[Crowbob]

In nature, populations are self-limiting. The food and space runs out and the population declines. For humans, increasingly divorced from nature, food and space are artificially sustained so the population also is sustained and so grows.

However, with the introduction and proliferation of the internets, humans are beginning to be exposed to ‘virtual crowding’ and ‘virtual hunger’. Nowdays, someone who lives, say, in Iowa is no longer insulated, by virtue of blissful ignorance, from the real world and the crowding and squalor of India, or China, and even parts of San Francisco or Detroit. So even though the Iowan lives in a spacious lack of want, he is, nevertheless, quite conscious of, and increasingly exposed to, the misery and hellish existence of enormous populations in other places.

As such, by extension, the entire world has been reduced to a Universe 25 so that even if particular individuals’ real existences are quite comfortable, their knowledge of the real world plays heavily on their psyches. The consequence is the proliferation of humans (with that proliferation being sustained unnaturally) behaving in negative ways inconsistent with their own realities. Great societies, though living in relative comfort, begin to decline.