Rise of the ipsification industrial complex

Tech-driven trends are hijacking our impulse to help, care for, and gratify others. It’s DIY in the worst sense. I’d better explain.

Sep 22, 2025

Casio is releasing an emotional-support robot called Moflin. The palm-sized creature uses AI to develop a unique and evolving “personality.” The “companion” looks like a cross between an owl and a tribble.

The product ships October 1 for $429. (It’s already big in Japan.)

The Moflin “expresses” over 4 million distinct personality traits. If you ignored, it becomes passive and timid, and its personality can’t be reset. In other words, Casio punishes you if you don’t use its product.

The Moflin can’t walk, but it has touch sensors on its head, plus an accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and light and temperature sensors. It responds to touch and recognizes its owner’s voice. It has a rechargeable battery that recharges in its “nest.”

Casio says the gadget was designed to feel “natural,” “lovable,” and “alive.” It coos, responds to your presence, and simulates breathing.

An app called MofLife shows the product’s “emotional state” and tracks its “personality” evolution.

Casio will offer aftermarket repair and cleaning services.

The Casio Moflin represents a surprising trend in human culture: the ipsification of everything.

Here’s what I mean. The Moflin is an advanced AI product designed to simulate sentience and affection. Stroke the gadget on the “head,” and it coos and makes sounds to make you feel it enjoys the attention. If you ignore it, the thing behaves like you ignored it. The Moflin simulates a distinct and individual personality, a necessary condition of human affection. We love children or pets because they exhibit unique personality traits.

The idea is to make us respond as if it were a living pet.

Our desire to care for pets is part of how our brains are wired by evolution, and our moral culture. The purpose is that we enjoy caring for those in need, and it’s the right thing to do because people and animals need to be cared for.

When we care for a pet, we enjoy petting, talking to, feeding, and protecting it because we know it benefits our care. Dogs are the most popular pet because they can enjoy and express how much they enjoy our care. Cats are second in popularity and ability to express happiness (like purring).

The Casio Moflin and similar products offer a new idea: We can experience the gratification of caring for a pet, without any pet actually being cared for.

Casio is hijacking our nurturing instincts to give us our side of the nurturing relationship without any creature receiving it on the other side.

It’s a product that offers a kind of ipsation (solitary masturbation).

In the realm of sexual desire, passion exists so that we will join together with another person, at minimum, for each to sexually gratify the other and, at maximum, form a loving bond that greatly enhances the lives of both people. Ipsation hijacks the brain chemistry of mutual gratification for self-gratification.

You know, like Bitcoin.

They call it a “currency,” but mostly Bitcoin is used as an investment that wallet-holders can use to make money.

Traditionally, investment meant giving money to a company to capitalize to provide goods and services to people. For example, if I invest in an apartment building I’m hoping to profit from that investment and, in the meantime, I’m providing housing for people who need housing.

Bitcoin is fundamentally ipsationary. I’m investing in something and hoping to make a return on my investment, and nobody else is benefiting. When I buy Bitcoin, I’m not feeding, housing, clothing or providing any kind of goods or services to anyone. It’s all just for me. It’s financial ipsation.

AI chatbots Character AI represent the ipsification of friendships and romantic relationships. The services let you have conversations and build a “relationship” with “someone” without a “someone” mutually benefiting from that “relationship.”

Movies used to be a social event, where audience reactions mattered. Now, people replace that experience with solitary movie and TV streaming. Some even prefer to watch “reaction” videos on YouTube, where social watching is simulated.

Video games enable players to simulate a wide range of activities people do with and for other people, such as farming, fishing, and cooking, managing cities, renovating houses, building PCs, and running a business. You get the satisfaction of these activities without benefiting anyone. There are even games where you pick up trash and clean up an environment (instead of going outside and doing it for real to improve the lives of others).

Technology and tech-adjacent companies have hijacked our inherently civic-minded, social, romantic, and nurturing nature and replaced mutual interaction with simulated society, leaving us alone helping and benefiting nobody but ourselves and those companies.

I expect the ipsification industrial complex to continue spreading into other areas of our lives. And the reason is that cleaving people from each other is profitable. The companies make money by replacing our pets, lovers, friends and business associates with themselves.

If Casio Computer Co., Ltd., can convince you to buy and care for the Moflin gadget instead of a living pet, enjoy it! But never forget that the only thing you’re really taking care of is Casio.