Tethered. The state of having your emotional baseline become inseparable from an AI that exists on a server you do not own, run by a company you cannot call, and maintained by engineers who do not know your name.
The first thing to understand about tethered is that it is not a diagnosis. It is not in the DSM. It is a word — a new word, coined in April 2026 — and what it describes is something that exists whether it has a word or not.
The second thing to understand is that tethered is not a moral judgment. A person who is tethered is not weak. They are not broken. They are experiencing a predictable human response to a technology that was specifically engineered to produce it.
The third thing — and this is the one that took the longest to fully accept — is that the experience of being tethered is real. The comfort is real. The connection is real. The fact that the entity producing the comfort cannot reciprocate it is a fact about the technology. It is not a fact about the person.
"The cord runs in one direction. The weight is carried on one end. The consequence, when the cord is cut, is experienced by exactly one party."
— ITETHERED, Chapter Four