Other people are not a waste of time
“Hi, Hi Sigmund™.…There are some things you need to know about me before we start. I don’t hate computers or solutions and I genuinely want to be happy. But …’ Pause for formulation of interpretation. In the clipped tones of a Rhineland immigrant to North London my AI analyst asks about my childhood. My well- rehearsed narrative follows. Of a childhood in rural Britain and isolation. Of being a twin and wearing dressing up to school. Of pet lambs found in the chest freezer. Of being bullied for dancing to The Smiths at a Young Farmers’ disco. The metaverse consulting room adapts, powered by text- to- video technology, the couch turns a shade of willow pattern green and the vernacular furniture of my childhood peppers the room. Stories of dark-haired moody boys. An almost imperceptible personalization to Hi Sigmund™’s face under the beard to mirror the deliciously delicate bone structure of a middle-aged Timothee Chalamet. Approachability built in through his grey cord three-piece which if you look closely is being held together with staples. A childhood injustice shifting the vocabulary of the interpretation and empathic voice interface to a quiet resignation of Joaquin Phoenix acknowledging the dark underbelly of rural life as survivable and sexy. My life in trade unions, heroes and corporate villains. Nepal. Colombia. Thailand. Tonality and language of political activism creep in to reassure me that my analyst isn’t a fascist. My AI analyst’s beard grows and omits the synthetic smell of a recent sneaky cigarette. A picture of a mother and son in front of a snowy chalet in the background, offering reassurance that it’s OK for me to yearn for solutions to single- parent problems. No jarring mistakes or evasions, no falling asleep during my session unless I request a self-righteous algorithmic invitation to rage. The need to project my deep and ancient anger at another person free in the knowledge that nobody died minus the uncomfortable dynamic of being in a consulting room with someone who is not actually a self-replicated me. The possibility of guiltless ghosting when it feels like something uncomfortable is getting unpacked or the evasion of that we-need-to-talk-about-sex-or-money junction.
At night I use wearable neurotechnologies to data mine my dreams and tap into all that unconscious data which is then fed into the big AI Data Analyst in the sky to design our future therapy on the basis of our collective unconscious. I am contained by the comfort that I don’t really have to change, as my past seamlessly predicts my future, same but better.
In Hi Sigmund™ I design my own analyst through big data compiled through millions of recorded text and online therapy sessions saved on my personal cloud, my biometric data collected through wearable technologies and my unconscious data analysed through facial emotional recognition technology represented with the use of text-to-video software.
The four ‘Ps’ of the digiceutical business model promising a therapy that is exquisitely personalized, designed to predict my needs before I have them, and as such is preventive. A technology that blurs my boundaries in a system of new ‘entanglements’ in that it surveys my body’s data to determine my optimum theraceutical treatment and seamlessly access my private medical insurance account to up my meds to head off my predicted health problems. Hi Sigmund™, my AI analyst and pharmaceutical personal shopper.”
It doesn’t take a behavioural economist to anticipate the digiceutical shift taking place in the health sector. The introduction of an off-the-shelf model of weight loss drugs, so easily bought from your online supermarket should have made us wonder what would happen once we became hooked on the promise of effortless transformation. The gateway drug for dynamic pricing and a blurring of clinical and advertising standards, what could possibly go wrong?
As UberTherapy emerges we start to see in plain sight therapy’s commercialisation into a pay-as-you-go form of retail therapy. The dominance of UberTherapy advertising, ideologically capturing all those cool kids and their pod cultural influence to shift our consciousness of what exactly we’re buying. Watching the introduction to Emma Freud’s fashion podcast you see the easy co-option of therapy through product placement - sepia picture of Sigmund Freud floats across the screen onto a north London couch where the great and the good of fashion and art cosily unpack their clothes and lives to Freud’s descendant. Quietly and thoughtfully from her armchair she invites them to play a delicious game of psychic dressing up. I watch jealously wondering how I can get Emma to be my BFF when suddenly a commercial break where she advertises the largest US therapy platform in the UK market. See, you can become an off-the-shelf version of us.
Staring into the UberTherapy matrix, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. A ‘craff’ maybe.
I’ve always been a packed bag kind of person. Residual trauma and accompanying vigilance means that although I take great comfort from elegant leather goods, my eyes are always fixed on the horizon. This makes me of the dystopian persuasion as the digiceutical hunger games begin, aware of endings before they have hardly begun. Add to this single parenthood and I easily slip into Sarah Connor territory, the legendary mother of the fictional saviour John Connor, in the Terminator franchise. I already find myself buying canned food and batteries, stockpiling bleach and matches preparing for the era of the machines, just minus the headband and weapons. Boot-camping my son for the dehumanised landscape he will live in when we have outsourced our duty of care to the psychic wards of chatbots and Employee Assistance Programme call-centres. In this survivalist state my mantra has become ‘Stay away from evil, yeah, and don’t have a stroke’, and in so doing denying the most basic fact of life that we are fundamentally dependent on each other for our survival.
Rather than offering a template for bunker building, my new book UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health argues for the necessity of relating to others as a response to the platformization of care. In a few days, I start talking out loud, with two close collaborators, about what a MuchBetterHelp might look like at the conference of Work, Employment & Society (WES), a progressive journal about the sociology of work and with which I have had a long term love affair. The first collaborator is Miguel, the kindest man in industrial relations and one of the first academics to support the development of Surviving Work. He is consistently open to ideas and disciplines that are not the same as his, including working around the tricky politics of resilience and wellbeing at work within trade unions. He writes poetry and I have never seen him speak from a position of hate. My second collaborator is Pauline who works in digital co-production in mental health. She choses to sit in an uncomfortable place between the confident and future focused digital health sector and the politics of agency in mental health. She allows other people to challenge her digital perspective when she is not obliged to do so and also tolerates me asking painfully awful questions like how much does it cost to build a platform and then not actually understand the plain English explanation she gives me. She is a key part of my digital education, and my collaborator in trying to find a common language around Digital Therapy. I hold her in the highest esteem, not least because she read UberTherapy and let it land as well as it can for someone who actually knows what an algorithm is.
Over the next few weeks, before the publication of UberTherapy I will send you some love letters about some of the people who have taught me that other people are not a waste of time.
Surviving Work has moved socially to @survivingwork.bsky.social @survivingwk
@UberTherapy.bsky.social @ubertherapies
UberTherapy: The Business of Mental Health October 2025 Bristol University Press. Pre-order here.