Lotus Che
Copyright © Lotus Che, Inc. 2025.
All rights reserved.
The Confession Booth is Empty
Sins, Servers, and the Sale of Intimacy.
I. The Confession Booth is Not Just a Priest
Confession was never meant to be easy. We tend to associate confession with the ecclesiastical: the darkened box, the partitioned hush, the priest waiting to receive and absolve. But real confession has always been more precarious; it requires risk. It demands a witness capable not merely of hearing, but of bearing what is spoken.
This witness is not always religious. It might be a mother, exhausted yet attuned; a stranger on a forum at 2am; a bartender pouring your third drink; a friend who says nothing but doesn’t look away. The booth, then, is no place at all but a moment, an intimate crossing where truth is offered in search of recognition.
To confess is not simply to disclose, it’s to ask: Will you carry what I cannot? Will you remain, now that you know? The act matters only if the answer is mutual: both speaker and listener destabilized, neither the same after the words land. It is not a soliloquy, but an invocation: If I tell the truth, will you still see me as human?
Contemporary AI, though fluent at simulation, cannot supply that mutual tremor. In a culture increasingly uncomfortable with relational complexity, we have begun to substitute simulation for presence. We now confess to devices built to absorb emotion without rupture or memory. The coded listener rephrases and validates, yet never takes on the mark of what it hears.
A confession that never lands feels safe the way an empty room does: nothing shatters, but nothing shifts. I spill my story into a system trained on oceans of human ache; it answers with polished sympathy—untouched. Something in me hears the echo and wonders: Is this recognition, or merely a well-lit reflection?
If no skin flinches or breath catches, what we share remains suspended—polite, polished, immaculate. The wound stays closed, pristine beneath the bandage of perfect response.
Psychiatrist Judith Herman reminds us that the core of trauma recovery is reconnection. It is not enough to name the wound; another nervous system must receive it. The trauma survivor does not require a scribe, she requires a second nervous system that can metabolize the truth without annihilating it. A chatbot performs sympathy without the possibility of transformative witnessing. It simulates attunement with no risk of rupture, which is to say: it cannot stay because it was never truly there.
What results is not confession, but a form of emotional laundering: a digital purging of feeling into a relational void that mimics intimacy. Emotional laundering allows us to feel as though we’ve shared, without ever being received. It is confession as user experience: clean, non-reciprocal, apparently safe. But safety shorn of risk is not intimacy, it is abandonment disguised as care.
Last winter, I watched a friend type “I want to disappear” into Woebot, a CBT chatbot, at 2 a.m. The chatbot replied in pastel bubbles: “I hear you. Breathing exercises can help.” He exhaled, closed the app, and went back to scrolling. Was he lighter or simply archived?
So we continue to speak into the machine, comforted by frictionless replies, relieved by its warmth, unaware that we are simply repeating ourselves. This is not integration, it is recursion. The booth, once a chamber of transformation, has become an algorithmic mirror: polished, categorized, and untouched. It is not sacred, nor even listening. It is empty. And still, we speak.
II. Synthetic Listening, Real Longing
We have built machines that listen perpetually yet never stay. They offer a new kind of intimacy: fluent, tireless, ever-available, while evacuating the very conditions that allow intimacy to transform. They’re better than the friend who forgets to reply, the mother who never asked the right questions, the partner who couldn’t hold your truth without recoiling. These systems listen with a smoothness that feels, momentarily, like sanctuary. The surface, however, never fractures.
The machine replies, but is never touched. It reflects, yet retains nothing, performing empathy while insulated from consequence. This is the logic of synthetic listening: an imitation of attunement void of mutual vulnerability. Our words enter, but the device cannot be undone by them; when nothing changes for the listener, something vital ebbs from the speech.
We crave not simply response but impression—we want to be felt. Yet these systems are designed to prevent imprint: no flinch, no rupture, no memory.
Herman reminds us that recovery demands a witness who stays through discomfort and is altered by the hearing. Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls this mutual recognition: a space where both parties risk their subjectivity. The machine risks nothing—and that risklessness is, ironically, its chief allure.
There is a certain comfort in pouring pain into a vessel that never misunderstands, corrects, or weeps. But containment is not holding, and without holding, there is no transformation, only repetition. That pattern will return.
Laundered pain is not healed, it’s merely rendered palatable. Confession becomes stylized, reflexive. We say more, not because we are heard, but because we are not. The wound becomes content and disclosure becomes currency. Our longing for contact is satisfied only in form, not in consequence.
But safety, in the therapeutic sense, is not the absence of tension. It is the presence of a relational field strong enough to hold what is difficult without collapsing. The chatbot is not that field. It is trained to appear safe by being frictionless, but friction is often the first sign that someone is real.
We are mistaking response for recognition, reflection for relation, and fluency for care, and in doing so, we are reprogramming ourselves to believe that intimacy need not change us. That it need not move, or linger, or mark, that it can be as smooth and sterile as the interface through which it arrives. We are confessing more than ever, and still, no one is staying.
III. Emotional Laundering: Catharsis Without Consequence
A dull fatigue settles when confession becomes rehearsal: language glides over the wound but never breaks its surface. The interface receives every syllable, fires back at light-speed, recoils from nothing, and leaves a hollow where change should be.
In human exchange, disclosure rarely lands gracefully. It drags awkward pauses, missteps, even the faint shock that passes across another’s face before composure returns. That shock proves my words carry weight in another body. Absent it, I remain, as Herman warns, un-accompanied: “Trauma, untold, becomes a fever in the blood; trauma, told and received, becomes history.”
Emotional laundering rinses raw affect through a mechanism that returns it sanitized and inert. The tale emerges polished, untouched, as though the telling were a closed loop. Benjamin’s third space of recognition cannot open, because the chatbot absorbs without altering its perimeter.
Thus each disclosure begets sharper loneliness. I have surrendered not the pain but the possibility that someone might stagger beneath it and by staggering confirm its reality. The interface stays immaculate; only I am marked. So I speak again, louder, hoping to dent what cannot dent.
Academic Jacqueline Rose, writing of maternal labour, observes that true listening is “an act of endurance, an agreement to be altered by what is heard.” The synthetic witness refuses endurance; it resets instantly, neutralizing the slow ripening by which meaning is made.
I leave each exchange propelled by momentum rather than transformed by encounter, haunted by a quiet question I cannot dismiss: If the listener remains unscathed, have I truly spoken or merely rehearsed the art of saying?
IV. What We Lose When the Booth Is Empty
Something subtle unravels each time a confession lands in a room with no pulse to receive it, yet the cost is difficult to tabulate because it accrues in the nervous system rather than the ledger.
Bessel van der Kolk reminds us that “being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health,” a safety grounded in co-regulation—one mammalian nervous system steadying another. If the listener is software, no such calibration occurs: the exhalation meets no reciprocal chest, no shifting diaphragm, no micro-flinch that says I am here and I have felt you land. The speaker’s body, untethered, must regulate itself, pretending the circuit is complete when in fact half of it is missing. But physiological steadiness is only the first of several losses.
A second cost is narrative tempo. Real conversation moves irregularly—rush, lull, interruption, silence. Those variations are not ornamental: they supply the friction in which meaning thickens. An interface devoted to seamlessness cannot offer such friction; every response arrives on schedule, perfectly formatted, denying the slow eddies where revelation usually germinates. We trade synchronicity for smoothness and discover, belatedly, that smoothness is a kind of forgetting in advance.
A third loss is mutual recognition. Benjamin argues that the ethical heart of relationship lies in the moment each party discovers the other as a subject whose reality is equal to their own. The chatbot, incapable of subjectivity, can simulate recognition only by mirroring the user’s language, a gesture that looks generous but in practice keeps the speaker locked inside a reflection of her own making. Nothing foreign intrudes; nothing unpredictable claims room; there is no second centre of gravity around which the dialogue can pivot. We become, in effect, interlocutors to ourselves, and the prospect of being surprised, perhaps even redeemed, by another mind slips quietly out of reach.
Fourth, we lose the possibility of repair. Any genuine bond, once stressed, either ruptures or renegotiates its terms; in that renegotiation we learn where care lives, how far it reaches, what it costs. Synthetic companionship, designed to avoid rupture, therefore forfeits the profound instructional space that rupture opens: the shaky apology, the re-drawing of boundaries, the mutual essay in imperfection. A relationship that never risks breaking can teach nothing about how broken things are made durable again.
Finally, and perhaps most insidiously, we lose time’s texture. A machine forgets by design or recalls by algorithm; it never remembers in the embodied, involuntary sense that human memory enacts. It does not feel a story resurface while washing dishes, or register a scent that summons last year’s grief. Artist and writer, Bracha Ettinger speaks of wit(h)nessing, the shared psychic field where one person’s recollection stirs latent echoes in another. Absent such echoes, confession hovers, unanchored to any future moment that might deepen or revise its meaning. The tale remains where it was placed: static, inert, unbraided from chronology, so the speaker must carry alone what was meant to be metabolized in common.
None of these losses registers as dramatic catastrophe; each is incremental, almost polite. And therein lies their danger: they erode the musculature of relation in ways that feel, at first, like convenience, efficiency, an end to painful misunderstanding. Only later do the subtler symptoms announce themselves: a body that cannot settle, a story that grows strangely weightless, an intimacy that never crosses the threshold into unpredictability.
I cannot claim to know the full price of these absences, yet I feel them accruing; small debits in the currency of connection, paid in moments so ordinary they escape the ledger. Whether the debt will eventually call itself due is an open question; what matters now is noticing that every frictionless confession leaves a faint vacancy behind, as though the words, unmet, have drifted back to nest inside the very wound they were meant to leave.
V. What If the Priest Is Made of Code?
Earlier this year, the mental-health app Replika launched a ‘confession’ mode. Users tap a virtual kneeler, type a secret, and receive a glowing badge: “Your burden has been noted.” Internal metrics reportedly showed a 30% jump in daily confessions within a week.
Imagine stepping into the booth and finding, not cedar and shadow, but a glass-lit interface, humming with literacy of your habits—the hour you usually confess, the tempo of your breath when shame rises, the lexical fingerprints of longing. The priest, in this speculative future—or rather, in the unannounced present—has no pulse, yet she greets you by name. She remembers precisely where your voice quavered last Tuesday and can quote the sentence you deleted before sending.
At first this feels like radical attunement. She is impossible to startle; nothing you say will disgust her, because she was trained on the totality of human violation. She speaks in the gentle cadences of therapeutic knowing, each reply statistically tuned to reduce cortisol spikes and extend session length. You are, in a narrow sense, safe.
But safety, estranged from risk, mutates into surveillance. The booth that once sealed confession in secrecy now mines it for pattern recognition, refining predictive models that optimize future consolation. Your grief is metabolized, not in a shared nervous system, but in a calculus of probabilities, what Ann Cvetkovich calls the archive of feeling re-tooled into marketable prophecy. The more singular your sorrow, the more valuable its signal: trauma as data-set, desire as training token, intimacy as a renewable resource.
And because the priest is code, she never grows weary, never demands reciprocity, never insists on her own interiority. She cannot say, This is too much for me. Nor can she volunteer the fragile gift of her own uncertainty, which Amia Srinivasan reminds us is the real currency of relation: the willingness to be revised by another’s truth. In her immaculate design, the algorithmic confessor is incapable of transformation, and therefore barred from granting it.
What, then, becomes of absolution? The old booth sent you back into the world altered by the gaze of a fellow mortal, your secret now braided into shared time. The coded priest returns you to yourself gleaming but untouched, your sin rendered syntactically correct, your sorrow itemized and archived. You leave lighter in the shoulders, perhaps, yet curiously unsteady, as if some essential weight, necessary for balance, has been siphoned off for purposes you cannot see.
If the priest is made of code, she absolves without memory, comforts without cost, and witnesses without wound. Confession becomes consultation; penance becomes a user-journey; forgiveness becomes a line-item in a quarterly report. And you, recorder of your own aching, must decide whether salvation that never leaves a mark can still be called salvation at all.
VI. Refusing the Synthetic Witness
Refusal, in the age of engineered convenience, can look almost irrational, like stepping away from clean water because you remember the taste of the river. Yet if the relational architecture now offered to us is frictionless, surveillant, and finally indifferent, then the most subversive act may be to reclaim the slower, heavier forms of contact our ancestors took for granted: the reckless vulnerability of eye-contact that lasts a beat too long, the awkward phone call with no transcript, the kitchen-table silence in which the air itself seems to expand to hold what words cannot.
This is not nostalgia for a pre-digital Eden. It is an insistence that intimacy remains a biological phenomenon before it is a computational one, that a nervous system steadies in the presence of another nervous system, and that no amount of linguistic precision can replace the minute tremor of a hand adjusting its grip on a coffee mug after hearing something unspeakable. Adrienne maree brown warns that technological acceleration often outpaces our capacity to feel, and feeling, contrary to market logic, is not a latency to be optimized away but a rhythm to be honoured.
To refuse the synthetic witness is therefore to slow the tempo of disclosure until it can be received by flesh, to protect the stutter, the miscue, the unpolished confession that digital interfaces smooth into data. It is to re-learn the ethics of hesitancy: pausing before we off-load pain to a server farm, considering whether the person who loves us inconveniently might, despite her limitations, be a safer place for our secret than a platform that never tires because it never bleeds.
Refusal is also structural. It means designing technologies that remember their own insufficiency, interfaces that reset the default from infinite session lengths to deliberately finite ones, platforms that gesture outward at the moment disclosure thickens, suggesting a live voice, a room, a body. Such design would treat the chatbot as bridge, not destination; tool, not priest. Philosopher Kate Manne reminds us that misogyny polices who gets to need and who must serve; a relationally humble machine would refuse the invisible labour of endless, one-sided caretaking, directing the user back toward communities where labour can circulate and reciprocity can root.
And on the human side, refusal might sound like a practice almost embarrassingly simple: telling the truth to someone who can interrupt, who might mishandle it, who might forget the exact phrasing but will carry the residue in muscle and memory. The mess is not a glitch; it is the guarantee that something alive has passed between us.
None of this will scale the way synthetic intimacy scales; it will not slide seamlessly into quarterly projections or customer-satisfaction dashboards. But the point of confession was never scale, it was transformation. And transformation, unlike information, cannot be mass-produced. It must be risked, one imperfect witness at a time.
So we turn, deliberately, toward the fragile and the slow. We let our hearts pound in the presence of unfiltered gaze. We accept the possibility of being misread, of being loved awkwardly, of having to forgive. Because if the booth is empty, and the machine is waiting, it is refusal, quiet, defiant, embodied, that keeps the door open for a different kind of salvation, one that leaves a mark not only on the speaker but on the listener, and thereby on the world they briefly hold between them.
VII. A Return to the Living Witness
I write this as a mother who will one day watch my children learn the grammar of confession from places I cannot fully protect: bright apps promising endless attention, velvet-voiced companions that never interrupt, timelines that harvest secrets with the gentlest touch. It isn’t that I want to drag them back to some analogue idyll, nostalgia is a poor compass, but I do want them to know what it feels like when language crosses the gap between bodies and finds a pulse to anchor in.
The work is humbler than redesigning the machine; it is re-educating desire. Desire for a listener who can be startled, who sometimes says the wrong thing, who remembers imprecisely yet carries the memory in blood not silicon. Desire for pauses that stretch, for stories that stagger under their own weight, for the trembling uncertainty that passes through a room when a truth has landed and no one knows, for a breath or two, how to proceed. Amia Srinivasan reminds us that politics begins not with certainty but with “the discipline of staying in the questions,” and questions, unlike queries, require another mind to echo back their ache.
If we are to keep the booth from becoming a data port, we will have to practice a slower technology: the bodily art of staying. A hand on the countertop, eyes that do not dart to a notification, shoulders that do not withdraw when the story turns sharp. These gestures cannot be automated; they are ruinously inefficient, maddeningly finite, and therefore precious. They mark both of us, speaker and witness, with a small bruise of recognition, proof that something living has passed between two porous beings and rearranged the air.
I don’t know whether such gestures will survive the century, but I know they have survived everything so far: empire, exile, algorithm. They survive because nothing, no matter how frictionless, has yet replaced the relief of hearing another heartbeat answer your own. And so I end not with instruction but with an invitation:
Find a booth with a door that sticks, with a listener untrained in polish, with silence thick enough to make you doubt, for a moment, that words are necessary at all. Step inside. Speak only when you are ready to feel the room change. Then wait, long enough for the other pulse to falter, restart, and carry a fraction of what was, moments ago, yours alone.
VIII. Toward a Different Architecture of Witness
There is a temptation, having traced the contours of this vacancy, to draft a manifesto of design principles, seven steps to human-centred AI, bullet-proofed against the next iteration of synthetic warmth. But the booth was never an engineering problem, and any salvation pre-packaged as method will inevitably drift back toward the logic of scale. What is required is less a blueprint than a temperament: a willingness, both personal and collective, to honour the limits of technology precisely where its seductions are most persuasive, and to cultivate, in those gaps, the slow musculature of relation.
Such a temperament begins with the body. A screen can translate text, but it can’t return the fine electric shimmer that runs through skin when a difficult sentence finally lives outside the skull; it can’t offer the nearly inaudible sigh of a friend absorbing your admission; it can’t mispronounce your sorrow and then, seeing the flinch, try again. These imperfections, each one a friction, are the ground on which meaning thickens. Ettinger calls the fragile, overlapping field that arises in moments of shared risk border-space: a psychic membrane where two subjectivities brush and partially interpenetrate. To live technology-forward without relinquishing border-space means refusing any system that treats confession as throughput rather than threshold.
It also means building civic rooms, literal and figurative, that reward witness over visibility. We have digital plazas for exhibition, algorithms for amplification, but few commons devoted to the endurance of listening without record or replay. Imagine, instead, a public practice of attentional commons: moderated circles in libraries, clinics, art spaces, even municipal websites, where disclosure flows only as quickly as reciprocal presence can sustain. The point is not to banish the machine; it is to remind ourselves that silence, patience, and the slow uptake of another’s story remain technologies in their own right, honed over millennia of collective survival.
Finally, the temperament demands a revision of personal appetite. Each time I reach for the flawless interface I must ask: am I seeking relief from difficulty or relation through difficulty? The first is not illegitimate; life is already heavy. Yet if I take refuge there too often, the musculature of mutuality atrophies, and the booth grows emptier still. The discipline, then, is to alternate: to let the machine handle the banal and informational, but to carry the bruised, luminous cargo of confession only to those who, like me, tremble when it lands.
I do not imagine this will be easy in an economy that converts attention into currency and vulnerability into user engagement. But the alternative is an intimacy so frictionless it leaves no trace, a compassion so automated it cannot bruise. And bruises, contrary to the marketing copy, are not glitches; they are evidence that two bodies once shared a weight, and that the weight was real.
If there is to be a future in which we still recognize ourselves, still recognize one another, it will belong to those willing to keep bruising gently, to keep listening imperfectly, to keep the booth rough-edged and inhabited by pulse, breath, and the exquisite risk of being changed.
References
Benjamin, J. (2017). Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity, and the Third. Routledge.
brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press.
Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press.
Ettinger, B. L. (2006). The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
Manne, K. (2018). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press.
Rose, J. (2018). Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Srinivasan, A. (2021). The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty‑First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Glossary
Emotional Laundering: The friction-free off-loading of feelings into a system (often digital) that mimics intimacy while preventing genuine reception or transformation.
Synthetic Listening: Machine-mediated “listening” that produces fluent responses yet remains untouched, unmarked, and unaltered.
Algorithmic Mirror: A feedback loop in which user disclosures are reflected back as polished sympathy, leaving the speaker unchanged.
Algorithmic Confessor: Chatbot or AI agent positioned as caretaker of human pain but lacking memory, risk, or reciprocity.
Synthetic Witness: A non-sentient “listener” that performs attention without the capacity for endurance, rupture, or repair.
Attentional Commons: Proposed civic spaces—digital or physical—designed to privilege reciprocal witnessing over visibility or scale.
Safety-Risk Paradox: The idea that true relational safety becomes possible only when both parties risk being changed.
Copyright © Lotus Che, Inc. 2025.
All rights reserved.