odd rant on gaming politics (not about rating or violence)

Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox

The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was
talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence with
some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy holds 100
billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively on earth,
and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could
colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that
extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened
patiently, then asked simply, "So, where is everybody?". That is, if
extra-terrestrial intelligence is common, why haven't we met any
bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi's Paradox.

The paradox has become more ever more baffling. Over 150 extrasolar
planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that
life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Paleontology shows that
organic life evolved very quickly after earth's surface cooled and
became life-hospitable. Given simple life, evolution shows progressive
trends towards larger bodies, brains, and social complexity.
Evolutionary psychology reveals several credible paths from simpler
social minds to human-level creative intelligence. Yet 40 years of
intensive searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence have yielded
nothing. No radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close
encounters of any kind.

So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science
over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence
evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep
tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After
Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make
colonizing space-ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear
bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Perhaps
extra-terrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Fermi's Paradox
became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox.
Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get
addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or
colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and
virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them
in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to
indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness
itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty
foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to
produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and
pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality
to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at
delivering fake fitness -- subjective cues of survival and
reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit
juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends
is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually
colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have
done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.

Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our
psychological resistance to it. The printing press is invented; people
read more novels and have fewer kids; only a few curmudgeons lament
this. The Xbox 360 is invented; people would rather play a
high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson's King Kong than be a
perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through
a carnival of addictively fitness-faking entertainment products: MP3,
DVD, TiVo, XM radio, Verizon cellphones, Spice cable, EverQuest
online, instant messaging, Ecstasy, BC Bud. The traditional staples of
physical, mental, and social development (athletics, homework, dating)
are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue
the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute -- the
MIT graduates apply to do computer game design for Electronics Arts,
rather than rocket science for NASA.

Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars,
airplanes, zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air
conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual
entertainment -- the top 10 patent-recipients are usually IBM,
Matsushita, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology, Samsung, Intel,
Hitachi, Toshiba, and Sony -- not Boeing, Toyota, or Wonderbra. We
have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from
physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We
are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Freud's pleasure
principle triumphs over the reality principle. We narrow-cast
human-interest stories to each other, rather than broad-casting
messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period
of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life
evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species --
to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and
reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species
probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to
their pleasures, and less to their children.

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist
the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve
more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve
a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and
contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed
gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will
combine the family values of the Religious Right with the
sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.

My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already
happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism
activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is,
and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class
dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our
fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded
breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have
inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it
will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a
meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on
surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other
not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.