When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence.
When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn’t going their way, why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World War II revisionists, that’s the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics, the low-key ways of relating to political debates.
When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.
And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.
The idea that the internet carries a scythe is familiar — think of Blockbuster Video, the pay phone and other early victims of the digital transition. But the scale of the potential extinction still isn’t adequately appreciated.
This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.
That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.
In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.
Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.
Mere eccentricity doesn’t guarantee survival: There will be forms of resistance and radicalism that turn out to be destructive and others that are just dead ends. But normalcy and complacency will be fatal.
And while this description may sound like pessimism, it’s intended as an exhortation, a call to recognize what’s happening and resist it, to fight for a future where human things and human beings survive and flourish. It’s an appeal for intentionality against drift, for purpose against passivity — and ultimately for life itself against extinction.
The Fatal Progression
But first we have to understand what we are experiencing.
It starts with substitution: The digital age takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen. For romance, dating apps supplant bars and workplaces and churches. For friendship, texting and DMing replaces hanging out. For entertainment, the small screen replaces moviegoing and live performance. For shopping and selling, the online store supplants the mall. For reading and writing, the short paragraph and the quick reply replace the book, the essay, the letter.
Some of these substitutes have meaningful upsides. There are forms of intellectual and scientific work that were impossible before the internet annihilated distance. Remote work can be a boon to family life even if it limits other forms of social interaction. The online popularity of long podcasts might betoken a retreat from literate to oral culture, but it’s at least counterexample to the general trend of short, shorter, shortest.
But in many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. The streaming algorithm tends to yield artistic mediocrity compared with the movies of the past, or even the golden age television shows of 20 years ago. BookTok is to literature as OnlyFans is to great romantic love. Online sources of local news are generally lousy compared with the vanished ecosystem of print newspapers. Online friendships are thinner than real-world relationships, online dating pairs fewer people off successfully than the dating markets of the prior age. Online porn — well, you get my point.
But this substitution nonetheless succeeds and deepens because of the power of distraction. Even when the new forms are inferior to the older ones, they are more addictive, more immediate, easier to access — and they feel lower-risk, as well. Swipe-based online dating is less likely to find you a spouse, but it still feels much easier than flirting or otherwise putting yourself forward in physical reality. Video games may not offer the same kind of bodily experience as sports and games in real life, but the adrenaline spike is always on offer and there are fewer limits on how late and long you can play. The infinite scroll of social media is worse than a good movie, but you can’t look away, and novels are incredibly hard going by comparison with TikTok or Instagram. Pornography is worse than sex, but it gives you a simulacrum of anything you want, whenever you want it, without any negotiation with another human being’s needs.
So even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. Thus under digital conditions social life attenuates, romance declines, institutions lose support, the fine arts fade and the popular arts are overrun with slop, and the basic skills and habits that our civilization took for granted — how to have an extended conversation, how to approach a woman or man with romantic interest, how to sit undistracted with a movie or a book — are transmitted only weakly to the next generation.
Then, finally, as local embodied experience becomes less important than virtual alternatives, the power of substitution and distraction feeds a sense that real-world life is fundamentally obsolete.
Online life allows for all kinds of hyper-intense subcultures and niches where this sense of obsolescence is less of an issue. But for the average internet surfer, the normie afloat in the virtual realm, digital life tends to elevate the center over the peripheries, the metropole over the provinces, the drama of celebrity over the quotidian.
The result is a landscape where national politics seems incredibly important and local politics irrelevant; where English can seem like the only language worth knowing and an American presidential election feels like an election for the presidency of the world; where the life of small countries and local cultures seems at best anachronistic; where the celebrity influencer half a world away takes the place in your mental space that friends and neighbors used to occupy.
All this means that even though reality is in fact more real than the virtual world, people may still feel disappointed when they re-enter the everyday after marinating in the digital — the potential mates are less beautiful than the Instagram models, the stakes of a local mayor’s race less significant than whatever Donald Trump is doing now.
That letdown creates a special political problem for liberal democracy, which depends on egalitarian ideas about the importance of the common person, the ordinary citizen. It encourages a fashionable antihumanism, an impulse to justify suicide and expand euthanasia, and a general sense of personal and cultural futility that’s especially apparent when you visit the geographic locales that are aging and depopulating fastest. There’s a palpable feeling in these places that history once happened here, but that now it’s happening only in America and inside your phone — so why would any people bother to build a future for themselves in provincial Italy or rural Japan, or on Caribbean islands outside of the resorts, or in the Balkans or the Baltics?
All of this describes our trajectory before artificial intelligence entered the picture, and every force I’ve just described is likely to become more intense the more A.I. remakes our lives. You can have far more substitution — digital workers for flesh-and-blood colleagues, ChatGPT summaries for original books, A.I. girlfriends and boyfriends and companions. You can have far more distraction — an endless stream of A.I.-generated content and entertainment and addictive slop from a “creator” whose engine never tires. And you will absolutely have a stronger sense of human obsolescence or superfluity — economic and social, artistic and intellectual — if A.I. travels just a little bit farther along its current lines of advance. It’s as though all the trends of the digital era have been building up to this consummation of its logic.
How much survives?
Nothing I’ve described is universal: Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books.
But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.
by Ross Douthat, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie. (Georges Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884)
