Source: a book launch interview for "Artificial Intimacy"

Meta's avatar friends

As Turkle quotes from Zuckerberg's claims: "More than that, I think that it's very important to kind of ask, 'what is the end game of this?' So Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in which he said,

"Americans would like to have fifteen friends, but they can't have fifteen friends - they can only have three. It's hard to have more than two or three friends, given that we don't live in close communities any more, given our work patterns, so I'm going to give thirteen extra avatar friends to every American. That's my business model for Meta."

This is casually paraphrased and the full source seems to be Zuckerberg's "The Future is for Everyone" essay

This use of given is perhaps a signal of how Zuckerberg sees social conditions; as unchangeable norms. This is a misleading philosophy, and a greedy one from a social media leader, because social media and primarily Facebook are the baseline causes of those norms.

Memorial Generation

Sherry Turkle has six minutes of discussion around the generation of posthumous avatars for cherished people.

The earliest example I can remember wherein this use case was popularized in media was House of Cards; where Frank has a demo from tech bros during a camping break. Atlantic's Spencer Kornhaber also calls up a Black Mirror episode with a more embodied replica, "Be Right Back".