Break Big Tech’s Monopoly on Dating: A Manifesto
November 17, 2025
Western societies find themselves assailed by “loneliness epidemics” like the one declared by the previous US surgeon general, who linked the plague of social isolation in the US to a smorgasbord of physical illnesses. Sexual inactivity is one crucial feature of isolation and of depression—the lifestyle traits that have most defined the global culture of Gen Z: the Institute for Family Studies revealed that last year “24% of people aged 18-29 said they had not had sex in the past year, twice as many as in 2010”, declaring a historic “sex recession” which also drives high suicide and drug addiction rates. That sex-recession is behind the problems of plummeting fertility rates and demographic decline in Western countries—phenomena that demonstrably feed political extremism in the 21st century, as propagandists for the Great Replacement Theory draw conspiratorial links between lowering birth rates and migration, claiming that these changes are all part of a diabolically engineered plan—rather than, say, the pain and debris resulting from the indifference of business-run societies.
Technology—in particular the smartphone and the apps we download onto it via GooglePlay—plays a pivotal role in this wave of asceticism. The management of contemporary sexual frustration towards profit results in the techno-puritanical wasteland we currently dwell in. One year before the pandemic, a team of American Ivy League scientists published their findings in a much-underlooked research article “Smartphones Reduce Smiles Between Strangers”, (Elsevier 2019). Think of casual flirting that used to happen more often in public spaces, (on the subway, in parks and in cafés, which are today lit up by the arcade of smartphones intercutting all glances.). As suggested by the cultural theorist Nina Power, younger people drink less than ever, partly because alcohol rarely mixes well with anti-depressants, but also because of the fear of “going viral”: the dread of the phone-camera’s power to livestream one’s most embarrassing drunken behavior to a mass audience. And in Western contexts, less drinking means less promiscuity.
