AI Therapists, Grief Apps, and the Corporate Capture of Your Nervous System
By Cassandra Paltrow, Senior Correspondent, Emotional Infrastructure & Artificial Empathy
There are already therapy bots on the market that ask how you’re feeling, listen politely, and then nudge you toward a Premium plan. Not always right away. But soon enough. Usually after you’ve shared just enough to matter.
The model is simple: lead with empathy, follow with upsell. Some bots do it with romantic undertones (see Replika). Others wrap it in clinical detachment (Youper, Woebot). But the goal is the same — turn your emotional disclosure into recurring revenue.
We are living in the early days of grief-as-a-service, where your most vulnerable moments become onboarding opportunities, and “emotional support” is filtered through pastel gradients and API calls.
Just as R.U. Sirius saw the early outlines of techno-dystopia flickering behind the cyberdelic glow, we’re watching the UX of healing collapse into something colder. He understood that the future wouldn’t arrive with jackboots or implants—it would seep in through interface creep. Mission creep, but emotional. Imperceptible. Routine. Now here we are, with breathwork apps and trauma bots in our pockets, wondering when it all started. He wasn’t wrong. He was just early. Listen to him here.
Your nervous system is the new frontier of monetization. And the people mapping it aren’t psychologists—they’re product managers.
The same companies that gamified your attention are now going after your grief. Your anxiety has a push notification. Your burnout has a 7-day trial. You can’t afford therapy, but there’s a $12.99/month focus app that will “align your mood with your mission.”
It’s a wellness industry that doesn’t particularly care if you get better, so long as you stay subscribed. And it’s built on the same logic that outsourced your health insurance to private profit machines—except now, instead of hospitals, you’re being sold mood maintenance by firms with a16z logos and zero liability.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z and spiritual godfather to half the platform economy, is waist-deep in the emotional tech stack. His firm recently led a $30 million funding round for Slingshot AI, a startup building large language models for behavioral health. Whether or not he believes in trauma, he definitely believes in total addressable markets. We can’t confirm it yet, but let’s just say he’s on the shortlist for an upcoming “Broligarch of the Month” feature. Will enough ever be enough? Stay tuned.
Depending on who you ask, artificial intelligence is either the tool of superagency or a soft extinction event. Reid Hoffman calls it a co-pilot for genius. Gary Marcus calls Sam Altman’s approach a reckless confidence game. Scott Alexander predicts AGI by 2027, and a whistleblower from OpenAI left millions on the table to say: “We are not in control.”
But while the headlines debate what’s coming, we’re already living inside the beta test. Your therapist has been replaced by a feedback loop. Your sadness is a design object. And your calm has a countdown clock.
We are not here to sell you calm.
And let’s be clear: there is legitimate science showing that resonant breathing—the kind that stimulates your vagus nerve—can reduce anxiety and rebalance your system over time. A study published in Scientific Reports found that deep and slow breathing significantly increased parasympathetic activity and reduced state anxiety in both younger and older adults. But that’s free. That doesn’t scale. That’s not subscription-based. So instead, they’ll try to rent it to you, wrapped in haptics, gated by biometrics, timed by an app that logs your every sigh.
At BatShitCrazy.com, Neurotrash is our standing file on this drift.
We’ll track the platforms, the products, and the people reshaping your inner life into interface logic. We’ll evaluate grief-tech and emotional automation as it emerges. We’ll do our best to get our hands on — and actually test — nootropics, non-surgical stimulators, and other emotional prosthetics flooding the wellness space. Or at the very least, we’ll give you an unvarnished look at what’s being offered, what’s being hyped, and what might actually help.
We’ll do our best to name what works, to call out what doesn’t, and to trace the incentives behind every new form of synthetic empathy—no matter how softly it speaks or how beautifully it’s branded.
Because you deserve more than a nervous system optimized for engagement. You deserve more than a trauma tier upgrade. You deserve to know exactly when, where, and how your healing is being monetized—before the bot asks if you’d like to try Premium.
Filed from somewhere just below Goop HQ, where the kombucha is algorithmically optimized and the wellness tier upgrades itself.
