I was deeply moved when I read the TIME article on America’s “Connection Recession” by Bing Chen, founder and CEO of Gold House and watched his closing remarks at the Gold House Gala. Something just clicked.

I found him quite striking. Never before had someone’s willingness to be vulnerable reached me this way, especially as someone who has struggled constantly with grief. I had a violent death in the family in the Philippines pre-pandemic where I felt traumatized by seeing disturbing images on social media years ago, and was triggered when I learned of the recent killing of my friend, Lyle Prijoles.

Throughout his social media posts and many of his other interviews, he shared vulnerable memories of his father who passed away from cancer at the age of 15 years old, an immigrant executive with a sharp tongue that reminded me of my own parents. More compelling, he painted the image of an empty church calling us to question who is around us. Who catches you when there is a death in the family? Who shows up when you lose a job or face any other life challenge? Aside from his ability to deliver eloquent remarks with clean prose I saw he was able to communicate what we’ve all been through the last few years with the COVID19 pandemic—mass collective grief.

Last year, I lost 8 people, not including my dog of 20 years, Bam-Bam. At a Pride Month party the other day, I learned of a friend who had lost 13 family members and friends, and it isn’t even July yet. I thought: maybe this is the new normal we weren’t prepared for—the baby boomer generation dying out en masse.

Earlier this year, I attended celebrations of life for Filipino American technology pioneer Dado Banatao and for my Uncle Abet, one of my parents’ longtime friends from the biotechnology professional organization they helped build decades ago, long before tech company Business/Affinity/Employee Resource Groups were officially established.

Then my friend, 40 year old Filipino American activist, Lyle Prijoles, was killed in the Philippines.

I haven’t slept quite the same since.

I thought, maybe it’s just the end of an era that came sooner than I wanted.

Photo credit: Patricio Ginelsa. Pictured: Lyle Prijoles, Director of the Debut, Gene Cajayon, Associate Producer of the Debut, Patricio Ginelsa, LeRoid David (artist)

Lyle was a well-known community organizer, cultural worker, and artist. His life’s work, outside of advocating for human rights in the Philippines, existed inside a broader ecosystem of Filipino American cultural production: Bindlestiff Studio, the nation’s only Filipino American theater; filmmaker Gene Cajayon’s groundbreaking film The Debut; Patricio Ginelsa’s work documenting Filipino American identity through projects like “The Apl Song” and “Bebot” (generation 1 and 2) and San Francisco Bay Area artists like LeRoid David. All of them became my friends when I was a journalist covering their work over 20 years ago, documenting pioneers who were fighting for more positive representation of Filipino Americans. The Debut helped create more of the “viewership pie” for Asian American audiences years before broader representation became commercially viable. They were artists, storytellers, filmmakers, and organizers who fought for space in an America that often rendered us invisible, and long before Gold House existed (when Bing and I were still also in our pre-teen and teen years).

Visibility did not happen accidentally.

It was organized.

It was fought for.

It was sustained.

Lyle wasn’t counted alone, either. 18 other people died alongside him, Kai Sorem, another Filipino American trans activist and Philippine peasants, journalists and organizers — who have become known as the Negros19 — many of them young lives, the kind of loss that usually gets reduced to a footnote, the way pandemic death counts became just another statistic we stopped registering.

I started to remember the famous Rent song “Seasons of Love,” which I sang in high school church choir.

525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear.
525,600 minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.
In 525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year in the life?
How about love?

Measure in love.
Seasons of love.

525,600 minutes! 525,000 journeys to plan.
525,600 minutes - how can you measure the life of a woman or man?

The whole premise of the song is a refusal to measure a year in any of the units we default to — money, minutes, output — and an insistence on measuring it in love instead.

Other countries outside of the U.S. measure progress through a happiness index, something we should seriously consider especially given the nature of our country today.

When I thought of a single death, Lyle’s death two months ago, I asked myself what anyone else asks when someone they knew passes away:

And more unique to Lyle, in particular given the nature of his death was one of injustice:

That question took me back to where all of this began.

Growing up I thought I’d be working in music, technology, or television/film (my early career in civic engagement was related, but a different route). My last memory of the Philippines was telling my grandfather (brother of famous FAMAs screenwriter and director, the seasoned filmmaker who won the equivalent of 10 Oscars or a film in the Philippines, Johnny Pangilinan), that I wanted to be a computer scientist like my brother and a writer.

For most of my life, as a proud Silicon Valley native born and raised, I believed technology, creativity, and organizing could give life meaning and purpose.

I spent years working in journalism and civic engagement at the intersection of grassroots organizing, digital strategy, issue-based advocacy, and electoral campaigns. Over the years, I advocated for immigrant rights, affordable housing, education. Like many who came of age politically during Obama’s first election, I believed in the possibility of institutions—hope and change. I was official paid campaign staff for President Obama in 2012 and for then–Former Deputy U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ro Khanna on his first Congressional campaign in 2014

My first organizing lessons came through Filipino Advocates for Justice’s youth programs in Union City, where arts and culture were used to help young people avoid gang violence and imagine different futures, and where I met singer, Buffy, at age 11. Later, under the mentorship of UC Davis Asian American Studies professor emeritus, Robyn Rodriguez, I worked on the campaign to prevent the Cuevas family, a Filipino American family from my hometown of Fremont, from being deported through advocating for private immigration bills in lieu of comprehensive immigration reform being law. Representation was always something we had to fight for, funding our Asian and Filipino American organizations and social justice causes.

The underlying belief was simple: technology could help bridge gaps, increase participation, and build opportunity at scale.

As community organizers, we called it civic tech and digital strategy.

As technologists, we called it innovation.

Years later I founded FASTER - Filipinx Americans in Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics (STEAM), a non-profit focused on helping Filipino Americans enter STEAM fields—a continuation of the work my parents began when they immigrated from the Philippines and built careers in biotechnology.

And yet 2 decades later, I find myself watching many of the same communities I organized alongside face mass deportations I spent my twenties trying to prevent.

In addition, the entrenched politics of the Philippines, a country I hadn’t been back to in decades, also felt painfully distant. I found myself frustrated by how little I could do beyond advising legislative strategy here in the United States to uniquely contribute my time and skills. This would be how I chose my specific activism. In the past, I was accustomed to being a physical body on the frontline, where I had spent years before standing behind a bullhorn chanting at all kinds of direct action demonstrations for advocating for various social justice issues and policy reforms.

When I entered my technology career as a software engineer working alongside scientists and researchers, I found myself asking the same question through a different lens:

This year I spent countless hours building with AI.

The progress has been astonishing.

Problems that once took months, weeks, or days now take hours.

About a decade ago I was trying to build something similar to Google’s AlphaFold and Nanome combined—visualizing open-source biomedical data at petabyte scale in augmented and virtual reality to advance Alzheimer’s research through searchable protein databases and reconstructed brain imaging.

Today, many of those same kinds of technical feats are dramatically easier to create. With a handful of well-crafted prompts, better tooling, and agentic workflows, we can build so much faster.

Yet for the first four months of this year, I easily spent so much time, 10 hour days completely timeblind managing AI agents while spending less and less time with actual human beings. I jokingly started calling myself an “AI vampire.” Eventually I learned how to orchestrate more reliable agentic workflows that could run overnight, finally allowing me to sleep again. But even as my productivity increased, I could feel the tradeoff.

The possibilities seemed endless.

But when I learned of Lyle’s death two months ago, I was shocked, and I couldn’t feel anything for a week.

There was no technological solution that could have stopped the forces that caused Lyle to be killed in the Philippines, a country still shaped by colonial history, entrenched in political corruption, and systems of power that had resisted change for decades.

At his fundraiser, held inside the intimate space of Bindlestiff Studio—the epicenter of Filipino American arts in San Francisco—I broke down crying to a friend. I told her I felt dehumanized.

Not because technology had failed.

Because I had allowed it to consume the parts of myself that made the work meaningful in the first place.

For years, my focus on the “A” (which stands for Arts) in STEAM - Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math, had quietly drifted to the margins.

The irony is I’d already wrestled with this tension years earlier. In one of my poems, I wrote:

As a systems builder I was thriving, preparing to publish my next benchmark on agentic AI and spatial computing.

But the artist in me was dead inside.

After COVID forced me to pause my venture studio three years ago, I had slowly begun treating art and cultural production as a luxury instead of a necessity. Writing became something I squeezed into the margins. Poetry became something I occasionally returned to at open mics instead of something that shaped how I moved through the world. This year I’ll finally release a poetry chapbook containing more than a decade of that work.

With Lyle’s death, I woke up.

Lyle's death forced me to recognize the imbalance between my professional life, which focused on my technological work and contributions, and my creative life, which I often framed as more personal, more "soft," and harder to monetize in my previous venture — and secondary.

We spend enormous energy measuring economic productivity and technological progress.

We spend remarkably little measuring the cultural infrastructure that allows people to flourish in the first place.

Bing points toward when he argues for something like a cultural GDP, calling it “missing architecture,” in our country.

Many countries track happiness metrics — indices that measure social cohesion, meaning, community well-being. The United States largely does not. In a country where workers have historically been measured as units of productivity, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the metrics of human flourishing aren’t on the national dashboard. These measurements shape societies at scale. And right now, by most informal readings, we are not doing well.

We count GDP.

We count productivity.

We rarely measure trust.

People aren’t turning to AI because technology suddenly became irresistible. They’re turning to it because many of the institutions that once helped people find meaning, purpose, belonging, and community had already begun weakening long before generative AI arrived.

I had a conversation with Ilya Sutskever at a party in 2018, asking him about my favorite algorithm from Ian Goodfellow’s Deep Learning book, StyleGAN (a precursor to diffusion models and to what we know today as generative AI). He said to me, “It was a thing, but not really their thing.” Ilya — the research architect credited with steering OpenAI toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — and Sam Altman, co-founders of OpenAI at the time (pre-GPT), had no idea what they were building would turn out the way it did. Generative AI was still in its infancy when I had these conversations. Personally, I felt there was an unfair amount of blame and projection, by the media and in general sentiment, aimed at many of the new billionaire class of AI founders, who were genuinely unaware of how well their research-turned-product would do. But they also knew they had a responsibility to humanity.

The deeper question isn’t whether AI will strengthen our humanity.

It’s whether it will simply amplify the social fabric we’ve already built.

Before ChatGPT existed, I was a diversity fellow through Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas’s fast.ai deep learning program at the University of San Francisco (USF) Data Institute. The landscape was different then, when I first took courses in 2017. I still believe OpenAI has been the leading pioneering company in AI. Over the years, my own thinking about AI ethics has evolved alongside the technology itself, more on that in my Tethics piece here.

The people closest to these technologies have always understood their implications—and so has popular culture.

Most superhero stories are ultimately arguments about power, accountability, and responsibility.

I redesigned Rachel’s slide with other images for readability. This was inspired by the content from Mark White’s chapter comparing Marvel movie characters to different types of philosophies of AI.

My ethics training often framed it this way à la the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): a Captain America or Thor approach versus an Iron Man one. The first two are rooted rooted or virtue ethics and morality—leave no one behind, even as technology scales and the costs of exclusion compound. The other is more utilitarian: save as many people as possible while accepting collateral damage.

It’s the trolley problem from The Good Place dressed in Marvel IP.

The rapid development of AI has been exciting for the AI community, and for most others, especially outside of tech, there remains dissent. Who gets left behind and who benefits?

As AI reshapes society, the conversation is often framed around productivity and employment.

Those concerns are real.

AI can displace jobs, as Bing has noted at his Forbes panel, as Anthropic’s report and many others have cited, or it can also create new ones, as Jensen Huang of Nvidia notes.

My hypothesis: we’re heading toward an economy of small companies built by individuals leveraging AI rather than large employers offering stability, and whether that’s liberation or precarity depends entirely on what resources you start with. The fear came up on a recent panel during Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month with Asian Leaders Alliance (ALA), where Asian American founders talked about fear of losing their jobs to AI— and about reframing that fear by leveraging AI to build a side hustle and eventually start a company fas a way to reclaim control and agency.

Similarly, as someone who helped coin the term “creator economy” alongside his team at YouTube, Bing has shared in recent talks at Cannes Lions that content creators/influencers are well positioned with their superpower to be able to thrive in this market having to wear different hats. That they are able to leverage AI tools create their own unique content, things that AI cannot replicate so easily.

They say that marketing and taste is the new electricity, not data or AI’s ability to give yet another collaborative filtering algorithm (recommendation systems) for curation — so style and perspective is inherently human.

Every major technological revolution has promised abundance, including AI.

The question is whether our capacity for meaning, belonging, and collective care grows alongside it.

Similarly, Paget Kagy offers a sharp distinction: AI won’t replace people because it’s smarter. It will replace work that has become predictable enough to automate.

She posits that people are already operating like programs. Up-and-coming author, Courtney Cho makes a related point about identity: this is the moment where AI has been so explosive it demands a shift in who we are, not just what tools we use.

As technology changes how we work, it also forces us to reconsider where meaning, purpose, belonging, and identity actually come from.

Culture teaches people what futures are possible.

That’s why I remain a technology and a cultural optimist—but technology alone cannot answer the questions society has to answer for itself.

Those observations reinforce what Bing is ultimately pointing toward.

The connection recession frames income inequality and our economic problems, lack of affordability of our basic needs that are what keep our people together, living longer, healthier lives: housing, childcare, healthcare, and support for fertility care remain inaccessible for many Americans.

Bing writes about declining marriage and birth rates.

Economics matter—Housing, childcare, healthcare, and fertility care remain financially out of reach for many Americans who want families. In many other countries, these are treated less as private burdens and more as public investments because societies recognize that helping people build families ultimately strengthens the social fabric. In the United States, those same decisions often become deeply personal financial calculations.

I know because in my own fertility journey and obsession with Spring Fertility’s egg calculator to determine just how many eggs I would need to freeze to have multiple children, I eventually wrote a Modern Fertility Guide, pulling together the diagnostics, AI tools, and resources I wished someone had handed me a decade earlier.

Affordability explains a real part of the decline.

But I don’t think it explains all of it.

Alongside rising costs, we’re also living through a loneliness epidemic. A lack of closeness and intimacy has become increasingly normalized, and it’s perhaps even more telling that Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations, as comedian and creator Anna Akana has pointed out — what feels like a “Sex Recession” that I know is part of the larger Connection Recession and loneliness epidemic. Studies have found that having sex once a week mitigates depression and leads to greater well-being. I laugh and cry simultaneously at this obvious truth and sad reality.

If intimacy correlates that directly with well-being, what does it mean that an entire generation is opting out of it — is that a symptom of the recession, or has it quietly become one of its causes?

Some factors explain this trend: Gen Z experiences more mental health challenges, drinks less, lives at home longer, and has been shaped by a relationship to social media and technology that Gen Xers never had to navigate at the same age. But explanation isn’t the same as understanding. What does it say about a society when people are finding it harder not only to afford families, but to build the closeness that would make them want one in the first place? When did intimacy itself start to feel like another resource people couldn’t afford?

Technology continues expanding what is medically possible. Yet many people remain uncertain whether the social conditions exist to build the lives they actually want. The challenge isn’t simply producing more technological abundance.

Part of that comes down to economics. Part of it comes down to trust.

Do we trust that we can afford a home? Raise children? Keep our jobs? Find a partner who shares our values? Build a future that won’t constantly be pulled out from underneath us? And if the answer to most of those is no — what exactly are we asking people to have faith in when we ask them to build a family anyway?

Part of my Catholic upbringing preached procreation narratives by default, where the assumption that everyone would marry and have children was the baseline, and anything outside of that was treated as the exception that needed explaining. I’ve watched friends, my former partner’s brother and his cousins, choose to opt out of marriage and children altogether, asking: is it worth it? What about hobbies and personal time? Can we afford it financially? I found that alarming — not because I think there’s one right way to build a life (I have real respect for solo lives, coupled lives with or without kids, every configuration), but because the question itself had changed shape. It used to be do I want this. Now it’s can I justify this.

So many people I know have said they had trouble finding a partner, found everything too expensive, as if they were living inside a scarcity mindset. I never fully understood it from the inside — until I started to wonder whether it was a mindset at all, or just an accurate read of the conditions. Would bringing a child into this future make sense, given where society has been lately, given climate change, given how fragile everything has started to feel? I take issue with that framing. I want to believe people can have love and family in whatever form they choose, regardless of affordability or a changing world that isn’t scary so much as just what the world is now. But I’m aware that wanting to believe something and having evidence for it are different things. If an entire generation has started running a cost-benefit analysis on whether love is worth it, what does optimism even mean anymore, and is it still honest to call myself one?

Years ago, I met Sam Altman while working on Ro Khanna’s first congressional campaign, shortly after he became president of Y Combinator—long before OpenAI existed. We talked about Universal Basic Income as a genuine attempt to think through what abundance could mean. Those conversations no longer are theoretical or ‘the future of work,’ they are the present state of our society.

There is a real question with regard to the method of how productivity gains from AGI will be redistributed—as Altman notes at his most recent talk at Stanford, through distributed compute as AI becomes a utility, through Universal Basic Income, a citizens’ wealth fund, or other mechanisms that already exist in countries with consistently higher measures of well-being. It’s a question worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as socialism, corporate greenwashing, or wishful thinking.

Similarly, Bing noted during the Gold House Gala:

“In the last three decades, we have made far fewer far wealthier. It’s the top 1%, by the way, if you’re counting. In the last three decades, middle- and lower-income families’ wages have only increased 17%, while the top 1% have increased 300 times. That’s American Dream math, if you’re counting.”

As Obama notes, we’re living through a revolution that could transform medicine even as it accelerates inequality—connecting us instantly while leaving us more isolated than ever.

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed an executive order on AI governance, and similar conversations are happening nationally — those policies matter.

Policy also tends to follow culture.

Culture creates the conditions for what becomes possible before politics makes it real.

As Bing says, before there was a Black president, there were fictional ones on screen (24, The Fifth Element).

Culture teaches people what futures are possible through imagination and cultural production.

Technology and culture are two different kinds of essential infrastructure and vehicles that shape society.

Technology is infrastructure of capacity—it expands what’s possible, how fast, at what scale.

Culture is infrastructure for meaning — it tells people what to do with capacity, what we should build.

The connection recession isn’t simply about loneliness or screen time. It’s about recognizing, valuing, and investing in the cultural infrastructure that allows society to flourish.

Culture creates the trust, intimacy, belonging, and imagination that make technological progress meaningful.

For too long, particularly in Silicon Valley, we’ve often treated the “A” in STEAM—arts, design, and culture—as secondary to engineering. Yet Steve Jobs famously reminded us that “design is how it works.” That insight extends far beyond the user experience of a product.

It asks a much bigger question: not simply how our technology works, but how our society works—and just as importantly, how it feels to live and experience it.

Culture is essential infrastructure—one we have never adequately measured, invested in, or valued, even as so much of our collective future depends on it.

Technology creates connectivity.

Culture creates connection.

This piece was a deeply personal one. I’ll resume our original technical series related to my new app release in our next post.

Erin Jerri Pañgilinan is a software engineer, computational designer, and the lead author of Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities (O'Reilly Media). She worked as a journalist for over 7 years and worked in civic engagement for over 5 years, including as official electoral campaign staff for Obama for America (2012) and Ro Khanna for Congress (2014). She is a UC Berkeley alumnus. She is currently working on her next apps, books, and films

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