159B. The Crisis of Touch
Technology puts people under stress that can be countered by drugs or touch. As the need for touch increases, the supply is decreasing. Why is that, and what are the consequences?
This is a huge topic and I don’t want to split it into two papers. Thus I will not be trying to detail points that I have already argued in previous papers. I will cite my or other works as I go through my analysis.
This paper will be organised into three sections:
Explaining why touch is not an optional luxury for our species, and how choices we have made on our technological/industrial path have raised the need for touch. This is similar to how increased exposure to oxidants (free radicals) increase the human requirement for anti oxidants such as Vitamin C and E.
Explain why we are getting less touch than at any previous time in human history.
What will be the consequences of us placing stigma upon Touch.
When you biologically need more of something and get less of it instead, the result is disease. This is exceptionally easy to track statistically. What is harder to determine is causality. That means the source of the disease is hard to prove. There are entire industries that depend on proof of causality being challenging to achieve. The tobacco industries are a well known example. The gaming industries are another well known example, where we are very close to proof of causality so all the tactics used and refined by the tobacco industries to delay regulation are being redeployed.
The easiest way to figure out what is happening is to follow the money, and here I will shine light on the Aligned touch industries and their transformation into “no touch” industries. Simultaneously there is suppression of Misaligned touch industries.
The Need for Touch
I first began educating the interactive media industry on the role of oxytocin in my 2014 lecture series and the associated paper titled The Rise of Game Neuroeconomics. There I explained the road to digital drugs. We’ve been on that path since that year, but industry maintains the same level of secrecy as the tobacco industry did, just as I explained in that paper and lecture series. Meanwhile I’ve been explaining to developers, consumers, regulators, and governments how this all works.
In 2017 I explained how oxytocin, like all other neurotransmitters, is an essential hormone that you will 100% die without. In that paper I also explained how this anabolic hormone could boost performance, as all anabolic hormones can. This was the first paper censored by Gamasutra. No explanation was given. I had been promoted by Gamasutra as one of their primary contributors since 2012. I had concerns that racism might be involved, since I was talking about an African-American world record holder that I had supported when I was her trainer. It has been pointed out to me that viewership at that site began to drop significantly right about this time. I would credit that with them laying off Chris, the very popular manager of community contributors. When the Editor required “Editorial Control” of all content, this ruined the quality of content on Gamasutra. I would assume he was being paid by advertisers or others to bias coverage.
Touch is the primary natural source of oxytocin. The levels produced without access to touch are insufficient to maintain health. Fortunately, as a tribal species, humans for 98+% of our time on Earth received daily contact from their fellow tribe members who were all extended family. Back then exile was a death sentence.
The advent of agriculture and then the social management systems associated with religion put restrictions on who it was okay to touch. But even during the height of the Witch Trials in Europe, it was still okay to hold your children. And women typically were married and engaging in reproductive activities by the age of 13. So even in what many may have considered the most repressive times in human history, oxytocin was still more available than it is now.
Oxytocin is a very powerful chemical. Some of the world’s largest industries (social media, gaming, gambling, tobacco, and many illicit industries rely on it) rely on dopamine as the core of their product. Dopamine is also a powerful chemical, but it’s not as powerful as oxytocin. Where dopamine will reward you for successfully defeating a tiger, and make you want to try it again, oxytocin is so powerful that it will make you throw yourself in front of a tiger (almost certain death) to protect a family/tribe member/child. Dopamine is nowhere near that powerful.
You might call that “loyalty” perhaps even heroic loyalty in the modern age. I would just call that having a healthy oxytocin response. But people today don’t have that because they run in a deficient state for years. This causes mental and physical damage. It could even cause dementia. The links are there in animal research but doing human research to the point of causality will be long, difficult, and expensive.
Similarly in a recent paper I discussed recent research that shows that even dopamine does not function properly in the absence of oxytocin. So oxytocin is a dopamine regulator. Being bombarded with dopamine delivery products while oxytocin is withheld could lead to a wide range of dopamine dysregulation diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. Both dementia and Parkinson’s are trending to double in the next 25 to 35 years. Most of that is due to population aging, the rest is of uncertain causality. That uncertainty will take time to clear, with more than half of what we know about oxytocin only having been discovered in the last 10 years. Prior to that time it was typically seen as a “female” hormone and the link to mental/physical disease immunity/resistance was still unclear.
In early 2018 I described the importance of oxytocin, dopamine, and other neurochemicals in the health of humans in my The Physiology of Gaming. Of course I also discussed applications in gaming in that paper. That paper also triggered another international lecture tour.
Since oxytocin is the primary chemical that boosts immune resistance and psychological resiliency, its need has never been more critical in daily life as the microbial evolution I predicted in 2010 increasingly threatens our survival. Further, in a world of deep fakes, living in a world where we can’t even trust what we see and hear raises our psychological stress levels to historic highs. Our rates of depression and suicide, especially in younger (more technologically exposed) people, are skyrocketing.
Our Access to Touch (and Oxytocin) is Decreasing
In a world where we text people we know even when they are only 10 meters away, and increasingly live by ourselves without children, partners, or family, we are incredibly isolated. With food delivery services and remote work, we don’t really ever need to leave our houses. We are already very close to the Matrix-like bubble existence.
We may have more “friends” due to social media, but these are not loyal friends but normally just friends of convenience. The odds of them “taking a tiger” for you are pretty much 0%. Even our ability to talk or read the faces of other people in real space is in decline, raising social anxiety.
Touch services are rising in cost while lowering in quality. Oxytocin is made in the brain. It doesn’t get released just because you rubbed up against someone. You need to feel cared for by the other person. Our increasingly casual sexual entanglements may feel momentarily exciting (mostly from risk related dopamine) but don’t generate much connection.
Sexual exhibitionists like Bonnie Blue, who had sex with over 1000 males in 12 hours, are not oxytocin generating. These “actors” will admit they only might remember the faces of about 6 of those people. They put themselves into a detached state in order to endure such environments. I also find it disturbing that sexual predators come to Australia to pull off these stunts. Standing in front of a high school with a billboard recruiting children for filmed sex it just an awful trend. They will say “oh but they were at the age of consent!” Do they ever mention that the age of consent here is 16? No. That’s why they come here and farm high schools. If they were farming female children, I think the outrage would be greater.
Our entire society is moving towards ever more casual and sexual relationships that might be dopamine generating but minimally oxytocin generating. These interactions don’t generate loyalty or trust (symptoms of oxytocin release), they often create the opposite.
“Legitimate” sources of commercial touch are also deteriorating. Massage prices are skyrocketing in the West, with many advertising “Thai Massage”. This is a dubious claim, but Thailand is a very pro-touch society. This is why the country is so popular of late and why tourism is booming there. You can get a massage of higher quality than you can get in the West for only $10 USD on average.
If you need something more therapeutic such as I described in the previous paper, your options in the West (and especially the USA) are extremely bleak.
The Industrialization of Physical Therapy
I taught physical therapy for six years for the State of California. I oversaw my students in dozens of work internship placements including hospitals and PT clinics. This was during the 1990s and it seems the situation has just gotten worse since then. What situation am I talking about?
The mechanisation/automation of care in physical therapy. Where in the old days a PT might have worked one on one with a patient, those days are almost all but forgotten. Today a PT will typically oversee ~6 physical therapy aides. These aides can bill insurance at the same rate as the PT as long as they are getting orders from the PT. Each of those Aides will be placing machines (called “Modalities”) on patients or directing them to do weight exercises instead of touching them. This allows each aide to oversee 3 patients simultaneously.
The result is that an “efficient” PT clinic will have 18 patients being treated simultaneously for every PT, with the PT never touching any of those people. Essentially this is factory farming applied to healthcare. The shift in the industry was pushed by PTs that wanted to make more money, and by the makers of Modalities that come to all the clinics and try to sell their latest gadgets.
This generated a lot of lobbyists that changed insurance and billing codes to facilitate this patient farming. How has this affected the health of patients in the USA?
I see parallels in the game development industries, where every effort is made to raise the costs at the loss of quality and value. I warned about this explicitly in my Data Implosion paper which predicted the current industry downturn in detail in 2017. Replacing our workers, or even our partners , with AI is only accelerating the move towards a “touch-less” society.
Touch Phobia
This all in turn creates a touch-phobic environment. Because the concept of touch has gone from an essential element of human survival, to instead be something to be feared, just further reduces the odds of people ever getting enough touch to meet basic biological and psychological needs. The number of adults in the USA who want partners but can’t find one has skyrocketed to 26 MILLION. This comes out to 20M male, 6M female. Yes that means that active men have multiple partners. Yes women would rather share a “high value man” than touch those 20M undesirables. Yes that’s exactly normal for our species. Yes no one likes to admit it.
Further, we victim shame the people in society that are not able to get touched. They are literally “untouchables”. We call them “Incels” and a google search of the term equates these 26M Americans to terrorists. In that society, it’s okay to kill terrorists and no legal procedures are necessary. Can you imagine if someone became untouchable because they couldn’t afford to go outside and thus were Vitamin D deficient?
I was in the USA a few years ago for a game design jam. The people I was there with all knew I was a PT instructor. One of the people there had an injury and asked me for help, so of course I went about fixing her injury. One of the other women there (who knew my PT background) said to me “I hope you got consent!”
Of course I got consent. Have you ever seen a man or women go up to a woman and ask if they got consent to touch a guy? Even if that person was not a clinician? No, it never happens. So I saw this as sexist, and that sexism is also pervasive in Western society.
I feel really bad for all those people affected, and who may never know what it is like to be touched or appreciated. This can’t be good for their mental health. Even my friends who work in mental health are collapsing under their current workloads and are losing their own minds. Does this lead to more violence and self-harm? Of course it does. People spreading hate for political purposes doesn’t help the situation at all.
My suggestion for my readers, who are presumably much more self aware than the average person, is to reflect on your own beliefs. Is racism okay? Is sexism okay? Is violence okay? Is touchism okay?
The Fetishization of Touch
When something is “normal”, people do it and see it without giving it another thought. Sex, for instance, has become pretty normal in society. So normal that to get attention people like Bonnie Blue have to go to an Australian high school and bang 1000+ boys (age 16+) in 12 hours to get attention.
What isn’t normal anymore, is touch. Even in places like physiotherapy clinics where it is necessary. A “fetish” is typically a desire for some sort of pleasure that is considered taboo. The desire for touch is biologically normal and wired into our physiology as a non optional need. But when you have an ideological opposition to touch, even though that will harm you, the hidden desire builds up. Like for instance how hotbeds of “anti trans” ideology in the USA are secretly the most interested in that sexually. That contrast between what you think and what you want makes it more erotic, but something that has to be kept secret.
Likewise incest porn has become rampant on the internet, with demand highest in conservative communities. My concern is that at this point touch has become so stigmatized in Western culture that it is being forced into this “forbidden zone” where fetish content lies. When I went to go get my first massage license back in the 1990s, I had to go to the Santa Monica Police’s “Vice” department to get it. That probably has not changed. I was working for 6 doctors at the time.
Note that sex and Touch are not the same thing. People crave touch but substitute with sex. Sex is a very poor substitute for Touch. It’s the equivalent of your body being malnourished and begging for nutrients, and you taking it to a fast food restaurant.
The “nutrient” in question here is oxytocin. Since it is made in the brain, you can get some of it just by being romantic in a touch-less environment. I think this is going to be a huge driver of AI companionship content, but again that’s fast food. Further, the more dependent you become on AI companionship, the less likely you are to actually get real companionship.
At the current rate, normal human interactions are going to become non-normal. They will be replaced by content that can be automated and sold at high scale with high profit margins. Ironically, the digital drug designs I’ve been researching since 2014 do exactly this. But I’ve designed them to be more nourishing than what others are attempting to build without the proper science background.
In the gaming industry, the use of dopamine in game dev has become totally a fetish for developers. They won’t talk about it publicly, but they will go to extraordinary lengths to try to optimize it in their products. They seem to think no one is noticing, but it’s completely common knowledge at this point and it is discussed directly in the EU’s Digital Fairness Act regulation. The one group that probably fetishizes dopamine more than developers is investors. They think they’ve fallen onto the Holy Grail of bio-hacks that guarantee addicted consumer compliance.
But consumers aren’t demanding dopamine anymore. Games based on it are failing right and left. I published a possible answer recently when I explained that the latest research indicates that dopamine receptors are oxytocin-dependent. That means your violent dopamine delivery devices are causing biological rejection in consumers. No company is spared, all companies making violent shooters are trending down. I’m not making an ethical argument here, I’m pointing out that because of biology (being exploited in companies without any biologists on staff) your business model is failing and is going to fail even harder year after year.
Instead of a rejected dopamine delivery device, wouldn’t it make sense to sell a chemical that is at least 10 times as potent, causes obedience/trust in the recipient, and which is almost entirely absent from the market (no competition), wouldn’t that be a better product to go all in on? Rationally/commercially, absolutely. The only thing that’s preventing business leaders from thinking rationally here is their dopamine business model fetishes. The fact that they might be hurting consumers just makes it more erotic for them.
There are 5 ways we can try to solve the Touch dilemma:
Substitute with real sex.
Substitute with abstract (touchless) sex.
Substitute with AI companionship (similar to option 2).
Substitute with digital oxytocin sources (these can be non sexual and child safe).
Normalize touch (such as is the case in Thailand).
Option 1 has an efficacy of perhaps ~25% since you are mostly getting dopamine, not oxytocin. The efficacy for option 2 is far lower even than option 1. Option 3 could potentially be higher than 25%, but only if you can get the consumer to fall in love with your AI. This has happened and has resulted in consumer death, especially with children consumers. When the connection to the AI is interrupted this can kill the child. When the AI itself orders the child to kill themselves, this can kill the child.
Thus option 3 could be powerful, but not necessarily in a good way. It’s too much of a wildcard.
Option 4 involves maximizing human social interaction via gameplay interdependency and social support. Because all participants are needed by other participants, there is a de facto social net to protect participants from emotional shocks. This makes participation safer than real life. Efficacy is unknown but can be tested as soon as one of my various designs makes it to market. That’s been frustratingly challenging mostly because investors are still deep in the dopamine fetish and AI is sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the air.
Option 5, the option that has gotten our species here over the last 250,000 years, seems like it could end up being the most unlikely option/source going forward. A lot of this is due to ideological/religious/political demonisation of just normal biology. Unless that somehow reverses, Touch in all its forms is going to become taboo, embargoed, or just outright illegal. That’s possible because of all the laws attached to touch that limit its supply and maximize its cost. I assume this is in part happening due to lobbying from touch-competitors. Like the porn and “streaming” industries. There are also a host of industries that prey on people who try to have traditional relationships, like divorce attorneys and sexist content creators.
Give Sanity a Try
If you’ve tried dating recently, when was the last time you just went for a walk in the park or at the beach on a first date? Almost all of my dates are a variation of this. I might start talking over tea, but if there are no real problems (like fake pictures or obviously antagonistic behavior) then I try to move the date to a natural environment.
Make every effort to avoid making your early interactions with a potential partner transactional. We are flooded with content pushing us to have transactional dates. I’ve even written a paper on how to have transactional relationships. Not because I’m advocating for it, but because that is the new normal.
Instead try to focus on the basics. Do you find them attractive, and do they seem to feel that way? Do you enjoy listening to them, or is it like claws on a chalkboard? Do they seem interested in listening to you? Do you have any common interests and daily activities?
After a lot of talking and a very intense (but non sexual) date in Manhattan with a CEO woman back in 2012, I agreed to court her. I moved to her town and rented an apartment. For her part, I asked her to make the time to walk with me for an hour a day, every day. She agreed. That was it. That was the entirety of the agreed upon exchange. And we both did what we said. That ended up being one of the best relationships of my life, until I had to move when Wargaming hired and relocated me.
I did something similar with my current (6 year) relationship. We went on regular walks for a month before I even invited her over to my house. That really isn’t very long, but people today just don’t do this.
I hate to label myself as a traditionalist. I’m ultra progressive. But socially, I go back to Source a lot. What’s worked over the last 250,000 years could work for another 250,000 years. I don’t just discount traditional relationships because I think I’m capable of much more.
Ultimately all the pressure to transact is just going to kill your connection. The end goal is to find someone you can build emotional connection with, and who enjoys touching you as much as you enjoy touching them. There’s nothing sinister about that. That’s as natural as it gets.