Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25?
How a creepy experiment from 1968 is eerily relevant today
Back in groovy 1968, visionaries dreamed of a utopia of peace and love. But only one person actually created it.
I’m referring to John B. Calhoun, a scientist who built a perfect society in a small town in Maryland. He created an actual Garden of Eden in modern America.
But only for mice.
Even today, Dr. Calhoun’s bold experiment—known as Universe 25—demands our attention. In fact, we need to study Universe 25 far more carefully today, because zealous tech accelerationists—that’s now a word, by the way—aim to create something comparable for human beings.
What would you do if AI took care of all your needs?
Would you be happier? Would you be kinder and gentler? Would you love your neighbor more? Would you spend more time with family? Would you have a richer, more fulfilled life?
Calhoun tried to answer that question by creating a utopia for mice, and watching how their society evolved when all their needs and desires were met.
It didn’t turn out like he planned.
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Calhoun started with eight mice—and he gave them a perfect environment. His specially designed mouse utopia offered unlimited food and drink, cozy apartments for nesting, ample supplies of nesting material, and constant temperature control to maximize comfort.
There were no predators. There was no disease. There was no competition. There were no threats.
Mice were free to be the best they could be. The only thing missing was 24/7 Netflix.
There was just one rule: Nobody could leave.
The galvanized metal walls of Universe 25 had no exit doors. But why would a mouse want to move out of the Garden of Eden?
Calhoun expected that his mice would flourish and propagate. He had room for 3,000 mice in his pen. He anticipated that the population would soon reach that limit.
It never happened.
At first, the population doubled every 55 days. But things started to deteriorate after the mouse population reached 620—although that was only around 20% of Universe 25’s capacity.
The problem started in the northeast corner of the pen, where the birth rate dropped enormously. But the decline soon spread elsewhere.
Dominant males adopted a narcissistic lifestyle—cleaning and preening themselves, and gorging on food. But they lost interest in routine mating behavior, although rape of both males and females was now on the rise.
Many other males became listless. Calhoun shared some details:
They became very inactive and aggregated in large pools near the centre of the floor of the universe. From this point on they no longer initiated interaction with their established associates, nor did their behaviour elicit attack by territorial males. Even so, they became characterized by many wounds and much scar tissue as a result of attacks by other withdrawn males.
Females now became very aggressive—attacking each other, and even their own children. Males no longer acted as protectors, losing interest in defending the nests. Yet they would increasingly attack other mice for no purpose. Although ample food was available, mouse-on-mouse cannibalism was now commonplace.
The mouse population stopped growing on day 560. A few baby mice survived weaning for several more weeks—but after day 600 not a single newborn mouse lived to adulthood.
Autopsies of female mice now showed how rarely they mated:
At autopsy at a median age of 334 days only 18% had ever conceived… and only 2% were pregnant….By this age most females in a normal population would have had five or more litters, most of them successfully reared.
The last living mice in Universe 25 were totally anti-social. They had been raised without maternal affection and nurturing, and grew up in a society of extreme narcissism, random violence, and disengagement.
Eventually the entire mouse population in Universe 25 died out. They couldn’t survive utopia.
When you read that mice case study, did it remind you of our current human condition? Are we deliberately creating a “leisure” world of narcissism, violence, and asexuality?
Maybe you have wondered why people have become solitary, like the rodent residents of Universe 25. They have fewer friends, even as leisure time has increased.
Intimate relationships are faring even worse nowadays. Like the mice in utopia, people are abandoning their standard mating behavior.
They have less sex, get married less often, and have fewer babies. Who would ever have guessed that the hottest trend in relationships would be virginity?
But here’s the reality: People’s deepest relationship is now with their phone.
It is an addictive relationship. That’s not my opinion—it’s what people using the phones say themselves. And the level of addiction increases with each generation.
Like our mouse utopia, the phone provides for all their needs. Whatever you want —a pizza, a driver, a lover, a game—there’s an app for it. Who needs friends or family, just so long as you’ve got the latest iPhone?
And it gets better! With the rise of AI and algorithms, you don’t even need to choose. The technocracy tells you what you need, and delivers it immediately.
Welcome to Universe 25 for humans!
Tara and I recently needed to replace our refrigerator. The old one started malfunctioning after 25 years.
I learned that new models will track my food supplies, plan my meals, provide my grocery list, and send it to my smartphone for ordering and delivery. I just need to sit back and wait—preferably with my mouth already open.
Call me crazy, but I declined all these options. I refuse to let my appliances talk to each other—or to the Internet.
I’ll plan my own meals, thank you very much.
But the future is going to leave people like me behind. Soon we will be like the mice in Calhoun’s experiment. We just need to attach our mouths to the spigot on the high tech feeding station, and suck in the nutrients.
Yum!
A refrigerator is a small thing compared to the large-scale social systems now targeted for disruption.
AI is ramping up to displace doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, software developers, engineers, scientists, therapists, writers, musicians, artists…all the way down to customer service reps, fast food workers, and the lowest entry-level employees.
Nobody is immune. Well, almost nobody.
Except for a few overlords, everybody else with a social purpose or meaningful vocation will be disrupted. And not because consumers want this—surveys show the exact opposite.
Consumers hate AI replacement theory by an overwhelming majority. But the ruling technocrats want it madly. And will force it upon us—as quickly and as irrevocably as possible.
But what happens to a society where people are deprived of purposes and vocations?
Humans are so much more complicated than mice. So if mice need challenges and obstacles in order to flourish, we need them all the more. People are not built for passive lives—and the tech billionaires who are chasing this (out of greed, not benevolence) are courting disaster on the largest scale imaginable.
More than 100 years ago, sociologist Emile Durkheim studied the problem of anomie. That’s not a word you hear very often nowadays. But we need to bring it back.
Anomie is a sense that life has no purpose or meaning. The people who suffer from it are listless, disconnected, and prone to mental illnesses of various sorts. Durkheim believed, for example, that suicide was frequently caused by anomie.
But the most shocking part of Durkheim’s analysis was his view that anomie increased when social norms were lessened. You might think that people rejoice when rules and regulations get eliminated. But Durkheim believed the exact opposite.
When the old structures go away, people encounter a crisis of meaning in their lives. In extreme cases, they kill themselves.
He wrote:
Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
Durkheim would have understood the risk of Universe 25. He could have predicted the collapse in the mouse society. And I daresay, he would grasp the comparable risk to human society in the present moment.
I am often skeptical of sociology, but nothing could be worse than the current situation. Today social engineering is implemented by profit-seeking technocrats with no expertise whatsoever in social dynamics or individual psychology.
In fact, a large percentage of these tech leaders appear to be socially inept, and disconnected from the people around them. They are the last folks on the planet you would trust with reinventing society.
Perhaps they understand semiconductors and super computers, but they have no grasp of how individuals will respond to the rapid ‘Universe 25’ shifts they are forcing on a reluctant public.
How do you destroy the purpose and meaning of human life? Is it even possible?
Unfortunately it’s not only possible, but already underway. Silicon Valley shows us how it’s done, step-by-step.
I’m not saying that tech companies deliberately intend to create social havoc. I believe their goals are merely to maximize money, power, and control. But the end result is the same, no matter what their motives.
Can anybody deny that this agenda is getting implemented rapidly by the technocracy—who are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen as fast as possible?
The people who smugly tell you that we need more research before we can figure this out are disingenuous. These dangers are intuitive and obvious to all unbiased parties. You and I already see and feel the consequences all around us, every day.
This is why we need a humanistic reawakening. Human values need to replace corporate mission statements.
It won’t be easy—I have grave concerns that the humanities are also in a state of collapse. But if we don’t defend our human values and purposes at this juncture, we are doomed to live our lives as captive clients of the technocracy.
In aggregate, this is the great crisis of our time—and you can read the results in the rising metrics of social harm.
The last missing piece to this new Garden of Eden is the virtual reality headset. At that point our existence totally shifts to passive consumption of mouse-like utopia.
Do you have any doubts about the fallout from this? People in virtual reality are already assaulting and raping each other—just like the bloated mice in Maryland.
Are you surprised?
It’s hard to believe that you can become a victim just by putting on a headset, but here are some of the crimes happening constantly in our virtual worlds:
assault
grooming
extortion
theft
impersonation
hacking
identity theft
financial fraud
cyberstalking
I note that the Metaverse is a perfectly controlled environment, designed to maximize leisure and remove obligations—the closest human equivalent to Universe 25 ever constructed.
The only difference is that you can leave the Metaverse—well, at least for the time being.
But we know how much web platforms hate losing their captives. That’s why they encourage addiction among the rank and file. They will do the same inside the Metaverse, and hope you stay there forever.
Take my advice, and exit from these tech fiefdoms as fast as your virtual legs will carry you. Or be even smarter, and don’t enter the Matrix in the first place.
I’m tempted to make jokes about all this. And there is something amusing about people living in a make believe world, like they’ve found their own personal Narnia.
But the darker side of these technologies demand a serious response. They are already creating social havoc on a massive level—every mental illness and psychological metric of harm is on the rise. Meanwhile the techies who cause it keep using the word acceleration—it’s their favorite term right now.
The only thing that gives me comfort is the knowledge that we are smarter than mice. This would be a grand time to prove it.
In The Matrix, 1999 classic first movie, Mr. Smith mentions that the first version of the Matrix was meant to be utopic, and the people turned on each other and mentally rejected the whole system. So the virtual world was reset to the end of the 20th century, right before technology took off in the direction of The Matrix.
It's sort of funny that the Wachowskis' meta apologetics for why the fashion / architecture / city et al was in 1999 actually turned out to be a prescient point about the last moment in human history when virtual reality seemed like some entertaining science fiction notion and not something we had to deal with. And it's also pretty prescient of the Wachowskis to know the human brain can't survive without survivalism.
That is why I have opted out of most internet conversations and articles. I choose to ignore most of what is going on in the world. I don't have a smart phone, no tv, limit my on-screen time and immerse myself in books that cause me to think. I like looking out of the window and watching the leaves on the trees move in the breeze and the cats that occaisionally take a rest in the yard. I hang out with my wife and we laugh a lot. I have reached an age where what goes on in the world is largely irrelevant to me and I'll be gone befores the rot sets in permanently. I feel sorry for those who will be here to experience what is coming next. We seem to be between 1984 and the Brave New World, and rushing headlong into the Brave New World. It was fun while it lasted.