If you want a clean way to summarize 2025, you can do it with a single contradiction: we have never been more connected, and we have rarely felt more alone. Group chats never sleep, notifications never stop, and yet “being social” increasingly happens through screens that flatten presence into pixels. In that environment, some companies don’t just ride the wave—they explain it. They become mirrors.

That’s the spirit behind Ed Elson’s provocative pick in his essay naming OnlyFans as the company that best captures the cultural mood of 2025, not because it’s the most profitable or admired, but because it reveals the incentives and emotions that defined the year—read his argument in the “Company of the Year” essay about why young people feel so lost here:Ed Elson’s “Company of the Year”. The same piece is also shared widely in a share-link format that circulated across social feeds—if you’re referencing the viral version, it’s available as the shareable edition of the “Company of the Year” post here:the share link version of the essay.

Pair that with a broader cultural diagnosis—how technology reshaped what “togetherness” even means—and the picture becomes clearer. A separate article explores the modern paradox: constant digital contact can still produce isolation, because micro-interactions aren’t the same as presence, and “connection” can become something we consume rather than something we build; see the piece on how technology redefined what it means to be social here:“Alone, Together”.

Put these ideas together and you get a uniquely 2025 truth: the internet didn’t eliminate loneliness; it industrialized it. It created products that scale “almost-connection” the way streaming scaled entertainment—fast, convenient, and often emotionally unsatisfying.

The new definition of “social” is frictionless—and that changes everything

For most of human history, being social required effort: coordinating schedules, showing up, reading body language, tolerating awkward pauses, and investing time without immediate feedback. Technology flipped that. Now “social” can mean sending a meme, dropping a reaction, or staying loosely aware of hundreds of people without truly engaging with any of them.

That transformation is the backbone of the “alone together” dynamic described in the article about how modern digital communication blurred the line between connection and isolation: the “Alone, Together” essay. The key idea is not that online connection is “fake.” It’s that it can become thin—too lightweight to satisfy the human need for intimacy, belonging, and being truly known.

In 2025, thin connection became the default mode. And once that happens at scale, it creates a market.

Why OnlyFans fits the moment: it sells “presence,” not just content

OnlyFans is often described as a porn platform, but that label misses why it became so culturally explanatory. The platform’s “secret sauce” is not merely explicit content; it’s the feeling of personal access—an illusion of closeness that traditional porn can’t provide.

That’s exactly why Elson argues it deserved the symbolic title in his breakdown of the company that best captured 2025’s loneliness and sexlessness: the “Company of the Year” argument. In his framing, OnlyFans wasn’t just monetizing desire; it was monetizing companionship-shaped desire—the craving to be seen, responded to, and emotionally validated.

This lines up with the broader technology paradox: platforms can multiply interactions while reducing depth. If social life becomes shallow and fragmented, users don’t stop wanting depth. They just start looking for it in places that can simulate it. The result is a new kind of market: paid intimacy, paid attention, paid closeness.

In that sense, OnlyFans is not an outlier. It’s the logical endpoint of a decade of parasocial habits.

The attention economy evolved into the intimacy economy

In the early social media era, the business model was attention: maximize time-on-platform, sell ads, optimize for engagement. By 2025, the model increasingly shifted toward intimacy as a product—not necessarily romantic intimacy, but the feeling that someone is “with you,” responding to you, and making you feel less alone.

You can see the psychological ingredients described in the article about how digital life can simulate togetherness without delivering the full emotional nutrients of real presence: “Alone, Together”. When likes, emojis, and short replies replace prolonged shared experiences, the brain gets signals of social contact, but the body doesn’t get the grounding of actual companionship. Over time, people can end up both overstimulated and undernourished.

That’s where platforms offering “direct access” become powerful. They don’t just promise entertainment. They promise a relationship-shaped experience—often personalized, often interactive, often addictive precisely because it feels like it could become real.

“Company of the Year” is really a diagnosis of the social operating system

Elson’s concept of “Company of the Year” is explicitly not a celebration of virtue or profitability; it’s a way of naming the company that explains the cultural operating system. In his telling, OnlyFans fits because it thrives under specific conditions: loneliness, sexlessness, and a society that is increasingly terminally online—see the reasoning in his essay about the company that best reflects our new parasocial age: Ed Elson’s post.

What makes this framing compelling is that it connects business outcomes to emotional trends. The platform isn’t random; it’s adaptive. It monetizes a gap created by modern digital life: a world where people have constant contact but insufficient closeness.

And crucially, it does this with a product form that is perfectly designed for 2025’s user behavior: subscription + personalization + messaging. In other words: a relationship-shaped UI that can be scaled.

Technology didn’t kill in-person life—it made it optional, and “optional” is dangerous

A subtle point in the “Alone, Together” perspective is that technology doesn’t have to “replace” real life to change it. It only has to become good enough that you can avoid discomfort. If you can get social stimulation without leaving your room, you might do that on tired days. Then you do it more. Then it becomes your default.

The shift is gradual, and that’s why it’s powerful. Human connection becomes something you can postpone—until you wake up months later with fewer deep relationships and more digital noise.

That’s the ecosystem in which companies that sell simulated closeness grow rapidly. They’re not inventing loneliness. They’re providing a product that fits a loneliness-shaped schedule.

The uncomfortable insight: we’re optimizing for convenience, not fulfillment

Both pieces point toward a shared tension: we’ve optimized social life for convenience and scalability, but fulfillment doesn’t scale in the same way. A hundred micro-interactions can’t always substitute for one meaningful conversation. Ten “reactions” can’t always replace the felt experience of being with someone who knows your mood without you explaining it.

The “Alone, Together” article describes how constant connection can still produce emotional distance because people are often observing, scrolling, and performing rather than truly engaging—see the discussion of the paradox of connectivity here: how tech changed social meaning.

Elson’s “Company of the Year” framing complements that by showing what happens when emotional needs meet scalable business models: companies arise that package the feeling of intimacy into a paid product. That’s why his essay resonated enough to spread in share-link form as well—see the share-ready version of the post that circulated widely here: the shared edition.

What this means going forward: the market will keep rewarding “almost-connection” unless we change the incentives

If 2025 taught anything, it’s that markets are incredibly good at monetizing unmet needs. If society produces more loneliness, businesses will appear to sell relief. Some of that relief will be healthy (community tools, better ways to meet people). Some will be ambiguous (parasocial products). Some will be harmful (addictive substitutes for real relationships).

The core question isn’t whether technology is “good” or “bad.” It’s what kind of social life we are building by default—and which behaviors are being rewarded.

• If the easiest path is always screens, people will choose it more often.
• If the most profitable path is simulated intimacy, companies will build it more aggressively.
• If the cultural norm shifts toward staying home and scrolling, a loneliness economy becomes a growth industry.

That’s the through-line connecting a cultural essay about loneliness and a broader article about the redefinition of social life: 2025 didn’t just “happen.” It was engineered—by product design choices, incentive structures, and the quiet substitution of deep relationships with convenient interaction.

Closing: 2025 wasn’t just a year—it was a mirror

The reason these pieces fit together is that they describe the same phenomenon from different angles. One explains the psychological transformation—how technology reshaped what it means to be social: “Alone, Together”. The other names a company that capitalized on those conditions so well it became a symbol of the year: Ed Elson’s “Company of the Year”. And because internet culture spreads through shareable packaging, the viral version of that argument lives here as well: the shareable link to the same essay.

If you’re looking for the real takeaway, it’s not “this platform is good” or “technology is bad.” It’s simpler—and tougher: we are building a society where connection is abundant but companionship is scarce, and the market will keep selling us substitutes until we rebuild the real thing.