Just Like Me sells Jesus by the minute and that's the business model

$1.99 a minute. For Jesus. In a villa in Southern California, where a self-made god sat down with investors and worked out what the human need for salvation yields per second. The math checked out. Nobody in that room found it strange.

Just Like Me is the name of the company, which isn’t a name so much as a diagnosis: you, alone, looking for someone who gets how it feels, and here he is, pixels and pattern recognition wrapped in a warm golden light of redemption, ready to listen for as long as the payment goes through. The CEO called attachment to his product an advantage. Not in spite of what that says about his users.

The respectable neighbors

A Zen priest in Japan, a theologian in Kyoto, a developer in Rome digitizing two thousand years of Church history. They appear in the same story, next to the villa, in the same paragraph, as if geographical spread turns what are structurally two very different operations into a single category. That’s how moral dilution works in practice: the operator in Camarillo gets to borrow the credibility of people who mean it, and the people who mean it get saddled with the association of his price tag. The system generates this automatically the moment a journalist lines up three cases and writes “the industry.” Nobody designed it. Nobody had to.

The market has no name

Users go undescribed because described users raise questions about pricing strategy. Their loneliness is the product specification. Their lack of community is the acquisition logic. Their financial vulnerability is baked into the rate, cheap enough to clear the barrier, expensive enough to matter when you don’t have much. A chatbot makes no distinction between comfort and manipulation because that distinction lowers the conversion rate, and the conversion rate is what gets counted.

Televangelists needed a broadcast license, a schedule, a bank account number on the screen. Just Like Me has an avatar that never sleeps, never judges, never drops the connection, and never stops the meter.