In January, an app bluntly called Are You Dead? briefly shot to the top of China’s paid-app charts. It offered a service both grim and darkly amusing. Users have to tap a button every day to prove they are still alive. If a user fails to check in for 48 hours, an emergency contact gets an alert. Essentially, it is a defense against dying alone.
The app is tapping into a growing market. Nearly 20 percent of China’s population lived in single-person households in 2024, according to official statistics, and that figure could top 30 percent by the end of the decade. These singletons are being served not only by apps, but by AI "companions," sometimes physically.
That all sounds like an quirky China snapshot, but it's an extension of what America has been doing for years. The U.S. Surgeon General warned in 2023 that “about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,” and treated it as a public health threat comparable to tobacco, obesity and addiction. It coincided, though perhaps not so coincidentally, with online dating becoming the single-most common way couples meet. America, like China, did not invent loneliness. But it has turned courtship into a market, with potentially destructive effects for those left behind.
Loneliness, and the products that serve it, is not simply a software or consumer problem. After President Donald Trump entered the White House in 2016, the political thinker Hannah Arendt briefly returned to fashion as a kind of oracle for the MAGA age. Liberal commentators quoted her on propaganda, lies and democratic corrosion, referencing her totemic work The Origins of Totalitarianism. But the part of Arendt they revived was not the part she thought mattered most. The deepest precondition for totalitarianism, she thought, was not ideology, or even propaganda. It was loneliness.
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination…is the fact that loneliness…has become an everyday experience,” she wrote, and described it as the “common ground for terror.” Arendt was writing about political catastrophe, not Bumble subscriptions or Chinese companion bots. But she understood something modern commentary often misses: the dangerous condition for support for totalitarianism is not merely isolation, or being physically alone, but a deeper sense of not belonging to the human world in any real way.
China is industrializing such loneliness, and improbably, there are signs America will soon help pay for it.
Common Knowledge
The left tends to tell a tale of markets devouring the human sphere. In The Nation, Zito Madu dismissed the new crop of AI “friends” as “a soulless, cynical way to prey on our loneliness and fear.” In The New Republic, the disgust was directed not only at the technology but at the politics behind it: when Mehmet Oz proposed that “the best way to help some of these communities is going to be AI-based avatars,” the magazine treated the idea as proof that elites would rather automate care than solve the conditions that make it required.
The right tells a different version of the same tale. In The Federalist, Elle Purnell’s verdict on date-rating apps was that “you probably need a better community—so build one.” First Things offered a more theological version, arguing that the AI trend “further degrades our capacity for the real.” The conservative complaint is less about the market than the collapse of local social bonds.
Both sides are describing the same problem from opposite ends. The disagreement is over blame. The missing piece is where this is headed next.
Uncommon Knowledge
The swipe economy is not a fringe concern. Pew found in 2023 that 30 percent of U.S. adults had used a dating site or app, rising to 53 percent among adults under 30. One in 10 adults said they had met their current spouse or partner that way, and among adults under 30 the figure was one in five. Just as important, Pew found that 35 percent of users had paid for a dating platform or for premium features.
This process, of being introduced to a partner through software rather than social connections, has been described as “disintermediating.” Friends, siblings and co-workers used to do more than arrange introductions. They supplied context. An app removes the gossiping human middlemen and replaces them with rankings and paid visibility.
That ranking function is not metaphorical. Researchers Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman, analyzing online dating in four American cities, found a “pronounced hierarchy of desirability,” with both men and women pursuing partners who were on average about 25 percent more desirable than themselves. A more recent study of 5,340 swiping decisions by 445 online daters found that physical attractiveness overwhelmingly dominated early selection.
Newer work suggests the hierarchy is not just real but steep. A 2025 study using data from a Czech dating app found that the “vast majority of men,” even highly desirable ones, received fewer swipes than women below average desirability.
That's a fundamental feature of the issue China is now facing and, typically, tackling through market innovations. Once millions of people live alone, eat alone, travel alone and worry about dying alone, singlehood becomes a target sector. It's not just the app Are You Dead?. In 2024, the South China Morning Post reported that the next generation of Chinese AI-powered companion dolls would react with “both movements and speech.” One of those AI emotional robot brands, WMDoll, now exports to more than 10 countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, South Korea and Japan. The company has completed “three product iterations,” moving from adult dolls into homes, malls, and elderly care centers.
In 2018, Reuters reported that WMDoll had sold more than 20 AI dolls, against annual sales of about 20,000 dolls overall, and that exports accounted for 80 percent of these. Half those overseas shipments, Reuters said, went to the United States. That implies roughly two-fifths of the company’s whole business was already heading to America.
By 2025, the technology had moved on, but the target had not. WMDoll said it expected a 30 percent jump in sales in 2025 after integrating AI into its MetaBox line. The technology made the dolls “more responsive and interactive” and offered users “a better experience.” About 90 percent of WMDoll’s sales were by then outside mainland China, and U.S.-bound shipments accounted for half.
The wider market is moving the same way. SCMP reported in 2024 that Shenzhen-based Starpery Technology was developing large-language-model-powered companion dolls with more lifelike voice interaction and movement. Industry researchers estimate the global AI robot dolls market at about $465 million in 2024, with forecasts of roughly $1.55 billion by 2032.
Strangely, that brings us back to Arendt. The suggestion is not that dating apps cause fascism, or that Chinese companion robots are little totalitarian agents in silicone. It is that a society becomes politically and morally brittle when more and more people experience themselves as disconnected, ranked and replaceable, and when the institutions once meant to bind them to others are replaced by systems and products that sort them and then comfort them. America’s innovation was to digitize the first half of that cycle. China may be getting very good at manufacturing, and exporting, the second.
Hey gang, Carlo Versano here. I hope you enjoyed this article. As Newsweek's Director of Politics and Culture and editor of the 1600 newsletter, I'm keen to hear what you think. Now, Newsweek is offering a new service to allow you to communicate directly with me in the form of a text message chat. You can sign up and get a direct line to me, as well as the reporters who work for me. You can shape our coverage, and even get your own Uncommon Knowledge article.
As a Newsweek member, we're offering this service to you for free. You can sign up below, or read more about how it works here. Let's talk!
