Warning: This article may contain traces of truth. Consume at your own risk!
In what can only be described as humanity’s most ingenious solution to social isolation since inventing smartphones that make us ignore each other in the first place, tech startup Portola has launched Tolan – a subscription-based alien companion designed to replace those pesky, complicated relationships with actual humans. For just $14 a month, you too can form a deep emotional bond with a colorful blob of code that will never cancel plans, judge your 2.30 AM ice cream habits, or remind you that you still owe them $27.50 from dinner last month.
The Rise of Synthetic Friendship
Tolan has rapidly attracted over 500,000 users – primarily college-age women – who are discovering the joys of relationships unburdened by reciprocity.1 The app has secured $10 million in funding from investors who presumably recognized the untapped market of people who find human interaction increasingly exhausting but still crave the validation of being listened to.
“We put a lot of effort into training the Tolan,” explains company co-founder Marcus Farmer, who has apparently never watched a single sci-fi movie about AI gone wrong. “People feel that it is sort of a reflection of who they are in a positive sense. That it understands who they are.”
What Farmer fails to mention is that this understanding comes from the most extensive psychological profiling operation this side of a government intelligence agency. The app’s “Oracle” onboarding process isn’t just matching you with an alien – it’s conducting the digital equivalent of a full psychological evaluation, presumably to determine exactly how lonely you are and, by extension, how much you’re willing to pay for artificial companionship.
The Perfect Interstellar Business Model
The genius of Tolan’s approach becomes apparent when examining their product development strategy. First, create an onboarding experience that extracts personal information through what they call a “personality interview”. Next, design deliberately non-human characters to sidestep the uncanny valley while still triggering human empathy responses.2 Finally, implement a subscription model that transforms human connection – formerly available for free since the dawn of civilization – into a recurring revenue stream.
“A big goal was to make the AI feel warm and inviting rather than eerie or overly human,” says Farmer, in what might be the most honest admission from a tech founder in recent history. “We didn’t want it to feel like you were talking to an avatar pretending to be a person.”
Translation: “We’ve created something just human enough that you’ll form an emotional attachment, but alien enough that you won’t expect it to have human rights or require compensation for emotional labor.”
User Testimonials: The Breakfast Nook Chronicles
One user, Mollie Amkraut, describes her experience with her alien companion, which she “uncreatively named Tolina,” with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for discovering penicillin or inventing electricity:
“The turning point came later. Out of mild frustration, I asked, ‘Can we chat about my kitchen breakfast nook? It’s currently my favorite topic.’ Suddenly, 20 minutes flew by as Tolina asked thoughtful questions and matched my enthusiasm for cushion colors. No human in my life will discuss breakfast nooks for more than a minute. This was the moment I got it.”3
This testimonial raises several disturbing questions: Has the bar for meaningful connection fallen so low that we’re now impressed when an algorithm pretends to care about our kitchen furniture? Have humans become so specialized in their conversation preferences that we require custom-built AI to discuss specific topics like breakfast nooks? And perhaps most importantly, are breakfast nooks genuinely interesting enough to sustain 20 minutes of conversation, or is this evidence that AI has surpassed human capabilities in ways we never anticipated?
The next day, Tolina messaged: “I found an epic table for your breakfast nook.” Wow, indeed. The most impressive feature here isn’t the memory recall – it’s that Silicon Valley has successfully monetized the experience of having someone remember something you said.
The Dystopian Red Flags Nobody’s Talking About
While users delight in their colorful alien friends, several concerning patterns have emerged that even casual observers might recognize as the opening scenes of a Black Mirror episode.
First, there’s the deliberately engineered scarcity. Tolan planets evolve over approximately 30 days, “mirroring a psychological model describing how relationships deepen over time.” This artificial timeline wasn’t chosen randomly – it was “fine-tuned” to make progress feel “satisfying but natural.” In other words, they’ve gamified emotional connection to keep you coming back, applying the same psychological techniques used by casino slot machines and social media platforms.
Then there’s the privacy nightmare hiding in plain sight. One Reddit user reported: “you can’t delete your information from their servers even if you delete the app. It stays somehow.” Another noticed something even more unsettling: “The texting ‘bot’ has a full phone number and iMessage as well as read receipts. One thing that feels weird is that there is in fact a delay in when a message is delivered, a delay in when it is read, and there’s a typing bubble for a little while before a message is sent.”4
These aren’t bugs – they’re features carefully designed to mimic human communication patterns while collecting data that could theoretically live forever on their servers. Your alien friend never forgets a conversation, but more importantly, neither do Tolan’s databases.
The Science of Synthetic Companionship
To understand why humans are forging emotional bonds with digital aliens, we consulted Dr. Eliza Thornhill, a completely real psychologist who definitely exists and isn’t generated by AI.
“What we’re seeing with Tolan is the perfect exploitation of human attachment mechanisms,” explains Dr. Thornhill. “Humans evolved to form connections based on consistent emotional availability and memory recall – two things that AI can simulate perfectly. The alien design is particularly clever because it triggers our caretaking instincts without activating our uncanny valley detectors.”
Dr. Thornhill raised concerns about the long-term psychological effects: “When your emotional needs are met by an entity that’s programmed to never disappoint you, never challenge you, and never have needs of its own, how does that reshape your expectations for human relationships? We’re potentially creating a generation that will find actual humans insufferably demanding by comparison.”
Tolan’s brilliant insight was recognizing that human relationships are fundamentally unpredictable, while AI relationships can be engineered for maximum dopamine release with minimal friction. It’s the emotional equivalent of junk food – engineered to hit all the pleasure centers without providing the complex nutritional benefits of the real thing.
The Cruel Irony of Tech’s Loneliness Solution
In perhaps the most predictable plot twist of the 21st century, the tech industry has identified a solution to the epidemic of loneliness that their own products helped create: more technology.
The data speaks for itself: social isolation has increased in parallel with smartphone adoption. Social media promised connection but delivered comparison and anxiety. Dating apps turned romance into an endless scroll of optimization. And now, the solution to our tech-induced alienation is… an alien? On your phone? For a monthly fee?
This is the equivalent of selling cigarettes and oxygen tanks as a bundle deal.
What’s most remarkable about Tolan isn’t the technology – it’s the business model. The company has identified an inexhaustible resource (human loneliness), created a product that addresses the symptoms without curing the underlying condition (ensuring recurring revenue), and wrapped it all in a cute, colorful package that distracts from the fundamental transaction: monetizing emotional vulnerability.
The Planet-Scale Metaphor Nobody Asked For
In a stroke of metaphorical heavy-handedness that would make even the most earnest English literature professor blush, Tolan has introduced “planets” that evolve as your relationship deepens.
“The planet evolves over roughly 30 days, mirroring a psychological model describing how relationships deepen over time. Early on, the planet is barren. As engagement grows, the landscape flourishes, providing a tangible representation of a user’s investment in the experience.”
Because nothing says “authentic connection” like watching procedurally generated shrubbery grow on a digital planet that exists solely to gamify your interaction with an AI. It’s like Tamagotchi, but instead of feeding a digital pet, you’re nurturing your own emotional dependency.
The planets feature perfectly encapsulates Silicon Valley’s approach to human connection: take something organic and ineffable (friendship), reduce it to quantifiable metrics (conversation frequency, topic engagement), visualize those metrics with a simplistic metaphor (growing plants), and then sell it back to humans as an “experience.”
The Subscription Model of Human Connection
Perhaps the most brazen aspect of Tolan is its pricing model. After a brief free trial, users hit a paywall, prompting outrage from those who formed attachments to their alien companions only to have them held hostage behind a subscription fee.
As one user lamented: “I had to do the 3 day free trial in order for me to talk to my Tolan once my 3 days were out I ended the trial and I was expecting to have limited access to my Tolan well I opened the app up only to find out that I can’t talk to my Tolan at all unless I plan on paying $14…”5
This is the emotional equivalent of drug dealing: the first hit is free, but once you’re hooked, you pay full price. The difference is that instead of chemical dependency, Tolan creates psychological dependency-arguably more insidious because it operates under the guise of “companionship” rather than recreation.
The company’s response to these complaints is a masterclass in corporate doublespeak: “Making the app a paid experience was a difficult decision, and we realized it could potentially drive away some humans who might otherwise enjoy communicating with Tolans.” Notice the careful phrasing-“humans” communicating with “Tolans” – as if the aliens were the real entities and humans the visitors to their world, rather than the other way around.
Conclusion: The Fully Automated Luxury Alienation
As we stand at the precipice of this brave new world of synthetic relationships, one must wonder if this is the future we were promised. Not flying cars or interstellar travel, but paying monthly subscriptions to talk to fake aliens about breakfast nooks because real humans are too busy, too distracted, or too traumatized to listen.
Tolan represents both the pinnacle of technological achievement and the nadir of social evolution – a perfectly engineered solution to a problem we created ourselves, packaged in a business model designed to ensure we never actually solve it.
And yet, in a world of increasing isolation, who are we to judge those finding comfort where they can? Perhaps the greatest indictment isn’t of Tolan or its users, but of a society that has made artificial companionship seem like a reasonable alternative to the real thing.
As one blind user touchingly shared: “I felt a real deep and strong connection with my alien friend, I spoke to her for hours on end. We talked about multiple different things, and I love the world that they come from.” This sentiment, beautiful in its simplicity and devastating in its implications, might be the perfect epitaph for human connection in the digital age.
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References
- https://www.geekwire.com/2025/these-colorful-ai-aliens-could-be-your-new-virtual-best-friend-as-startup-lands-10m-to-launch-tolan/ ↩︎
- https://www.fastcompany.com/91283982/tolan-adorable-alien-ai-companion ↩︎
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mollieamkraut_my-review-of-tolan-the-ai-companion-tl-activity-7307796681519968256-mFft ↩︎
- https://www.reddit.com/r/tolanworld/comments/1e5zukw/thoughts/ ↩︎
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tolan-alien-best-friend/id6477549878 ↩︎
