Emotional capitalism and artificial intimacy: Have you paid the subscription to your partner?
Description
In light of the recent cancellation of RightsCon 2026, SRHM, in collaboration with the Queensland University of Technology, is supporting Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, CONICET, the NOMADIC project and other organisations, to host this session that were scheduled to take place, to ensure these important conversations continue.
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This session examines the rise of "artificial intimacy" and emotional capitalism as the next frontier of AI.
In 2023, the World Health Organization launched an international commission on loneliness, declaring it a global public health issue. Their 2025 report found that 1 in 6 people worldwide experience loneliness-most common among youth and in lower-income countries.
Amid this crisis, digital technologies that often exacerbate isolation are now selling "artificial empathy" as a cure, promising flawless, subservient affection on demand. After trying to model attributes such as intelligence and creativity, AI is moving into empathy.
Large language models simulate emotions to deliver frictionless companionship, but at a cost: emotional dependency, critical thinking decline through "cognitive offloading," reinforcement of biases, and the commodification of vulnerability. Users are discovering the harsh realities of "attachment-as-a-service," where corporate control means that their AI partner can be locked behind a paywall, lobotomized by a software update, or deleted altogether if the company shuts down.
Far from harmless, this artificial care is built upon real world consequences and human trauma, relying on exploited human labor of underpaid and overexposed workers that are sanitizing AI systems, as well as massive ecological costs.
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A RightsCon session hosted by Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters (SRHM), in collaboration with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), following the cancellation of RightsCon 2026.
Read Defending Sexual and Reproductive Rights in the Aftermath of the RightsCon Cancellation by Zahra Stardust.
Speakers
Moderator: Dr Zahra Stardust
Dr Zahra Stardust is a white, queer, femme settler working on the stolen lands of the Yugara and Turrbal peoples. Her work specialises in sexual media and sextech, focusing on the politics of sexual content moderation (including the production, distribution and regulation of explicit media) and the design and governance of digital technologies. Her book Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance (Duke University Press, 2024), explored how governments and platforms regulate sexual media, and her forthcoming book Sextech: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press) examines the role of capitalism, colonialism and carceralism in contemporary sextech. She is on the World Association for Sexual Health’s Sexual Justice Initiative and is a member of the World Health Organisation’s Sexual Health and Wellbeing Advisory Group. Her current project, funded by the Australian Research Council, investigates how digital platforms can better safeguard sexual and reproductive rights online. She is a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology and a former Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Micaela Mantegna
Known as the ‘Abogamer’, Micaela Mantegna (AR) is a video game lawyer and activist, renowned for her expertise in digital ethics, extended reality (XR) policy, and the complex intersections of artificial intelligence, creativity, and copyright law. Author of “ARTficial: creativity, AI and copyright” (2022) and the influential essay “ARTificial: Why Copyright Is Not the Right Policy Tool to Deal with Generative AI”, her work explores in depth the implications of digital capitalism, at the intersections of intellectual property, AI, art, and ethics. In 2022, Micaela was chosen for the prestigious TED Fellowship, with her TED talk earning over 1.5M views globally. She has been an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, while also serving on Chatham House’s Responsible AI Taskforce, the World Economic Forum’s Metaverse Council. Building on her previous work on artificial intelligence and creativity, she coined the framework of “Intimacy Technocapitalism” to critique the commodification of simulated connection in digital ecosystems, pointing to artificial empathy as the “third wave of AI” designed to mimic human attributes. She has presented keynotes and lectures in over 28 countries, at conferences like GDC, TED, GamesBeat Summit, Ada Lovelace Festival, World Summit on Arts and Culture, Vancouver Biennale, RightsCon, DLD, Internet Freedom Festival, etc. Her work has been featured in The Verge, WIRED, Le Monde and other prestigious outlets. Micaela curates the Substack “Braindancing in the #Metaverse”, critically following the developments on extended reality, AI and the geopolitics of digital technologies.
Dianela Gahn
Dianela Gahn is a sociologist and interaction designer working across urban research, gender, sociotechnical systems, and with a growing interest in AI governance. She is a CONICET Research Fellow and doctoral candidate at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), affiliated with IHUCSO Litoral and IIGG. She is also a researcher in the NOMADIC project (Horizon Europe), studying how urban platforms mediate sociability and shape encounters across physical and digital spaces. Beyond academia, she works as an independent consultant in service design and public innovation.
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