The article posits that the digital revolution and artificial intelligence are causing a widespread societal shift, creating a ‘bottleneck’ effect that threatens numerous aspects of life. This change impacts numerous aspects of life from artistic expression to political structures.
The author illustrates this through several examples: declining readership of books due to the prevalence of digital media; the fading of traditional institutions such as newspapers, churches, and clubs; and the perceived rise of radical political movements.
Perhaps most critically, the essay discusses the decline in birth rates, leading to depopulation in several regions and threatening the long-term survival of human society itself. This point is supported by references to decreasing birth rates in various regions such as East Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
The overall conclusion is one of concern. The author suggests that the current trajectory is unsustainable. The essay offers a rather dire outlook on the future, arguing that profound changes are happening at an alarming rate.
Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.
When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.
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.
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