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An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

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Ross Douthat
By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

April 19, 2025
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.

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Lobsters pee from their head; their bladder is located under the brain. They often use pheromones in their urine to communicate with one another. Dolphins, too, seem to communicate with their pee—they were recently spotted spouting fountains of the stuff for others to swim through, a feat dubbed “aerial urination.”

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