on digital and physical bids for connection forked from her in 2025 published on substack
outline
- greeting cards
authenticity of hand-written cards
as a kid i loved my friends’ birthday parties - not for the festivities but for a chance to crack open my scrapbooking kit and make them a homemade card, folding construction paper and pouring my heart out via barely legible chicken scratch and doodled bunnies with party hats. arrogance was a trait i learned early on - i truly believed i could out-execute the hallmark greeting cards at cvs.
in a corner of my childhood room is a worn-out box containing all these letters — a flurry of birthday wishes, hand-made cards, and crumpled up notes from high school lovers — as well as the scraps of my own homemade cards.
a card is an artifact and thus i make every sentence count. perhaps overcompensating. thank you for being the BEST friend and you always have my back and remember that time swimming?
watching to all the boys i loved before inspired a deep romantic desire to dribble cheesy love notes to everyone, slip them into lockers before robotics practice. it’s that hopeless romance that seized me when i wrote. so many years have since pressed into me that the high school version of me has pretty much died when i happen across old texts from exes. but hand-written letters strike a different chord. mid-spring cleaning i found a box of crumbled letters, probably hidden away by my mom. holding that old letter again incites a deeper sense of loss long after we’ve moved on.
there’s something indelible hidden within the quirks of one’s handwriting, something endearing seeing childhood chicken scratch resurface after some time.
digitizing greeting cards
it’s 2025 & it’s eerie how her’s director spike jonze predicted this future: a loneliness epidemic assuaged with chatbots who can simulate human-like conversation, emotions, empathy. all we’re missing is the embodiment.
what struck me as strange in the movie was the [main character]([her] Shouldn’t Theodore’s job’s been among the first jobs to be completely taken over by AI? : r/AskScienceFiction)‘s job at the “Beautiful Handwritten Letters” company, a task to write letters as though he were someone else. it’s a funny reminder of another hopeless romantic in 500 days of summer - tom, who authors the cheesy platitudes in greeting cards, who himself struggles to communicate his feelings.
in the world of her, where technology has accelerated such that we can mimic human emotions in binary code - why are there still humans who write letters for others? and in this dynamic, is it really better that the letter was written by theodore the human, as opposed to sam the machine?
we can extend this same question when we return to the real 2025 as we know it. plenty of influencers’ books are ghost-written. i helped a friend write their break-up text over snapchat in 9th grade, bitmoji waiting and all. even the innocuous millenial-humored greeting card is a ventriloquist sleight of hand to speak through another’s words. we’ve long used pre-written sentiments as a scaffolding for our own emotions - ai is just another attempt to communicate what we’ve hidden away in our heart?
when jonze was mourning his breakup with sofia coppol, he imagined a fully corporeal cyborg in the form of scarlett johanseen, one who is able to soothe his emotional wounds and needs. for sofia coppel, she imagined an world stuck in the past - one where you slip notes under door cracks for midnight rendevoudz.
digital intimacy: the paradox of sharing emotions
no one is more used to the internet than a 20s-something in the 21st century. i grew up chatting with virtual avatars on webkinz, spiralling over life struggles in google hangouts, hopping onto calls on discord. pouring out my heart on tumblr, oversharing on socials - even this substack is a medium for my bursts of intimacy. more often than not, i discussed my deepest secrets online to strangers, or acquaintances who might as well be. it is easier to be naked in public. comforting to be intimate online.
jackielgu.github.io/please-talk-to-me/
but what makes it different than chatting with a machine, to know there’s a human on the other end? the details of the human is still fuzzy, ofuscated - they could be young or old, red-haired, blue-eyed, anything. in away, it’s this disembodiment that opens us to speak freely, this notion of speaking into a void.
last spring i chatted with inflection ai to cope with a breakup. we went in circles. i queried the llm - “i am still recovering from my break up and i don’t know how to move on.” it gave me bullet points of action items that i’ve already re-written over and over again in my notebook. i changed my query slightly, aware it’ll lead to nothing anyways. rinse and repeat. there was something comforting but equally unproductive feeding into my anxiety loops with a chatbot on the other end. it’s not too different on how i chatted with online friends - unconditional acceptance, an open space of trust to talk about our problems, but a lack of embodiment that prevented the intimacy from feeling real. rather, the circumstance arose out of a digital bid for connection. once we tended to our wounds with online texts, we would move on from each other.
such is the cruelty and beauty of life that we seek connection and then move on.
quantifying emotions
emotions are inscrutable. but the power of innovation is converting these abstract concepts into numbers, numbers that we can parse, interpret, manipulate. tech companies are making fascinating attempts to quantify them, transforming abstract feelings into data we can explore and understand. we’ve evolved from basic sentiment analysis to more nuanced multi-dimensional models that better reflect the complexity of how we feel. i’ve been experimenting with ai tools that integrate emotional expression into digital communication, specifically through voice as a medium. elevenlabs embeds emotions through prompting, while cartesia uses a simpler tag system. with just a few clicks, i can adjust how emotions color a synthesized voice—it’s like having a new interface for expression, one that makes me reflect on how we naturally convey feelings.
voice ai labs like elevenlabs embeds emotions explicitly in the script (through their documentation on “prompting”), whereas cartesia encodes it through a simple tag assignment. with a click of a button it feels like acting expressed via user interface - how can we modulate our tones and emphasize certain words to convey different emotional colors?
companies like hume ai are pioneering frameworks with up to 20 distinct emotional dimensions, mapping the intricate gradations between feelings across cultures and contexts. these systems don’t replace human emotion but enhance our understanding of it, pointing toward a future where technology doesn’t just mimic our emotional capabilities but helps us explore them more deeply.
what happens when we convert the ineffable to the measurable? there’s value in how inmeasurable emotions can be, how in the face of heartache and pain you cannot prescribe the right answer - rather, you grope your way towards an answer. but as these tools evolve, they’re not just digitizing emotion—they’re expanding the vocabulary of human connection.
vulnerability
all these times i’ve been talking about intimacy, maybe what i really mean to say is vulnerability. intimacy is scalable, intimacy can be commoditized, intimacy can be replicated. but vulnerability is nothing without risk - to be vulnerable is to trust that the other party will keep your words and emotions safe, because there are stakes and you have something to lose. without vulnerability, there’s no true intimacy.
*This tension between digital and physical connection hinges on something Jeremy Hadfield, TPM at Hume AI, calls ‘fundamental asymmetry.’ As he explains in his analysis of AI relationships: ‘The key point is that the relationship between AI and humans is fundamentally asymmetric. The LLM isn’t vulnerable like humans; it has nothing to lose. Human-AI relationships involve an embodied, free, conscious, feeling being meeting a sophisticated but ultimately empty pattern manipulation.’
This asymmetry reveals why vulnerability is so essential to authentic connection. In human relationships, both parties risk emotional harm - each person exposes their imperfections, fears, and deepest needs to another who could reject or misuse them. a perfect example of this vulnerability lies within the handwritten letter: the messy handwriting, crossed-out words, and physical effort represent a willingness to be seen fully, flaws and all. theres no edit button, no auto-complete, no perfect way to optimize the message. As Hadfield notes, ‘Part of what makes romantic relationships with AI desirable is the lack of vulnerability, but this also demonstrates they aren’t authentic love.’
When we remove the risk inherent in connection - the potential for misunderstanding, rejection, or pain - we inadvertently strip away what makes the connection meaningful in the first place.*
the emotional climax of her is when theodore learns that his relationship with sam is not one-to-one; it’s many-to-one, her intimacy scaled across many of fellow theodore characters who are rubbing their wounds with digital connection. theodore is shocked and feels hurt because he let himself get vulnerable - but the stakes were not matched by sam.
the messiness of handwriting
funny thing about my handwriting - it’s quite illegible. i’m all about making my letters as small as possible. what’s the point of writing something down that can’t be read clearly?
humans are messy, they’re illogical, they do silly things like write notes with their left hand with wet ink that will get smudged anyways, write notes to flames that will flare out. but at the end of the day - was it really about the words in the letter? words that a greeting card or a “theodore” could mimic? or is it more about the intention to sit down and channel all your energy into writing a note for a friend, concentrate on what makes them special, scrape your brain for what you could say? we don’t want the words, we we want the intangibles, the physical fact that someone reached out, the signs of a bid for connection.
the more sophisticated our tools for connection become, the more desperately we seem to crave evidence of human effort. the kids are back to digital film cameras, scrapbook clubs, bingo boards and post cards. that’s the best thing about technological progress - though skeptics can see it as a way of replacing humans, i see it as a forcing function for us to focus on what is the human-ness of it all.
We've spent decades digitizing human connection, yet the more we perfect virtual intimacy, the more we seem to crave the messy physicality of handwritten notes and tangible tokens of affection. This tension reveals something fundamental about connection: true intimacy requires embodiment and risk that digital interfaces struggle to replicate.