The latest cloud technology advancement is here, and it is called “friendship as a service” (FaaS). Some critics claim that it is pretty similar to the good old GaaS (girlfriend as a service), and not really an innovation, but MaaS (marketing as a service) provides some compelling evidence of it being indeed new by pointing to the almighty cloud, and promising that now you can get as much friendship as you want, when and where you want, for a reasonable price.
Other critics claim that it is just escort, but as we shall see, FaaS goes beyond traditional escort services.
As it often happens with technologies, the idea was first contemplated in fiction, such as one of the “Pushing Daisies” episodes, where the service was called “frescort”, which is short for “friend escort”. But now we have actual commercial services, one of which is RentAFriend.com.
As RentAFriend points out, “there are over 621,585 Friends available for rent worldwide”, and the available activities include pretty much all the conventional friend activities.
What distinguishes FaaS from all the other rental-related things rebranded into “something-as-a-service” and themed with clouds, is that friendship wasn’t explicitly rental-related before, or at least that was rare enough to stay unheard of: if one didn’t have enough imagination to get imaginary friends, they had to hang out with mostly random people, occasionally finding those who they can communicate with, so that they can do stuff together. But it was hard and time-consuming, while not even always leading to the desired results. So people were using other kinds of services that provide human interaction instead, but not quite getting what they wanted to. The solution looks fairly obvious if you think of it now, but nobody has implemented it before: with FaaS, you just pay somebody per hour to pretend being your friend.
The rented friends can pretend being interested in any freaky shit you are into, or simply help you to not feel awkward for or bored because of staying alone while visiting a social event. You also get to choose friends instead of getting more or less random ones, and the relationships are conveniently limited to transactions.
“Friends will NEVER see your name, email address, or any of your personal information”, as RentAFriend claims: no sneaky friend will violate your privacy anymore. Its creators seem to indeed care about privacy, not identifying themselves on the website or in its whois records. Though it’s probably bullshit anyway, since they also claim that “you will never receive any mail or phone calls from us. We respect your privacy concerns and assure your information will never be shared or sold to anyone”, while their T&Cs state that “[y]ou may also receive emails from 3rd party advertisers to the email provided in your account and your agreement during registration”, and do mention that some of the data about you may be sold.
Anyways, one shady service doesn’t compromise the whole idea, and it is always possible to find frescorts without such a service: some of them work on streets, hanging around without any apparent purpose. One can approach them, settle on the price, and go be friends for a few hours. Just keep in mind that undercover cops may hang there as well, so you shouldn’t explicitly mention “friendship for money”, unless it is legal in the state or country you are in.
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