A thirty-year-old man, in a recent debate, said something his contemporaries rarely say out loud. Among all his friends, not one has children. Not one. He then added a question that expected no answer, though it deserved one. Do you know how badly you have to mistreat a mammal to make it stop reproducing? The decline in birth rates is discussed in terms of housing costs, working conditions or female emancipation, and all of those explanations are valid and none of them is sufficient. Something operates beneath the indicators, and it has to do with the way an entire generation learnt to relate to others, or more precisely with the way it was taught not to. What that man described is a system that has been running for fifteen years without anyone having assumed its cost.
The Contract Nobody Signed
The original promise of the internet was articulated with a conviction that today seems hard to take seriously, but which at the time mobilised resources, talent and hope on a global scale. The network was going to democratise information, connect peoples above their governments, generate distributed prosperity and empower the individual against institutions. That narrative was not merely advertising. Engineers, activists and thinkers genuinely believed it, dedicating their careers to building digital infrastructures on the conviction that more access meant more freedom. The error did not lie in the sincerity of those who formulated it. It lay in the economic architecture on which everything else was built.
The model that ultimately prevailed was not the network as a public good. It was attention as a commodity. The platforms that today mediate most of the planet’s social relations are financed by selling human time to advertisers. The product is not the service. The product is the user. For this business to work, platforms must maximise the time each person spends connected, which in practice means designing systems that keep the user in a state of permanent activation, sufficiently stimulated to avoid disconnecting, insufficiently satisfied to have no reason to. The promise of connection became an engineering of dependency. Nobody called it that in press releases. Nobody needed to.
The generation that reached adolescence around 2009, when smartphones began to proliferate, was the first to construct its identity inside that system without having chosen it. Its parents did not understand it and its governments did not regulate it. In 2021, internal Meta documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal demonstrated that the company had known since 2019 that Instagram was causing documented harm to teenage girls, and continued operating without modifying the product. Knowledge of the harm and continuity of business coexisted without legal consequence because Section 230, the American statute of 1996, exempts platforms from all liability for the effects of their systems on their users.
The Architecture of Non-Encounter
Dating apps (digital platforms designed to facilitate romantic or sexual encounters) are the most illustrative case of how a system can present itself as a solution to a problem it contributes to creating. Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and their regional equivalents sell themselves as tools for finding a partner. Their business model, however, is not optimised to help the user find a partner. It is optimised to keep the user on the app.
Match Group, the corporation that controls Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, reported revenues of $3.24 billion in 2023. That money comes from premium subscriptions (paid-tier versions with additional features) and in-app purchases. The freemium design (free basic access with paid options to improve results) ensures that the free user experiences a calculated frustration, sufficient to consider paying, insufficient to leave the platform. Frustration is not a flaw in the system. It is its fuel.
According to financial records submitted by Match Group to the SEC in 2024, Tinder recorded a 9% decline in monthly active users during the third quarter of that year, which the company attributed, among other factors, to initiatives aimed at “improving ecosystem health” and outcomes for women, implicitly acknowledging that the previous model was not designed to produce satisfactory encounters.
For a generation, the rules of romantic encounter were rewritten by teams of engineers whose mandate was not the user’s happiness but their retention. These are two distinct things, and in many cases opposing objectives. The result is a generation with more formal access to potential partners than any other in history, which simultaneously reports levels of loneliness and social anxiety without precedent in available records.
The Panopticon on the Dance Floor
The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed in 1791 a prison model he called the panopticon. Inmates were arranged in cells around a central tower from which a guard could observe any of them without the inmates knowing when they were being watched. The intended effect was that prisoners would end up surveilling themselves, internalising the guard’s gaze to the point where external surveillance became unnecessary. Michel Foucault, who analysed this model in Discipline and Punish (1975), argued that the same logic operates within modern institutions. The most efficient power is not the one that punishes. It is the one that makes individuals punish themselves.
Teenagers no longer dance in nightclubs. Not because they do not want to. Because they know they will be filmed. Because an image can circulate without their consent, be edited, commented on, ridiculed. Because the social mistake that in previous generations dissolved in the imperfect memory of those who witnessed it is now indexed indefinitely. The result is a behavioural self-censorship that extends well beyond clubs. The person who approaches someone and fails may be filmed. The person who shows vulnerability may see it turned into content.
In the original panopticon there was one central guard. In the current model, everyone is a guard and everyone is a prisoner at the same time. The camera is no longer in the tower. It is in the pocket of every person present. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt documents in The Anxious Generation (2024) how young people who grew up with smartphones developed higher levels of social anxiety and greater difficulty sustaining relationships not mediated by a screen. A technology designed to maximise retention, installed in the social lives of adolescents without regulation or informed consent, produced foreseeable effects that nobody chose to prevent.
Reproductive Collapse as Evidence
Latin America recorded in 1950 one of the highest fertility rates on the planet. Latin American women had an average of 5.8 children over their reproductive lives. In 2024, according to the ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) Demographic Observatory, that average stands at 1.83 children per woman, below the generational replacement level of 2.1. The cumulative decline since 1950 is 68.4%, the largest recorded in any region of the world over that period. The region that reproduced most rapidly is now the one that has stopped doing so most rapidly.
ECLAC warned in July 2024, during a follow-up meeting of the Montevideo Consensus held in Cartagena de Indias, that Latin America had recorded that year the worst fertility rate in its measurable history. Chile reached 1.14 children per woman, becoming one of the countries with the lowest fertility on the planet. Costa Rica recorded 1.32 and Uruguay 1.40, figures that demographers classify as “ultra-low fertility”, a threshold indicating a population contraction that is difficult to reverse.
Attributing this collapse solely to digital platforms would be imprecise; urbanisation, women’s entry into the labour market and rising childcare costs all play a part. What those explanations fail to capture is the speed. Transformations of this magnitude used to unfold over generations, not decades, and the acceleration coincides with the mass proliferation of smartphones across Latin America, which moved from minority tools to mass infrastructure. A system designed to fragment attention and manage affective frustration does not produce the conditions for people to form families. It produces the conditions for them to stay on the app. The ECLAC figures are the invoice for that design, presented ten years late.
Who Pays, Who Profits, Who Answers
Platforms operate under a model economists call externalisation, the practice of transferring the costs of an activity onto third parties who played no part in the decision. Profits are concentrated among shareholders and executives; the damage is distributed across entire generations who did not choose the design of the system. Meta, Alphabet and Match Group do not pay for generational loneliness, social anxiety or the demographic collapse their algorithms contributed to producing, because no legal framework obliges them to account for those costs. Section 230 has guaranteed that immunity since 1996, and subsequent legislative attempts have failed to modify it substantially.
The legislators who could regulate these platforms belong for the most part to generations that did not grow up inside them and who, when they have attempted to legislate, have frequently demonstrated that they do not understand the product. The executives who appear before parliaments face questions that reveal more about the ignorance of their interlocutors than about the intentions of the industry. Meanwhile, the same companies invest consistently in lobbying, a term denoting organised pressure on legislators to steer political decisions in favour of private interests. The asymmetry is structural. One side understands the system it built. The other is attempting to regulate it without understanding how it works.
The man in the debate was right to implicate his own generation as part of the problem. The platforms were not imposed by force. They were adopted with enthusiasm, and by the time the effects became visible, they were so integrated into daily life that abandoning them amounted to an act of voluntary social exclusion. That is the system’s most troubling characteristic. It requires no coercion. It runs on consent, a consent that nobody adequately informed, granted by people who were children when their parents accepted on their behalf the terms and conditions nobody read.
The promise was democracy, freedom and economic growth. What arrived was an industrial model of attention extraction, applied to the most vulnerable moments of social life. Romance, friendship, the search for community. Mammals do not reproduce when the environment is hostile. Any biologist knows this. The question that nobody in a position of power has taken seriously is how much longer an environment designed for affective hostility can be sustained before the demographic figures become unrecoverable…
G.S.
Sources
- ECLAC, Demographic Observatory 2024, Low Fertility in Latin America and the Caribbean
- Swissinfo/EFE, Latin America recorded its worst fertility rate in history in 2024, according to ECLAC (July 2024)
- CNN Español, Latin America reaches its lowest fertility rate (March 2026)
- Match Group, Form 8-K Q3 2024, filed with the SEC (November 2024)
- Match Group, Form 8-K FY2024, filed with the SEC (February 2025)
- Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (Allen Lane, 2024)
- Wall Street Journal, Internal Meta Documents on Instagram’s Effects on Teenage Girls (2021)
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Penguin, 1977)
