97F. Averting Demographic Related Human Extinction

This coming extinction event is just one of several converging in the next century. Think tanks admit they are clueless as to the causes. I am intervening to explain the issues and propose solutions.

Why Current Leadership is Helpless Before This Crisis

This is the 6th and final paper in this series on Demographic Collapse. Here I compress the content from the previous 5 papers into a comprehensive analysis and propose solutions beyond the capabilities of think tanks and prevailing global leadership.

While researching content for this series I came across a presentation on the same subject from Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt given here in Australia only six months ago. I got the impression he is trusted as a foremost thought leader in the space. However, he sounds like he is reading from an excel spreadsheet, and if you’ve read this complete series you likely understand the concept of Replacement Rate better than he does.

Around minute 22 he explains that the problem will affect almost every country in the world except for the USA, which he says will not experience population contraction prior to 2080. He says that even when the “contraction” occurs, per capital wealth will just increase and that faith in capitalism and private enterprise will solve all problems. This was a bit alarming to me so I had to look him up. He works at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., and a quick review of their record shows they’ve been giving bad advice to the USA government since the 1930s. They still think climate change is a non issue.

I actually watched a few related videos from various academics. They were all awful and none of those academics had any idea what the problem was, they just relayed statistics. After watching a bunch of these the common theme was that these people thought this was an economic problem with a biological side effect. That’s upside down. This is a biological problem with an economic side effect. If your dog was having a hard time having puppies, you would not ask an economist what was wrong.

What is needed here is one or more neuroeconomists and possibly a toxicologist (because of the DDT/DTT angle). Neuroeconomists are very rare because of how much education is required, but they do exist. Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Finding Answers in the Trenches

One of Dr. Eberstadt’s interesting statistics was that in China there will soon be more people over the age of 80 than under the age of 15. He doesn’t pause to explain what that means though. People over the age of 80 are almost entirely dependent on young people to support them. The more older people each younger person has to support, the less time they are going to have to have and raise children, and in the relevant time frame we are unlikely to be able to deploy machines (like in The Matrix) to manufacture humans at a practical price point.

To find the answers these people claim are “Mysterious” we have to get our hands dirty. One of the people I surveyed in 2019 (one of the 150,000+ people I’ve surveyed) before I left the USA was the top Madam in Austin, Texas where demand for her industry is booming along with the migration of tech industries to that city. While she never associates with men in a non professional manner, I befriended her and traded her emotional support (which she actually needed a lot of, but hid pretty well) for information. Information you won’t find on ANY excel spreadsheet.

On this occasion I said to her: “The services of the many women you have trained and organised mostly work with men who have money, that can afford these services. These are older men. As sex increasingly gets commodified, young men won’t be able to afford it, and increasingly won’t have access to it. They will become increasingly frustrated and will not have opportunities to build relationship skills. If one of your ladies were to spend time with them instead of working for you, that would involve an opportunity cost that the man and woman can’t afford. If the men aren’t learning relationship skills from the women, and the women aren’t learning from the men, then are we about to lose an entire generation?”

I could see her thinking, and she didn’t have an answer for me. That was the last time I talked to her.

Since then OnlyFans has exploded as the ultimate professional goal for young women in the West.

Like with all sex work, it is extremely difficult for workers to do other work which might pay 90% or less what they make doing sex work. As their peers are learning work skills and getting experience, these women are falling behind and being rendered non competitive. Also, even if they did try to get a “normal” job, they risk being fired as soon as their employer finds out the employee has adult content on the internet.

Their relationship options while doing sex work are extremely limited due to stigma and jealousy. Most men if they are interested at all will just see these women as sex objects, not relationship material. And definitely not parental material.

Similarly, the movement towards “sugar relationships” is another more discrete form of sex work that the current generation is engaging in. The sugar dating site “seeking.com” had 500,000 men (customers/spenders) and 5 million women (mostly “service providers”) when I last studied it in 2020. These women are mostly of college age and might actually be in college. Of course why would they bother finishing school when they make 10 times more doing sex work than they will make in any “normal” career?

In 5 years that has increased 700% to 40 million users and now happens in over 100 countries just from that one sugar dating site. Sugar dating is sex work that is more “long term”, at least potentially, and which gives a “girlfriend experience”. From these numbers I would expect that means over 5 million women in the USA are doing “sugar” sex work, with perhaps half of those being active university students since the company targets their advertising specifically at this demographic. That’s about 25% of the total USA university population for women. If we assume they are also the most competitive women at universities based on attractiveness metrics, and 42% of women at this age state they are celibate, and perhaps another half million are on OnlyFans, that doesn’t leave a lot of women who are available for relationships with young men (unless they have a lot of money). University life used to be the best time in one’s life to find a partner.

It’s unclear how many of those 40M workers are in the USA, but the USA only has some 134M tracked workers out of a population of 343.5M citizens. We don’t know how many of those other 210M are working in unreported black market activities, but these sex work numbers have been skyrocketing according to OF and Seeking. Apparently the government is finally going after the OF workers, at least some of them, because they have started to complain about being sued for back taxes, on social media. Thus I started tracking the Gender Differential (which I wouldn’t be able to do if this black market activity was split evenly between the genders), which has been going up rapidly. You can see I use statistical means to find the information indirectly, just as scientists were able to calculate the real death rate from Covid in the USA when local governments began misreporting Covid deaths as pneumonia and such to hide the extent of the mortality rates. We will never know the “sugaring” rates directly because everyone keeps these “gifts” as secret as possible and it is so widespread.

Meanwhile, women are much more likely to be accepted to universities for study, and can actually afford tuition due to their far higher earning potential at this age compared to their male peers. But as I’ve stated, they have a very hard time leaving the business once they experience the high wages and dopamine thrills inherent in this work. Normal relationships involve too many opportunity costs, and fully transactional relationships are preferred. Traditional relationships also become too boring. Even with all the things that can go wrong in sex work, the high risks and rewards create a recipe for dopamine addiction that quickly become permanent.

The already very high rates of infidelity (which are both biologically normal and culturally unacceptable) are the leading cause of relationship breakups and divorce. But once you’ve gotten used to that rollercoaster, it’s hard to be with just one partner for 18+ years. Thus when a pregnancy does occur, the typical outcome now is single parenthood or aborted parenthood.

In the USA the government (which leans theocratic) has responded with “forced birthing” laws. If that escalates the next step would be forced impregnation.

A Bit of Recap

• Game developers, social media companies, and dating apps are threatening their users to amplify engagement. The goal is to get their users hooked on dopamine generating content. They all know it’s harmful, especially for female children. Some companies don’t care (like Facebook), while others do care and are doing it on purpose in order to demoralize Western countries. You can identify these malicious apps by their being banned in the country that made them, but distributed to everyone else. Kind of like what the USA did with DDT.

• Demoralization was explained by a Russian spy who defected about 50 years ago to the West.

• When children are under high stress/threat during development, they undergo permanent biological changes including epigenetic activation (which they can pass down to their children if they have any) and “abnormal stress response”.

• That means they over react to stress stimuli, and react at lower levels of stress than normal people.

• Because they have become addicted to dopamine (the corporate goal), they seek many times a day and receive it from the products that are addicting them.

• Dopamine stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. That means it stresses you out. It also gives pleasure. But you adapt to the reward and need ever larger amounts of dopamine to feel the pleasure. You don’t adapt to the stress, which just keeps amplifying.

• After some years you need extremely large doses of dopamine to feel anything. That means high risk behavior, typically “taboo” sexual activity or criminal activity. Something with a high risk of failure, which will maximize dopamine release.

• This in turn is causing a huge increase in commercial sex activity. Not just from “consumers”, but also from “providers”.

• As monogamy is pervasive in all modern cultures, “cheating” is a high risk high reward activity that is one of the few things that can continue to give a hardened dopamine addict continuing pleasure.

• These events force sexual activity down one of two paths: relationship seeking sexual activity (which could lead to productive fertility) and pleasure seeking sexual activity (which might lead to one birth and then suppressed fertility options).

• These two paths are mutually exclusive. The longer you stay on the pleasure path, the harder it becomes to stop as you become dependent on high risk sexual activity. Having relationships with people who believe in monogamy (almost everyone, at least they want their partners to be even if they aren’t) becomes impossible because as soon as you get bored or stressed you will start seeking additional partners. Good luck getting between an addict and their drug of choice.

• The dating app monopoly, controlled by a company that wants you to go down the addiction pathway, not the relationship pathway (because it’s their business model), helps force people down the anti fertility path.

• This monopoly also does not want to require authentication because this would interfere with the cheating they are promoting, and dopamine delivery.

• As demand for hardcore dopamine sources increases, addicts seek counter chemicals to “come down” in order to sleep. This typically means alcohol and prescription sedatives/opiates. This is fuelling the fentanyl crisis and death rates.

• No government (except perhaps China and Australia, but not effectively) is regulating these digital dopamine delivery services, what I call “Digital Drugs”. This was also the title of the book I was writing some years ago. They are pushing the line as hard as they can until they are regulated, so when they complain about regulation, they can be confidently ignored since they know it’s coming and it’s the only thing they will respond to.

• Addicts don’t make good parents and they typically don’t want to be parents. Throwing more money at these people to try to get them pregnant is not going to work. Zero efficacy as evidence has shown. Unless you are going to go the route of forced impregnation, you have to treat the source which is the dopamine delivery and resulting addiction.

Solutions

Dopamine Addiction, which I’ve been writing about for 13 years now and which I’ve talked about on America’s National Public Radio, has been rammed down the throats of an entire generation via social media, computer games, and quasi legal sex marketplaces. We passed the tipping point years ago and now are going to have to deal with one or more entire generations of dopamine addicts. I worked at the Betty Ford Center (perhaps the USA’s top drug rehabilitation facility) for three years after doing neuroscience research on addiction. Addiction isn’t fun. It’s not glamorous. It ruins lives and especially relationships.

Sure it’s profitable, and that’s the problem. As long as companies are profit driven (they always will be) and regulation/education is essentially non existent (I don’t expect that to change any time soon as long as companies run governments), this is the new normal:

Entire generations that are too addicted to consider parenthood even if they were somehow ready.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Countries that make it a top priority to understand and combat dopamine addiction may be able to turn things around. This would be a constant battle with companies whose business models depend on consumer addiction, and without a culture that supports these efforts politicians would easily be bought/subverted/replaced. Consumers themselves might fight reform because they are so strung out they can’t live without extreme dopamine exposure anymore.

Australia’s attempts to restrict children’s access to dopamine generating content is a huge first step in the right direction, but so much money will be thrown against this by multinational companies that I worry that Australia will surrender and offer up their children as human sacrifices to the machine gods. If these companies can’t stop the Australian experiment quickly, it could spread and force these companies out of business. And make no mistake, these are some of the largest companies in the world.

Reforming or Even Nationalizing Dating Apps

Because Dating Apps are being used to promote addiction, not fertility, they are a huge disruptor in fertility rates worldwide. From a fertility rate perspective, they do the exact opposite of what they are advertised to do. Since almost all of them are owned by one company (Match Group) their methods are fairly easy to reverse engineer and all of their products have similar approaches.

This means we could repair the algorithms in Dating Apps, just like we could repair the Algorithms in social media. It’s a very complicated process but I was able to crack the largest mathematical and social hurdles in 2016 so now the technology exists to do this. I don’t know how we could force changes on the various companies that use Algorithms for Dopamine stimulation, but with a group of public health and technology experts I am sure it can be done without Draconian regulatory efforts.

Japan has taken a critical first step in this regard by creating Tokyo Futari Story , a nationalized dating app that promotes healthy romantic connections. I don’t know who actually designed and built it so it could still contain harmful technology. But Japan was the first country to go into negative population growth (not counting plagues and wars) so it makes sense that they are taking the first constructive steps to stop it, even if it took them decades to do it.

Of course this raises privacy concerns because people have to identify themselves properly to participate in the Japanese dating app. This is an essential step towards improving dating apps since that first authentication step is so often fabricated and individual citizens can’t afford to send private investigators after everyone they date. The bad actors who are engaging in infidelity or even criminal activity (infidelity IS criminal activity in a lot of countries) won’t use a nationalized app, but that’s just another layer of security for participants.

Privacy concerns are a bit illusory anyways since every developed country uses advanced technology to spy on its citizens. That’s why it's gotten so much easier to prosecute crimes and find criminals if the government wants to. Criminals and other bad actors can still engage in transactions in various sexual black markets but the good faith actors can be protected. Here I don’t just mean protected from each other, but also from predatory companies.

Science Based Algorithms

The technology exists to replace dangerous dopamine addicting Algorithms used in computer games, social media, and dating apps. I warned the regulators for 80 countries about this at the ICPEN (International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network) regulatory summit in 2013 when they summoned me to Panama to testify. That’s how I got blacklisted in the USA, you don’t hear me on the radio anymore, and I don’t talk at GDC etc.

So I had identified, predicted, and communicated the problem 12 years ago and have been actively working on solutions since then. I had working algorithmic solutions by 2016. I’m ready to go when summoned again. In the meantime, I keep a very low profile. Until now I guess. In 2018 I wrote about how to make healthy games and went on a short world lecture tour to promote this. I appreciated the warm reception in Sweden.

We will have to force Algorithmic transparency on companies that want to continue to be consumer facing in these industries that I and others have identified as harmful to public health. Currently they operate in the shadows since they are allowed to. They can’t argue that they have to use harmful Algorithms because there are no alternatives. This situation has persisted because these things are too complicated for politicians to understand and they have not attempted to form expert groups to solve these problems. With the possible exception of Australia and Japan as mentioned here.

Addiction Reclassification

Currently some countries treat Gambling Addiction as an illness, or even Gaming Addiction (notably China, South Korea, and Japan). The World Health Organisation has classified “gaming disorder” as a mental health condition in their ICD-11, and more work to promote a global standard such as this would be very helpful. The classification needs to be expanded to include social media and dating app addiction. I am sure this will happen in the future, but doing it sooner rather than later would be helpful. All of these are essentially the same disease as internally they involve the same physiologic systems, and are created by malicious technologies designed to subvert these systems in order to be addiction forming. So I would like to see all of these wrapped into one classification to facilitate identification and treatment.

Australia has possibly the toughest stance in the world against social media addiction, but at the same time they are really at the mercy of their gambling industry lobby which is quite powerful. I’ve met with some local scientists who work in the gambling space in Australia and came away from those meetings with the impression that they were entirely beholden to gambling interests and were not protecting public welfare. So an umbrella classification might help overcome industry resistance to regulation like this, which is likely relevant to almost every country in the world.

Final Thoughts

If you managed to read this entire 6 part series I sincerely thank you for caring enough about your species and society to do so. While it took essentially 15 years to write, I recognise that just reading all of this is no small feat.

I would like to think that I explained a lot of the involved complexity related to Global Demographic Collapse, and shined a light on why scientists and politicians can’t seem to figure out how to counter it. It’s a very complicated technology-borne illness that threatens our species and will just keep getting more complicated over time.

As addiction becomes more widespread, reversing this illness is going to get harder and more expensive. The human toll will of course also be high. So the sooner we muster the collective will to take action to improve these situations, the better the outcome and the lower the final price tag.

As this technology-borne illness leads ultimately to an extinction event if not reversed, inaction is an option that no country can afford if it wants to continue existing into the 22nd Century. Escaping to Mars is not a practical solution, and won’t prevent this illness from following us there.