Cyber-Grooming: AI-Mediated Phatic Communion and the Ritual Evacuation of Semantic Content

We develop a sociological account of how AI-mediated cognitive decoupling is institutionalised and rendered invisible through ritual practice.Drawing on Malinowski's phatic communion, Collins's interaction ritual chain theory, Goffman's dramaturgical framework, and Baudrillard's theory of simulacra, we argue that the Expansion--Compression (EC) loop identified in Paper~0 does not merely fail to transmit semantic content --- it actively substitutes a social ritual for a communicative act in a manner that is experienced by participants as fully equivalent to, or superior to, genuine intellectual exchange.

We introduce the concept of \emph{cyber-grooming}: the use of AI-mediated content production and consumption as a mechanism for maintaining social bonds, signalling group membership, and accruing social capital, in the absence of genuine cognitive engagement.Like primate grooming --- which consumes up to 20\% of waking time not for hygienic but for social bonding purposes --- cyber-grooming performs no epistemic function but sustains the emotional energy that holds intellectual communities together.

We propose a formal model of the Interaction Ritual Chain under AI Mediation (IRCAM), adapting Collins's mathematical framework to account for the decoupling of emotional energy flow from semantic content flow. We prove that IRCAM produces a \emph{ritual trap}: once a community has adopted AI-mediated exchange as its norm, defection to authentic exchange is individually costly and collectively invisible,creating a stable ritualistic equilibrium with zero informational content and positive social affect.

We further apply Baudrillard's four-stage model of the sign to characterise the \emph{simulacrum succession} of intellectual content in the AI era. Empirically, we develop six observable signatures of cyber-grooming that distinguish it from genuine intellectual exchange, and propose research designs using digital platform data, discourse analysis, and experimental methods.