But he did not want to face that particular music, so he found a place to hide. In sharp contrast to his reign over a palace cleaned with gold-plated toilet brushes, the place they finally dug him out of was a literal hole in the ground. Specifically, a “spider hole”.

This will become relevant in due course.

You’ve undoubtedly read many reports of billionaire bunkers since 2022, when the media theorist and reluctant futurist Douglas Rushkoff published Survival of the Richest. The journey to that book started when a subset of the addlepated ultrarich whisked him away to an undisclosed location, where he found himself facing down desperate questions about the impending apocalypse. Questions on the order of: “how do I convince my security guard to join me in the bunker to assume his role as my eternal servant in the dystopian afterlife?” (And the word “convince” here definitely carried base notes of “exploit” and [sniffs suspiciously] “enslave”.)

Billionaire prepper stories were already getting popular, but since 2022, doomsday bunker content has become its own media genre. Here’s the BBC last month, Business Insider, the Independent, I could go on, but the concept has now been turned into a Netflix show.

What are they running from?

The queasy vibe seeded by these stories is that something is coming. The superrich don’t just think it, they know it, because of their better information streams, and only they have the resources to protect themselves and their families. From what? It’s a polycrisis pick ‘n’ mix. Something something AGI. (If anyone builds it, everyone dies!) Mass extinctions, climate change, North Korea’s nuclear range, eco crashes, water wars, I can’t take it anymore. Only the people who get rich enough to build themselves a luxury bunker will ride it all out with a nice glass of 1965 Chateau Souterraine, so get rich now or die horribly.

Some wealthy individuals fear that the apocalypse is coming for them whether or not there is a specific precipitating event. As one of them fretted in 2014:

“Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.”

His dire warnings are worth revisiting as we face the possibility of another global financial event that magically teleports a whole lot of people’s retirement savings. I feel this broader sense that in 2025, we are just finally now coming to the apotheosis of the era that started with the crash of 2008 – or maybe even in 2000.

But, in bad news for the bunker bitches, there’s evidence that doomsday fortifications won’t provide the seamless experience billionaires are expecting. Among other reasons, wrote Rushkoff in 2022,

“the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.”

So maybe billionaire bunkers end up being a bad deal for billionaires. But maybe let’s not tell them that – because what if they’re a good deal for everyone else?

The spider hole you live in

After all, an event that necessitates rich people climbing into a bunker is not necessarily the end of everyone’s world – it might just be the end of a particular 20th-century approach that has finally run its course. Not sure if you’ve read about the neo-Luddite rumblings but a rising number of people are getting tired of being told what to do by technology and those who use it to exploit them.

And, sure: technology is great! Where would I be without refrigeration and hot water? And I love Deliveroo and grocery delivery apps and Spotify and Whatsapp as much as anyone: I am basic as hell.

But… I’m also old enough to remember when new tech painted a shiny gloss on life and improved it. These days it’s more likely to suck the life out of life. Apps for zipless fucks, burrito taxis, Bobblehead chatbots nodding at our most unhinged notions that are in desperate need of human pushback (you know – a conversation), AI therapists that give us permission to abandon friends and family at the first hint of “emotional labour”, social media where blocklists and other ringfencing measures reduce our exposure to all the things we hate, whose numbers just keep mysteriously rising. The most successful technologies have one thing in common: by optimising the terms on which we interact with other humans, they wall us off into tighter and crampier confines while claiming it’s for our insulation and protection. Their creators do not wish us well.

If this system ends for any reason – a financial collapse, a solar flare, a climate disaster – perhaps the rich people will retreat to their bunkers. But much more importantly, perhaps we can finally climb out of ours.

Because of course the world will not end. It never does. In fact, when systems fail, people have been known to behave in surprisingly prosocial ways. In accounts of the times that were supposed to be the end of the world, you can find people suddenly stepping in to help each other navigate the absence of previous structures.

One example: about 20 years ago I was in Dresden and I started talking to a guy who was about the age I am now. Communism had been defeated. The iron curtain had lifted! Germany was reunified. Wasn’t he thrilled?

He was not. He didn’t see opportunity in capitalism. He saw a loss of something that all the penury of communism had inadvertently nourished. I’m not saying communism was good — it was demonstrably a shitshow. But this colossal system failure forced people to fill in the cracks. The realisation that you couldn’t count on the government for help created intricate smaller social systems that got communities through the day. People helped each other, they were kind to each other. They gave each other the benefit of the doubt.

And this man in Dresden was thinking about his children who were being issued their new priorities by the hypercapitalist invasion of his country. He said that his society had lost some of the qualities that made life sweeter and more meaningful, things we maybe don’t understand so well in the west where every man is in it for himself.

Don’t believe the hype

So, back to this Event all these bunker stories have been teasing – the cannibalism, the man-against-man dystopian nightmares, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. These may not be an inevitability after all, but rather the product of a certain kind of thinking. Atrocities happen, but they tend to result when people believe stories that were designed to control them. Narratives spread by those in power to protect themselves by making everyone else turn on each other.

Rushkoff himself has been thinking deeply about this. On his podcast, Team Human, he has a clear prescription for what to do in the event of an apocalypse: help each other. That’s it. What has been proven to work, time and again, is binding yourself into a matrix of close ties to other people. That means owing people things. That means sometimes doing more than you think you should. It even means “emotional labour”! If you want a village, as the saying goes, you need to be a villager. That’s the price of exiting the bunker.

Maybe you think we have lost the ability to live like this after decades of being stuffed ever further down our individual silos.

But have faith. Don’t succumb to the same bad narrative that is driving rich people underground. Human nature is better than what we’ve been conditioned to believe by people who make money off those beliefs. When shit goes bad, human nature overwhelmingly breaks good. Two decades of apps haven’t broken 300,000 years of evolution.

In the end, they needed to drag Saddam out of his spider hole to bring him to justice. We won’t even need to do that. Once the billionaires are safely ensconced in their doomsday bunkers, we will emerge once again blinking in the sun. We will realise: Their bunkers have not saved them from us. Their bunkers have saved us from them.

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PS. Christ I hope this ages well.

—

If you liked this post, I have some recommendations:

Read The Future by Naomi Alderman (who also writes an excellent Substack). It’s a criminally underrated sci-fi novel that lowkey creates a whole new genre. It’s the above essay if enacted IRL. For nonfiction, rise up against the machine with 21st century Luddite whisperer Brian Merchant, whose book and Substack (Blood in the Machine) are required reading. And to understand why you shouldn’t give up and throw yourself into the abyss, read The Bright Side, by Sumit Paul-Choudhury. Read it to find out why our current prevailing doomer narrative is a hole we have a moral obligation to dig ourselves out of.

Listen to Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

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Image credits: A graphic that was removed and replaced by a more accurate version in a BBC story from 2003. Archived page here.

Second bunker image is from Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

Why are birth rates falling? A beautiful, fear-inducing article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New Yorker gets under the hood of the new demographic time bomb. Some think this development is a net positive because with fewer people will come fewer of the environmental consequences of, well, people. Others see a downward spiral in which having children at all becomes so frowned upon, the choice so incomprehensible, that we all voluntarily march into comfort- and convenience-abetted extinction.

Wherever you fall in this spectrum, it raises a really important question: What social factors could be driving this global phenomenon? Turns out, Lewis-Kraus found, “reproductive cues are social.”

Hwang Sun-jae, a sociologist who studies fertility norms, traces the swift dissemination of low fertility in part to social media’s role as an accelerant of global monoculture. It has never been easier to acquaint yourself with the opportunity costs of childbearing — the glamorous destinations unvisited, the faddish foods uneaten. “People once had only local comparisons,” he said. “Now they see other people’s lives — in New York City and England and France — and they have a sense of relative deprivation.”

Social media is not just implicated in lower birth rates but higher stress overall, if you go by a teaser for a new book by Nicholas Carr, the guy who in 2010 wrote The Shallows, which ended up being quite a portent for the next 15 years.

In a section subtitled “digital crowding”, he makes a leap I’ve long been after, between physical overcrowding (whose noxious effects on mental health includes “social claustrophobia, with symptoms of stress, depression, withdrawal, and, at worst, aggression”) and the online version:

There are no bodies online, but there are myriad presences. With everyone pressing their virtual flesh on everyone else all the time, the communicative life becomes more extensive, and more oppressive, than it is in even the most densely populated of cities. Simmel’s description of the “psychological conditions” of the metropolis—“the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli”—seems if anything more accurate as a description of the social media environment than the urban one.

To sum up: social media makes you feel like there are too many people in the world, and social media makes you feel like a chump if you don’t live up to the lives of people who are doing and being the best.

Reading both these articles on the same day, I suddenly remembered an interview I did a few years ago for The Last Word on Nothing with a scientist who, I intuited, was seeing the future through a glass darkly.

In 2021, in the journal Endocrinology, Alexander Suvorov floated the startling possibility that your online social network is an environmental toxin. Or at least that maybe your body perceives it as one. Suvorov, a biologist at the University of Massachussetts Amherst, thought that it was changes in our social environment that were somehow contributing to the acceleration of the population implosion.

Those changes include moving from the real physical community we evolved to inhabit — with its limited numbers — into a virtual habitat where there was no end to the number of people that could step on our feet every which way we turn. Suvorov thought that even if our physical environment does not lack for space and resources, this is overridden by the faux-sensory information we get in the online world where many (most) of us increasingly spend a sizeable chunk of our lives. This world generates a sense of competition and stress that constantly saps us of our willingness to pursue meaningful goals in the world.

I want to resurface the conversation we had in 2022, as it does not seem to have aged.

* * *

Sally Adee: This is a really hard question to untangle.

Alexander Suvorov: As always in science, when you try to address a complicated question, the approach is to split it into much smaller questions.

By answering smaller questions, you can gradually build a mosaic, to arrive at a big picture. One example: in mice and small rodents, it is well-documented in laboratory experiments, and also in wildlife, that population density, or just social interactions, generate stress. And you can measure this stress by corticosteroid hormones in blood. So what about humans? For example, if you meet with many people over the day, will the level of corticosteroids be higher in your blood? Nobody knows. It would be a simple test, but no one has tried to measure this.

Or for example, let’s say you spend all your day sitting in front of the computer, interacting with thousands of people via Facebook. Will your body generate an increased stress response? Again, that is a very simple question that can be answered by a very simple questionnaire asking people how much time they spend on Facebook and measuring the corticosteroid levels. But nobody ever did that.

SA How come? I mean, that seems like such a basic idea. Especially in light of all the conversations around the online safety act. People are constantly talking about the harmful effects of social media – why hasn’t anybody tried to quantify it in this way?

AS It’s very difficult to develop a whole new area of research that asks questions nobody has asked before. One reason I published the paper was to trigger this line of research: to demonstrate that the amount and quality of social interaction can affect behaviour significantly.

SA Please can you explain what you mean by amount and quality of social interaction?

AS Our species evolved for millions of years in the African Savannah. The standard size of human groups was around 150. The idea is that this is the upper limit of the number of people with whom we can maintain meaningful social connections. It doesn’t mean that those people are your friends. Some of them may be quite opposite – your enemies – but at least you understand that they are enemies, meaning that those connections are of high quality. You can predict the behaviour of those people. You can model them in your head. You understand the resulting social environment very well, and that makes your brain feel happier. But as the number in your group starts to grow into the thousands, your brain starts to feel like it is completely out of control, because you cannot keep that amount of high quality models of people in your memory. The physical size of the brain structures responsible for social interaction and modeling even indicates that the number is optimally 150.

SA What happens when your number – that amount – rises too far above that?

AS The bigger social networks enabled by the internet, I think that they can be a significant source of stress. That is what I think. Unfortunately as yet it is just my opinion. I have to disclose that.

So imagine a small village from 100 years ago, and let’s say in that village, there are 10 young people, late teens, early 20s, trying to find their place in this small rural community. They’re fighting for their place. One of them is the strongest. The whole village appreciates how strong they are. Another is, I don’t know, the best dancer. The third is so handsome that every girl likes him. Then there is the great storyteller. The one who can fix any car. Right now, in this small village, everyone can feel themselves absolutely accomplished.

Each has found their own place in the hierarchy, the smaller pyramid on which that person is the best, bar none. In this situation, everyone is fine. People are happy, they have a place, they know that they’re best in something.

Now give all these people access to the internet. The one who is strongest goes on the internet – and sees the Strong Man competition where entrants are a thousand times stronger. He now feels he is a loser. The same thing happens to the best dancer and the one who can fix a car. This access to internet and to all of social media generates a feeling of not being accomplished for everybody, because only a few people in the world really are the best. Everybody else is not.

SA Okay but…. the world has not always offered only a binary of either life in a small village of 150 people or a firehose of all 7.5 billion people on Earth. There were intermediary experiences, like living in a city with loads of great dancers or, you know, cable news telling you about the Nobel prize winners. Is there a linear relationship between stress and the amount of exposure to people above you in the hierarchy?

AS There’s no direct evidence, because no one has tried to look at it. But there is indirect evidence. Much of it comes from recent studies of happiness. Many such recent studies demonstrate that there is a gradient of happiness – with the happiest people living in the smallest settlements, and the most unhappy people living in the centers of big cities. Several of these – from the United States, from China, from other countries – all arrive at similar conclusions. So the smaller your social environment, the happier you feel.

SA So that’s the effect of a large amount of social interaction. But you are also worried about the quality. In the commentary that accompanied your paper in Endocrinology, there was a discussion of the different kinds of interactions: distinguishing between “opportunity” interactions versus “challenging” interactions. What do you mean here?

AS There’s one aspect of all of this that I think many people do not recognize: The way aggression has evolved in society.

In 1963, the Nobel prize-winning scientist Konrad Lorenz wrote a book called On Aggression. I believe that that book was the most significant discovery in the area of human behavior – ever. No one has improved on his work since then. He was recognized as a fantastic scientist by Nobel committee, but the book fell out of favour because he was an Austrian scientist who supported Germany during World War II. His actions were unforgivable, but still it is unfortunate that his work does not survive, because it contains important insights.

He explained that the instinct of aggression – in humans and in many other species – is undergoing steady evolution. And that it is producing behaviour intended to resolve a goal without doing physical harm.

SA And what is the goal?

AS To establish dominance. The purpose of aggression is to build social hierarchies where the strongest will be dominant. He or she will fight until everybody else is defeated, and only they remain, and that defines them as the dominant one. But in developed society, to establish your dominance, physical aggression is no longer as necessary or desirable. Instead, you get a great education, and collect degrees and diplomas. These are today’s ritualised behavioural signals which – without any fighting – will put you at the top of the status pyramid. And that was actually what Lorenz’s book was about. He was explaining how this aggression instinct has pushed humanity to build these complicated social hierarchies, and how human interactions have therefore evolved to become less physically harmful while still conveying the message of your level in comparison with others.

SA So status-seeking behavior is evolving away from the ape-like behaviour of, just, like smashing each other on the head like in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

AS People can of course still continue to fight physically, though it is an increasingly uncommon way to establish social dominance. But just because there is less physical fighting doesn’t mean there is no aggression. Aggression is everywhere. When you meet with friends, colleagues, whoever, talking with them or working with them, you never think about what it is you are really doing: constantly comparing yourself with others to evaluate if you are higher or lower. Every time you communicate with other people, you are building this social hierarchy. We never think about it consciously, but it is happening every second.

It has come so far from the original violent dominance contests, that we no longer recognize it as such. But in reality, every time we communicate, it is at least partly driven by aggression.

And our brain subconsciously knows that, meaning that every time you meet with people – even friends – there are small stress signals generated because your brain is always on alert: Knowing that what you say or what others say may somehow affect your level, and you might go down. But in my opinion, Konrad Lorenz created the theoretical framework that allows us to understand that even ostensibly harmless interactions can produce some physiological stress response in our brain. Consciously we do not recognise that we are engaging in aggression, but our subconscious knows it.

SA I guess that helps me understand why people do certain things. Even before social media was ubiquitous, we were using the internet to rank ourselves. There was this terrible website called hot or not dot com where you would upload photos of yourself in order to then be rated by random strangers.

AS People willingly put themselves on display to build their rank, yes, to fight for a high place in the hierarchy. On top of that, we have now developed this technology – electronic means of communication- that can change how our brain perceives our environment completely.

SA So it’s really stressful to compete for status. In your paper you speculate that this has physiological consequences?

It wouldn’t be so controversial to say mental stress from some particular source could impact physiology – that the stress of “lower quality” social interactions could lead to biological consequences. After all, “the brain is intimately connected to the body and the body to the brain,” David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine told the New York Times last year. “The body tends to react to mental stress as if it was a physical stress.”

AS Pronounced trends have been registered by scientists showing a decline in reproductive physiology – both in men and women, but it is better characterized in men. For example, meta-analyses have now demonstrated a 50 percent reduction in sperm count, everywhere in the world.

My current research is mostly in the area of environmental toxicology. One popular area of research in this field is endocrine-disruptive chemicals. The default assumption is that we should attribute this drop to exposure to those chemicals. But nobody has tried to critically analyze whether this is true or not. And the reason for that is because we do not have alternative explanations. And so, the result is that every time you see some global decline in some parameter of health, people automatically attribute that to chemicals because what else could it be?

It’s not a bad hypothesis. It’s not that it doesn’t have support, it’s likely true. But nobody ever looks at other possible explanations.

SA And your hypothesis is that in addition to all the other factors, there is also some kind of awareness of overcrowding, some awareness of population increase, that has increased in the past 50 years? And you think social media is exacerbating this perception?

AS I feel that social media is one of the most significant factors that is affecting human behaviour today. These events, the pandemic, the economy, Ukraine. If they had happened in the 19th century – and so many did! – people would continue focusing on our duties, on our friends, families, our job, and et cetera. But today, the whole world is glued to social media, monitoring what is happening – including myself! And we cannot stop doing that. Those events are substituting for our personal lives. And there’s always something bad happening, so we never stop.

SA But linking stress and social media use and reproductive consequences would be a difficult experiment.

AS Yes but we could do it. We don’t have a lot of data from humans. So now we need two types of studies with humans. First, we need to see if reproductive outcomes are negatively associated with stress hormone levels – in the blood, or maybe in saliva, there are several different methods to measure them.

Second, we need to find associations between social interactions – specifically, the quality of social interactions – with stress levels. Again, measuring these via stress hormones in some biological media, saliva, blood, whatever. We still are missing a lot of data. For example, I was trying to find some historical trends for testosterone levels. We don’t know what teststerone levels were in men living 50 or 100 years ago – are they going up or down? What about estrogen? If we find that the human hormonal background is changing, it could mean that modern human beings, from an endocrine standpoint, are completely different creatures than the humans who lived a hundred years ago.

SA What gave you the idea that this had any connection with reproduction?

AS Anecdotally, I started to see a pattern in the families around me. The kids, at the age of around 30, have no intention to have kids ever. I’m a biologist. For me, that looks like complete nonsense. Natural selection is based on selective reproduction. Meaning that all those people who want to go child-free, they are mostly eliminating themselves from existence – because their genes will not be transferred to the next generation. Not at the personal level, but at the level of lineage, that is suicidal. Your genes will never go to the next generation. That’s it. Forever.

For millions of years, natural selection led to successful reproduction, but what is happening suddenly? And if you try to find an answer in the scientific literature, almost everything is sociology research where people say, oh, as women get more education, they deviate from this program. Or if people get wealthy. Or if they have good access to contraception. And et cetera, but that is all sociology. What about evolutionary programming, the instinct in our brain? Can you imagine a cat who suddenly says, ‘oh, I don’t want to have kittens anymore’. Or a dog who says ‘I want to live for myself’.

SA Aren’t you conflating the instinct to reproduce with the instinct that … leads to reproduction? If you can freely engage in the latter without having to deal with the former – I mean, it makes sense to me that you might then have fewer children, or maybe none.

AS Of course there is a drive for sex, but that’s not the only thing responsible for the production of new humans. People have maternal and paternal instincts. We like babies. And lots of people want to have a baby regardless of having sex. I don’t believe the neurophysiology of this programming is well understood, but I think that there are multiple layers in it. For example, for many people, having kids means you can propagate yourself into the future – it’s a key to immortality. I don’t think contraception alone can switch off that desire to proliferate.

SA Right now, I don’t really blame people for wanting to maybe not bring a vulnerable new human into a world unusually prolific with war, famine, pestilence, and death. Wouldn’t that be enough to temporarily override – for some people – any biological drive to reproduce?

AS Let me ask you the following question: In your opinion, when were the chances of survival, and of being wealthy, higher for somebody living in the United States or in Great Britain or in any other developed country today: the 15th century, or today? Of course the answer is today. Why? Because we have much better medicine. We do not suffer from starvation. We live very high-quality lives.

When people in the middle ages had wars, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis – or even just didn’t have enough food – they did not simply stop reproducing.

And furthermore, Covid-19 and Ukraine have only happened over the past three years. The trend for decreasing reproduction is much, much longer. Two years ago, there was a very good quality demographic paper published in The Lancet, which predicted that by 2064, the population of the humankind will reach its absolute maximum, meaning that after that population will go down.

SA Peak human.

AS Yes. So again: why? Today we have better than ever medical systems; we are wealthier than ever. In most parts of the world, we have resolved the problem of availability of food, and having a roof over your head. Against this backdrop, we cease reproducing? This isn’t just psychology. If we are now capable of suppressing the most basic instinct that has driven life on earth for millions of years, that means something very significant is happening at the level of biology.

That’s the question I’m asking here: what is happening with the biology of these people? What is happening to this program that has worked for millions of years? The fact that we exist today is due to the fact that every previous generation of humans, of homo sapiens, homo erectus, homo everyone – all our ancestors, back to the first unicellular prokaryote, they all reproduced. And that continuous chain of reproduction finally came to us. And now, what is happening? Why have we stopped?

From animal models, we already have enough data that shows that increased concentration of corticosteroids – stress – suppresses reproduction in mice.

SA Can you tell me more about this?

AS It was one of the inspirations for my work.

In the 1940s, the ethologist John Calhoun gave a group of mice everything they could want – ample water, food, no predators, and mating opportunities. The only catch was space: the rapidly proliferating mouse families had a limited enclosure into which to grow, and no constraints on that growth. The first few generations, when the population was small, were happy. When the colony hit a certain population threshold, however, everything went to hell. Cannibalism ensued, and mice killed their own babies and each others’, among a wider catalogue of horrors – but the most unsettling consequence was the increasing number of mice that withdrew from social interaction completely. Despite ample resources, some switch in their brains had been tripped (Calhoun thought it was the overcrowding), and otherwise reproductively ideal specimens – well-fed, eyes shiny, coats gleaming, the picture of health – stopped interacting with other mice. They didn’t mate, they didn’t fight, they didn’t socialise. They lay in their corners, alone, grooming themselves, until they died. Calhoun called these “the beautiful ones.” Eventually the entire colony died out.

SA I find it really interesting how much traction this study has gotten in popular culture. More than half a century on, it still pops up in everything from sci fi books to economics papers. Awareness of his work has been unusually enduring. Why do you think it continues to have so much traction and what in your opinion was its real significance?

AS It is a very important study. It was the first time anyone had demonstrated that population density is an important factor that determines behaviour. Not our behaviour, granted – that of mice and rats. But these are the standard models used in medical and biological research, so it raised a valid question whether it was applicable to us.

SA Some people might argue that humans are not mice. Do you think that something like this can be legitimately extrapolated to human psychology from mouse psychology?

AS I do. Every model in science is limited. There are things which can be modeled in mice and rats very well – for some research questions, they are perfect models. For others, they are very bad models. You just need to understand their limitations.

SA Did the reception of the paper go as you anticipated?

AS No. There was much more immediate interest than I anticipated. Usually you receive initially harsh review feedback. In our case it was surprisingly positive. One reviewer wrote “that is very interesting reading”. I have never, ever seen this comment before. Then the journal of the Endocrine Society decided to issue a press release about the paper; on top of that, there was an editorial commentary. So all of that was absolutely unexpected. But it was strange. Usually if a paper receives this much attention, it is cited by others. We have tools to monitor citations, and I have found that no other published studies have yet cited our paper.

SA What else might you expect to see in the next five years, if your hypothesis is true? More missed targets for births?

Alexander Suvorov: Existing trends will continue to go up the way they have been for a long time. More childfree families, new and different forms of social withdrawal. And people having less sex.

Art source:

I use Public Work, which surfaces artwork in the public domain. The artwork above is from a collection of Kawanable Kyōsai’s Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (1890).

Within three months of being declared the year of the brain-computer interface, 2023 was unceremoniously deposed by the year 2024: in January, a first trial volunteer for Neuralink’s brain implant, a second in August, and now rumours of a third. Not to mention all the companies that aren’t Neuralink. Things are accelerating quickly for brain implants. 

Neuralink in particular has inspired a new round of Brain Implant hype - and not necessarily just for helping people with disabilities. “The company's long-term vision is to make such implants available to the general population to augment and enhance their abilities too,” wrote the philosopher Dvija Mehta in BBC Future.  

Whether you believe that this vision is supported by reality depends on your priors. In a big report on the big money to be made in medical BCIs, the investment bank Morgan Stanley anticipates that after early medical applications, Black Mirror style “biological optimisation” will be a lucrative market. In the other corner is Kip Ludwig, neuroengineering’s eminence grise, who thinks this is “an exceptionally stupid goal for an invasive brain implant, based in a complete misunderstanding of what we know about the human brain, and how limited these technologies are and will continue to be in terms of interfacing with the underlying biology.”

But tell that to the reply guys who swarm the @neuralink hashtag on Twitter:

“Give me the chip and a Swiss army knife, and i’ll put the damn thing in myself” wrote someone else. Because, as yet another account volunteered, “I like Big Brains and I cannot lie”.

Putting aside the fact that there is probably a vast chasm between the muscular claims of anonymous X accounts and what they would do in reality, this enthusiasm is an understandable response to the Matrix-y superbrain speculation that has long been teased by tech people and transhumanists.

“Could we learn a thousand times faster?” Bryan Johnson rhetorically asked New Scientist, back when he was in the memory-augmentation brain chip business instead of … whatever this is he’s currently doing. “Could we choose which memories to keep and which to get rid of? Could we have a connection with our computers?”

Or could it be something that “controls your weight setpoint, so you can say, ‘I want to be 20 kilos [lighter]’”? This is the kind of killer app Anders Sandberg envisions for widely adopted cosmetic brain implants - the thing that “might actually make you want to put some electrodes in your head.”

Not only has Elon Musk indulged in similar teasing, he seems to actually make these prognostications part of Neuralink’s business plan. In a deeply researched special report for Reuters, reporters Rachael Levy and Marisa Taylor stitched together the threads from various Neuralink marketing palaver, Powerpoint presentations and all of Musk’s winky podcast asides (“you’ll be able to save and replay memories”) to assemble the broader business case Neuralink seems to be making for its tech:

“Both disabled and healthy people will pop into neighborhood facilities for speedy surgical insertions of devices with functions ranging from curing obesity, autism, depression or schizophrenia to web-surfing and telepathy.”

And yet, Point A (the current state of implants) and Point B (“erasing memories”) are miles apart.

Kip Ludwig isn’t the only person who gets exasperated by that. In an illuminating article, neuroscientist Erik Hoel had a go at the company’s habit of bigging up technological achievements that most people familiar with the space would recognise as old news.

For years now neuroscientists have been watching Neuralink recreate (to much fanfare) progress that has been known within the field of brain-computer interfaces for decades by academics.

He was particularly grumpy about how Neuralink made headlines in August for allowing a patient with its implant to play first-person shooter games with his mind (even though an older brain implant allowed another person to play Slay the Spire in 2020); and that it advertised the ability to move a cursor on a screen with the mind alone, a feat that BrainGate achieved back in 2006.

Based on the science alone, he wrote, their grand vision of streetcorner cosmetic brain upgrades is not supported.

So how do they think we are going to get from Point A to Point B? 

It’s anyone’s guess what kind of regulatory pathway leads from a handful of acute implanted patients in 2024 to street-corner clinics for guys who want to get their cognition boosted. “It's unclear how consumer BCIs would be regulated,” said Anna Wexler, who is a smart voice to follow on the ethical grenades in this field. “There may be parallels to look at in the realm of cosmetic surgery.” 

Specifically, I think there are useful insights in the narrative arc of the Brazilian Butt Lift. They’re useful because they show an ethics disconnect. For medical advances, there are loads of protections for people in clinical trials. Once you transition to cosmetic applications, people are left (literally) to their own devices.

Stage 1: Whetting the appetite

You might think no one would be stupid enough to get an untested brain implant. 

You’d be wrong. We know from various episodes in history that a treatment does not have to be proven for a particular indication for early adopters to go rushing in (cough Ozempic). It just needs to be plausible.

Once a medical implant is approved - for anything, doesn't matter for what - it won’t take long for someone to use it in a way that is off-label, shocking, and viral. So let’s assume a jailbroken medical brain implant is not a question of if, but when. 

Indeed, if onerous regulations are perceived to stand in the way of progress, all the better.

Nothing has been approved by regulatory agencies despite clinical trials that stretch back to 1998. Every existing invasive brain interface must be implanted in a lab. 

This will inspire some people to assume the role of self-experimenting guinea pig. Their explicit goal is to force the science forward, most recently with gene editing. Josiah Zayner injected himself (on Facebook, no less) with a dose of something that was supposed to CRISPR his DNA to increase muscle mass. Elizabeth Parrish did it with an untested treatment to lengthen her telomeres. Yet a third startup guy self-injected an untested Herpes cure (again on Facebook, somehow, and it bears saying that he was later found dead in a floatation tank). “It seems as though a key motivation for many biohackers is a feeling of frustration around the “overregulation” and slow pace of progress that follows,” wrote Keegan Schroeder describing this unfortunate series of events in Frontline Genomics.

Brain implants haven’t quite had their own Josiah Zayner yet, though one neuroscientist did implant himself with his own brain implant after he grew impatient with the FDA’s safety concerns. The results were not straightforward.

But tomorrow’s brain implant citizen scientists are out there and they’re ready. “Somebody called my secretary yesterday, saying they wanted an implant to meld themselves with artificial intelligence, and might I be someone who could help them do that? There is definitely an interest,” wrote a neuroscientist named Eric Leuthardt in The Guardian. He went on:

When I give talks, I ask the question: “If I offered you a small surgery, a one-centimetre incision, and I told you I could improve your memory by 50%, who would want one?” In the younger generation almost all the hands go up. Clearly this notion of altering yourself has changed dramatically. No one had tattoos 30 years ago, now more than 50% do.

Stage 2 - The Kardashian Event

In the 1990s, skinny heroin butts were de rigeur. People asked if these jeans made their butt look big and if the answer was yes, they did not buy the jeans. Butt enlargement surgery had a medical valence. You got it for an ass that was medically classified as too small to sit on. (And incidentally, it was done with implants that had initially been approved medically to augment the breast, for example after mastectomy.)

Then Kim Kardashian happened.

In 2014 she unveiled a caboose with proportions so improbable, it caused a print magazine to break the internet. Many of her fans had speculated for years that she had had a Brazilian Butt Lift, in which fat is grafted from places where one hates to see it and strategically reimplanted to places where one loves to see it. (Compare with the optimising brain chip advertised by Bryan Johnson that would let you “choose which memories to keep and which to get rid of.”) 

About 5 minutes later, everyone knew about the BBL and everyone wanted one. “There’s definitely evidence that celebrities influence public opinion and the direction procedures take,” ASPS president Robert X. Murphy told The Face Magazine.

In 2022, according to a Pew report, there wasn’t much appetite for an invasive brain implant. But at some point it will be done by a celebrity of some valence, with a high follower count, and we’ll be off to the races.

Stage 3 - The social media saturation phase

Between 2015 and 2019, the number of BBL procedures increased by 90 per cent. The next year saw a further 37 per cent increase; by 2021 it broke containment from the Americas to become the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world. And all of these people were showing off their new physique on social media.

This warped people’s perceptions, making it seem like everyone was having the procedure done, which made them feel like they were missing out, which made them get their own surgeries to show off online. 

This is how trends work now. During the saturation phase, your feed will make it seem like everyone except you has a brain implant. You will be made to feel remiss by not getting yours. It will also make it seem safer than it is: after all, if everyone is getting it, how could it not be?

At this point, it will also suddenly seem like everyone on your feed has been to brain implant medical school. Certifications by the Instagram School of Neuroscience will proliferate. 

Street corner surgery? Try someone’s bathroom (where they also do eyelash perms). Earlier this year, Nikki Minaj said her BBL was administered by a ​“random person”; Cardi B “in a basement in Queens”. These admissions however will come too late.

Stage 4 - The consequences phase

After people start dying, the statistics will out. In 2017, a study estimated a worldwide mortality rate of 1 in 3,000. The death toll was largely due to the fact that the procedure was still so new, and yet being prolifically undertaken in non sterile environments by unlicensed people, in an effort to make supply meet the voracious demand. 

The stories about the victims of botched brain implants will help to drive progress around making the procedures safer, and also public awareness around what not to do. They will examine the social factors that led early adopters to gamble their lives on such risky procedures. The TikTok brain surgeons will be exposed and sued. Many will be jailed. 

Real doctors, however, will learn from the botched surgeries; less invasive versions will be developed to meet the (somehow) continued demand. And, as with the BBL, regulators will try to bolt the door shut after the horse has gone.

Stage 5 - The patchwork regulation phase

You might assume, after this uproar, that elective brain implants will succumb to global regulations, or be banned. But that’s unlikely, and here we can again look to the BBL for guidance on how it might go down.

After several high profile deaths and mutilations, the entire procedure was banned in the UK. The ban was lifted in 2022 after new safety guidelines, but the authorities are still very much on the case.

But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what you regulate. If someone really wants a BBL, they will go to a country where there are no regulations, spend their medical tourism money, and deal with the consequences later, as Ellen Atlanta described in The Face.. 

“Through increased awareness and education, the ratio [of successful surgeries to death] is widening. Still, thousands of women fly to Turkey, the Dominican Republic or Mexico in order to get cheaper treatments, with TikTok showing videos of long lines of BBL patients waiting at airports in their wheelchairs.” 

And there’s no reason to assume that brain implants won’t succumb to the same kind of market logic.

Stage 6 - Oversaturation and normalisation

Trends follow a predictable narrative cycle – they crest, they peak, and then exhaustion sets in. Nowadays, even Kardashians are having their archetypal BBLs reversed. 

Extreme brain implants will also likely follow the same hype topography, going the way of the exaggerated breast augmentations of the 90s or the “overt BBL” look. Any elective surgery is a marker of class status, and once everyone has a class status marker it ceases to be one.  

Ironically, the safer the procedure becomes the fewer people will opt for it, as it will become too available to signify the sort of status that scarcity initially provided. In this environment, less apparent brain implants will proliferate, just as the overt BBL is in the process of transitioning to the so-called “country club BBL”: more subtle, less detectable, less trendy and, eventually, more commonplace. 

How do you convince someone to let you put your implant in their brain?

The reason I have catapulted us down this BBL rabbit hole is that I have been trying to articulate this nagging ethical question.

A general purpose brain implamt is the kind of ubiquitous device that will make companies Apple money. Not the comparatively small sliver of the population who needs brain implants for medical reasons. We don’t know how to get from the former to the latter.

At this point there are so many "missing stairs" in the science of neural code manipulation, you need human brains to test the science, not just the tech. To fill in these blanks, what an ambitious company really needs is lots of volunteers to sign up for this debugging process. Volunteers are neuroengineering’s most precious resource.

For the moment, Neuralink is only accepting applications from people with traumatic injuries. And yet, things famously “move fast” in Silicon Valley. It was only two years ago that the FDA rejected Neuralink’s application to implant paralysed patients citing “dozens of issues” including safety concerns. All of these appear to have vanished.

What’s next? “Any BCI will have some therapeutic claim, however thin,” wrote the bioethicists Charles Binkley, Michael Politz, and Brian P. Green, in a 2021 AMA Ethics article arguing against FDA oversight of BCI regulations. 

And the reply guys are so excited because they want the device Neuralink is selling them - as Hoel wrote,

For what makes Musk’s project so particularly buzzed-about is not its progress so far, but the goal (and aesthetic) of merging humans with machine in a kind of symbiosis.

I am not saying this is Neuralink’s plan - to spin tales of future prowess so irresistible they bewitch his enchanted followers into taking his hard chips into their soft heads with a crypto-bro hard sell. But that will be the effect.

Essentially, the early adopters of cosmetic brain implants will act as the cannon fodder that advances the grand vision of general-purpose brain computer interfaces that all these tech bros have been teasing. 

But whereas the people who participate in trials of experimental medical implants are revered as heroes and test pilots (as well they should be), our attitude to people who obtain experimental cosmetic procedures is not quite so generous. 

It’s a demoralising fact about human nature that we can take the attitudes to BBL deaths as indicators of how the public will greet the deaths and injuries that ensue after experimental cosmetic brain implantation. Instead of sympathy, they’ll be derided as Darwin award laureates. 

And yet, it’s their sacrifice that will lead to the “country club BBLs” that everyone can feel safe to partake of.

Medical brain implant trial volunteers have their interests protected by strong regulations. Specifically, in medical trials you’re not allowed to promise people the moon if there’s no moon. We are very careful about how we manage people's expectations around experimental medical brain implants.

After a traumatic brain or spinal injury, a person might agree to take part in a clinical trial of experimental invasive neurotech for a number of reasons. Jennifer French, who among other bona fides is a neurotechnology patient advocate, told me that two major factors play into a person’s decision to participate in what can be a risky and invasive procedure: 1) potential health benefits to themselves in the near term, and 2) an altruistic view that it might pave the way for future advances that benefit others.

Though experimental implants may be risky, the trial participants can be assured that the government has pored through a lot of relevant documents to ensure a basic level of safety. 

Some people think the FDA is pretty heavy handed with its regulations. But French thinks there should be even another layer of ethical protection beyond safety. Researchers should have to administer some kind of psychological assessment before a participant can enter their trial, to ensure they don’t go into it with the wrong expectations. People are faced with these decisions at an incredibly vulnerable moment in their lives. Brain surgery is, as the saying goes, a one-way door. Are their expectations really being correctly managed so that they are not a lab rat for an overzealous neuroengineer?

This makes sense. Clinical trial volunteers put their bodies on the line to advance scientific understanding and bring new technologies from the scientific outer bounds into mainstream use. They are contributing to the greater good.

But what about outside the lab? How do you get people to volunteer to put your chip in their brain? 

With enhancement, we assume everyone is compos mentis and we leave them to he consequences of their choices. It seems like the right thing to do if you believe in free will.

A lot of people will say it’s a free country and people are allowed to do what they want with their body and brain. But if we agree that it is imperative to protect people at a vulnerable medical moment in their lives, why are we so callous about the factors that may lead to uninformed consent at other times? I think that line gets fuzzier and more fractal the more closely you look at it. So, my only request is that we look.