There is a thing in the bedroom now.

It talks back. It learns her voice. It is in litigation, this year, for the deaths of children.

Episode 6 of Sacred Space is about the AI companion industry, the Character.AI and OpenAI lawsuits, and the question almost nobody is asking. Not why the chatbots exist. What was here before them.

Julia Wolf in the headphones. Arlie Hochschild on emotional labour. Lauren Berlant on the attachment that diminishes you. Lola Olufemi on what feminist care infrastructure would actually look like. The Strong Black Woman trope and the labour that was always cheap. The £1.3 billion taken out of council youth services since 2010. The CAMHS waits the chatbot is filling.

The chatbot is not winning because the chatbot is good. The chatbot is winning because the chatbot is what is there.

Out now wherever you get your podcasts. Full essay on Substack, link in bio.

If you are in a moment of difficulty, Samaritans 116 123, free, 24 hours.

#sacredspace #podcast #feminism #aiaccountability #youthmentalhealth #characterai #chatbots #carework #blackfeminism

The pipeline does not announce itself. That is its job.
You scroll. You see something. You laugh. You scroll. You see something else. You laugh, slightly less. You scroll. The third thing is harder to laugh at, and somewhere in your gut, in a place older than language, your body registers that something has shifted. But you are tired. You are scrolling because you are tired. You keep going.

Six months later you are looking at content that is no longer funny and you cannot remember when it stopped being funny. You cannot remember the path you took to get here. The algorithm has been refining your taste so steadily, so quietly, so professionally, that the version of you who is now nodding at things would have been horrified, six months ago, by where you ended up.

That is the pipeline. That is what it is. That is what it does. And it is happening, right now, in the bedrooms of millions of teenage boys in this country, while we sit downstairs and reassure ourselves that we have raised them well.

What gets done to women's anger before we have a chance to use it. And what it means to keep yours.