Artificial Intimacy
The space between the doorbell and the calendar
From my Madrid days, I carried an MBA under my arm. From a business school that eventually failed. The MBA bubble deserves its own piece. I came back with a title that looked better on paper than in life, but good friends, a lot of music, and more than a few sleepless nights.
One of the bands from that time, McEnroe, has been coming back to me these days. They’re an intimate band. Some will call them indie, others will say they land sharp little hits straight to the chest. Not easy. In one of their songs, Los Valientes, they sing:
Y me apoyo en tu corazón, Y te canto en una canción, Lo que nunca te digo.
I lean on your heart, I sing you in a song, What I never dare to say.
I play songs to reconnect with versions of myself. The ones I was. The ones I’ll never be. There’s something in that search that has no exact name in Spanish — though Portuguese tried.
Saudade.
I’m lucky I can still ring many of my friends. Walk downstairs and they’re there. But with others, you realize the time you spend scheduling is time you could be talking.
“Tuesday at 8?”
“Friday at 9?”
Better a WhatsApp.
And that’s where we are.
I don’t mean it bitterly. This is how we love now — in the gaps, in the five-voice audios, in the memes that say more than we do.
It’s not a complaint. It’s part of the charm. And part of the new narrative.
But in that gap — between the doorbell and the calendar — something appears. A space. And in that space, sometimes at 1am, no notice, no coordination, no need to align schedules, there’s the machine.
And you tell it what you don’t tell anyone. Not because you trust it more, but because there’s no consequence. No gaze. No awkward silence. No shared memory that could break. Nothing at stake.
And precisely because of that, you say everything.
And I tell you in prompts what I never dare to say.
That’s Artificial Intimacy.
It doesn’t replace anyone. But it takes up space. The space where conversations we didn’t know how to start used to live.
The dangerous part isn’t that it exists. It’s that it works.
There’s something deeper in there. Something where that intimacy transforms into something else.
But I’ll tell you on Sunday. Mass day.