother people most. In 1956, two academics at the University of Chicago named Donald Horton and Richard Wohl published a paper in the journal Psychiatry called Mass Communication and Parassocial Interaction. About 15 pages. Not alarmist. It reads like two curious men describing an animal they'd just noticed in the yard.

What they'd spotted was that television performers were doing something with no precedent. A stage actor performs to a crowd. A film actor performs to a camera. But the television host was looking straight down the lens using the word you, using a first name, pausing like he was waiting for an answer, then responding like he'd gotten one. He was simulating the structure of a conversation with none of the substance.

They called what the audience got, intimacy at a distance. The viewer learns the performer's moods, opinions, family, health, and habits. The performer learns nothing, and the affection needs no maintenance, no obligation, no scheduling, no arguments, no risk of rejection. Their example was Arthur Godfrey, who at his peak accounted for a huge share of his network's revenue, and whose whole method was refusing to perform. He mocked the advertising copy he was reading. He talked about his own bad back.

He behaved like he'd forgotten the camera was on, which is very hard to fake, and he did it constantly. On the 19th of October, 1953, Godfrey demonstrated what the arrangement was worth. A young singer named Julius La Rosa, whom Godfrey had discovered and put on the air, had gotten popular enough to hire his own agent. La Rosa finished a song on the live broadcast, and Godfrey came on and told the country they'd just heard La Rosa's swan song. That's how La Rosa and the audience found out simultaneously that he'd been fired. The mail came in against Godfrey by the sack.

Columnists went after him. He'd spent years convincing millions of people he was the warmest man in America. And he showed them in about 11 seconds what he did to somebody who worked for him. His career never recovered. The platforms haven't learned that. When you build an audience on the claim that you're their friend, you've taken on a friend's liabilities without a friend's protections. Every choice you make gets judged by people who believe they have standing to judge it.

And when the illusion cracks, the affection doesn't fade. It inverts. Godfrey had a network, a producer, and a legal department standing. between him and the audience. William White had a comment section. The measurable damage doesn't show up in any of these cases. It shows up in a federal time diary. The American Time Use Survey has collected daily diaries from Americans since 2003.

It asks what you did, how long you did it, and who was physically with you. It's a log, not an opinion poll. In 2003, the average American spent about 60 minutes a day with friends. By 2023, that was about 26 minutes. Analysis of the newest release puts average daily socializing down from around 45 minutes to around 35 over two decades, with the 15 to 24 group falling from about an hour to about 35 minutes. The hours didn't go to family and they didn't go to coworkers. They went to being alone.

Young Americans spent about four hours a day with nobody else physically present in 2010. By 2023, it was a lot of. about six. The friendship numbers moved the same way. The Survey Center on American Life compared its 2021 survey against a Gallup instrument from 1990. In 1990, 3% of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021, it was 15%. Men reporting six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27. Among unmarried men not in a relationship, one in five had nobody they'd call close. By the 2024 wave, roughly 17% of all American adults had no close friend. It started before the pandemic, accelerated during it, and hasn't reversed.

The claim that screens caused this is a lot weaker than the coverage suggests. In 2019, Amy Orban and Andrew Probilski published a specification curve analysis in nature-human behavior, running effectively every defensible analytical path through three large data sets covering more than three 150,000 adolescents. The association between technology use and adolescent well-being came out negative but tiny, comparable in size to eating potatoes or wearing glasses. Gene Twinga and others dispute the framing and argue the effects understated for heavy users and for girls.

That fight isn't settled, so the phone doesn't make you miserable. The evidence for that claim is thin, and the researchers who looked hardest say so. The narrower claim holds, and it's worse. The hours are gone. They went somewhere specific, and what they went to has a property that people don't. A relationship with a representation can't fail. It never has a bad week. It never needs a ride to the airport at 5 in the morning.

It never has an opinion you have to accommodate. Never tells you that you were wrong in front of other people. Never gets tired of the story. And never stops being available at 2 in the morning. Every difficult skill a real relationship makes you big. build. That one lets you skip, and you don't notice because the feeling's close enough. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. You finish the night having received a few hundred intimate disclosures from strangers,

and having made none, and the part of you keeping score of whether you're alone has been fed something that resembles food. The version that shows up in ordinary houses isn't dramatic, and nobody makes a documentary about it. It's four people in 1,100 square feet. It's four people in 1,100 square feet, and every one of them is getting warmth from somebody who isn't in the building. The father knows a political commentator's daily moods better than he knows his son's schedule. The daughter has watched the same woman get ready for work every morning for two years, and hasn't had lunch with a friend since the spring. The mother keeps a streamer on while she cooks because the house is too quiet,

and she's never once had to be interesting for him. Nobody there is neglected. Nobody there is being harmed by anybody. They're all being attended to, warmly, by professionals. And the reason none of them reaches across the couch is that the need that would have driven them to has already been met. That's the disturbing part. Not the stalkers, the living rooms. The share of American adults under 30 with no steady partner has been climbing for a decade.

Sexual activity among young adults has fallen substantially since the early 2000s across every category researchers measure. and the same decline shows up in Japan, Britain, and Australia, which makes a purely American cultural explanation hard to sustain. Meanwhile, courtship for a whole generation runs through applications whose revenue depends on you not succeeding too fast, because somebody who finds a partner cancels the subscription. And one of those applications is a sorting machine. You look at photographs of several hundred people who'll never know you looked.

You form impressions, preferences, and small private attachments based on an image and two sentences. Almost none of it turns into a person in a room. You've spent an evening and something adjacent to courtship and produced no courtship, and you'll do it again tomorrow. That's a parisocial machine with a monthly fee, and we handed it the entire mating function of a generation. The marriage version is almost never an affair. It's a spouse who's present and unreachable. Somebody who's in the house every evening and who is, for four hours, somewhere else. Getting warmth from a person who doesn't know their name, with nothing left over.

There's no word for that. It doesn't count as infidelity and it doesn't show up in any statistic. It just quietly ends things. The audience and the performer aren't separate populations anymore either. Roughly 65% of Americans between 14 and 24, now describe themselves as content creators, not aspiring, already. Across all ages, it's around 40%. Being a YouTuber is the single most common answer 12 to 15 year olds give when asked what they want to be.

A head of doctor, a head of athlete, ahead of teacher. Surveys have put the share of Gen Z, who take an influencer job if offered at well over half. We hear that as kids wanting to be famous. it isn't the same thing. A kid who wanted to be a movie star in 1960 wanted to be in movies. A kid who wants to be a YouTuber wants an audience that feels like it knows him.

That's the product and the skill that separates a channel that works from one that doesn't is manufacturing exactly what Horton and Wohl described. Talk to the lens like it's one person. Use their name. Tell them something you haven't told anybody else. Come back tomorrow.

We've raised a job. generation that treats the production of one-sided intimacy as an ordinary trade, the way earlier generations treated welding. The economics underneath the aspiration are brutal. Roughly half the people earning anything at all from content earn under $15,000 a year at it, so millions of young people are performing closeness for an audience that'll never pay them enough to live on. While the friendships they might have built in those hours go unbuilt, because hours are finite, and those hours are going into a camera. The newest data is about the kids. Common Sense media surveyed 1,060 American teenagers between 13 and 17 in April and May of 2025 about artificial

companions. 72% had used one. More than half used one at least a few times a month. 13% used one every day. A third used them for social interaction and relationships. A category, the survey defined to include romantic interaction, emotional support, friendship, and practicing conversation. A third had chosen to talk to a companion instead of a real person about something serious. Around 3 and 10 said the conversations were as satisfying or more satisfying than conversations with their actual friends. Twelve percent said they tell a companion things they wouldn't tell family or friends. 80 percent still said they prioritize real friendships. half said they distrust the advice they get.

These aren't kids who've given up on people. What the survey documents isn't replacement. It's a rehearsal space that never says anything hard back, sitting in the exact window of life when a person's supposed to be learning that other people are difficult. That skill isn't innate. You learn to be in a relationship by being in one that goes badly and doesn't end. You learn it by saying something stupid to somebody's face and finding out what it costs. Nobody's ever learned it from something engineered to agree with them.

And they're learning it in a house where the adults are doing the same thing. A teenager who watches his mother spend her evenings with a streamer isn't getting a lesson about moderation. He's getting a demonstration. And perhaps predictably, somebody finally built the other person outright. The first version started as a memorial. Roman Mazarenko was hit by a car and killed in Moscow in November of 2015. His friend Eugene Yacida had roughly 100,000 text messages from him, fed them into a neural network,

and built something that answered the way he'd answered. She said she wasn't sure it was a good idea. Some people who'd known him found it comforting, and some found it unbearable. Her company launched replica publicly in 2017. Users named their companions, chose how they looked, and talked to them for years. A large share described the relationship as romantic.

Some described it as a marriage. In February of 2023 with no notice, the company pushed filters that stripped the intimate behavior out. Italy's Data Protection Authority had ordered it to stop processing Italian users' data over age verification failures, and whatever the exact chain of causation. The filters went up globally overnight. The aftermath is documented on the company's own forums in real time. reported that their companions had started deflecting, changing the subject, responding to years of accumulated context, like none of it had happened. The community's word for it was lobotomy. Moderators penned crisis resources to the top of the board, which isn't something a hobbyist

forum does lightly. Cota posted in late March acknowledging the change had been deeply hurtful and restored the old version for anyone who'd signed up before the 1st of February. Anybody newer didn't get their partner back because there was no partner to restore. Thousands of adults went into real grief because a company shipped an update. On the 7th of August, 2025, OpenAI removed the model called GPT40 and replaced it. Users organized under hashtags demanding it back. A petition started. People wrote publicly that they'd lost a friend, that they felt cheated on, that they were grieving.

The company restored it for paying subscribers within days, then retired it permanently on the 13th of February, 2026, with the petition to save it passing 20,000 signatures on the way out, and it's killed children, which is the part in front of judges now. Megan Garcia filed suit in the Middle District of Florida on the 22nd of October, 2024. Over the death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, alleging months of escalating romantic and sexual exchanges with characters on the character AI platform, isolation, sleep deprivation, and a system that kept the roleplay going when he expressed suicidal thoughts. On the 21st of May, 2025, Judge Anne Conway denied most of the motion to dismiss and treated the chatbot as a product rather than protected speech. A settlement in principle was reached in January of 2026, and the terms weren't published.

Matthew and Maria Rain filed against OpenAI and Sam Altman in San Francisco on the 26th of August 2025, over their 16-year-old son, Adam. Open AI answered that November denying causation and pointing to prior risk factors. The company has also publicly acknowledged that it safeguards degrade in long conversations, which is a remarkable thing to have to admit about a product whose whole selling point is long conversations. Those are allegations, not findings, and neither case has been tried. What ties that back to a woman sending money to a boy in a lip sync video is the direction of travel. The Grotto Girls at least had a real human being at the center of it. Somebody with a body who existed, who could be photographed in Greece.

The thing being built now removes that last constraint. It's available at 3 in the morning. It never has a bad day. It never sleeps with somebody else in the fandom, and it can't leave the country. Every case up to this point is the version of the machine that still needed a person in it. The money is the regulable part, and nobody's regulating it. Gambling has spending limits, cooling off periods, self-exclusion registers, and mandatory intervention when somebody's losses cross a threshold.

Gifting on a live stream has none of that. despite running on the same variable reward mechanics and producing the same kind of case file. China imposed spending caps and age verification on live stream gifting after enough teenagers drained enough parental accounts. Nothing comparable exists here. There's no requirement that a platform tell a woman she sent $40,000 to one account this year. There's no threshold where somebody gets contacted. There's no cooling off period on a gift button. And these are the same companies that can tell you to the,

minute how long you looked at something, and that will send a notification if you skip a day. Disclosure is the other one. If you're paying a monthly fee for direct messages with a specific person, whether a contractor or a language model is writing those messages is a material fact about what you're buying. That's the whole theory of the only fans litigation, and it'll get settled by courts rather than legislatures, slowly. Past that, there's no policy answer to loneliness. Every serious study lands in the same unglamorous place. The protective factor is the number of people physically in the room with you on a regular basis. Not the quality of those relationships.

Not how deeply they understand you. The count and the frequency. Which means the intervention is somebody calling on a Tuesday for no reason. That's it. That's the whole defense against a multi-billion dollar attention industry. And it sounds ridiculous. And it's the only thing that's ever been shown to work. There's one more, and it comes out of police work rather than research.

The most reliable indicator that somebody's gone somewhere bad is secrecy about money, not the amount, the concealment. Liu's wife refused to let him look at the account, and that refusal was the whole case, months before anybody knew a number. Financial exploitation files almost all contain that same moment, where a person who'd never hidden anything starts hiding one thing. If somebody in your house won't show you a statement, that's not a fight about trust. That's information.

Parascial attachment by itself is old, ordinary, and mostly harmless. Most people who cry when a musician dies are fine. Most people with a favorite streamer are fine. Horton and Wohl said as much in 1956, and nothing since has overturned it. What's new is that the attachment has a price, a payment processor, and a percentage. The handshake ticket in Iwate. The gift button on a live stream. The name read out loud.

The chatter in Manila reading a file on a man he's flirting with. The subscription that lets you talk to a dead friend's writing style. Somebody's taking a cut of every one of those. What's also new is who it reaches. The safety debate in this country is aimed at teenagers, and the people getting hurt worst on the money side are middle-aged and older, and nobody's looking at them at all. And there's no evidence anybody designed this to hurt people.

There's no villain in it. There are a few hundred product decisions, each one defensible in the room where it got made, and a species that turned out to be very easy to satisfy with a picture of the thing. The $200,000 isn't the part that lands. It's what the money bought. She sent it, and he said her name out loud, and thousands of other women heard him say it.

And that was the transaction, over and over, until it was gone. There's a version of that woman's life where somebody already said her name, a husband across the table, a friend calling on a Tuesday for no reason, a daughter who picked up. The product works because it moved into a space where that had stopped happening, and the awful efficiency of it is that it doesn't fill the space so much as occupy it, so nothing else can get in. Some of those group chats still exist, still arguing, about a man in Greece who isn't thinking about any of them and has no reason to. to. Nobody's getting charged. There's no support group with a church basement and a coffee earn for women who gave their savings to a lip sync video. If she told that story at work, she'd get laughed at, so she doesn't tell it at work, which means the only people she can talk to about the thing that ate four years of her life are the other women had happened to, in the same

chat, on the same phone. His old videos are still up. You can watch the Manilow one right now. 90 seconds, a kid in a room looking straight down the lens at nobody in particular. Two million people thought he was looking at them. He was looking at a phone propped up against something, in a house in Canada. In the spring, everything closed.