Breed for Britain!

https://x.com/i/status/2005207321056842142

It's far too late now. We are in the hands of Skynet and at the mercy of policies and people we never voted for. All we can hope for now is to move to a country which offers privacy, where we can escape surveillance. But no government anywhere has ever voluntarily handed back power or privacy to those it removed them from. And now if you complain about this state of affairs you'll be flagged as one who has got "something to hide".

Yes,  this is a really bad state of affairs from which there is no obvious escape route. It may be that this is contributing to the population collapse in countries where this type of surveillance state operates. Parents have to ask themselves do they really want to feed their kids as worker fodder into this inescapable Orwellian nightmare?

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Final Thought

This doesn’t invalidate the economic and social explanations—we know those are real and powerful. But it adds a chilling new layer. If pervasive surveillance erodes the sense of personal autonomy and future predictability, it may quietly discourage the most profound act of optimism: having children.

Reclaiming meaningful privacy and rebuilding trust in institutions might turn out to be more important for future birth rates than any cash incentive or tax break.

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@ForeverScept 

Consider this 

Is Pervasive Surveillance  Contributing to the Population Decline in advanced societies?

Much has been made of falling birth rates in advanced countries. Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany, and even the United States are all seeing fertility rates well below replacement level, leading to aging populations, shrinking workforces, and mounting economic challenges.

The usual explanations are familiar: skyrocketing costs of housing, education, and childcare; women’s increased participation in the workforce; delayed marriage; urbanization; and a general atmosphere of financial and political uncertainty. In short, children have gone from being economic assets in agrarian societies to expensive liabilities (all more charitably "luxuries") in modern ones.

But what if there’s another, less-discussed factor? Could the rise of pervasive, always-on surveillance—through cameras, apps, data collection, and social scoring systems—be making potential parents think deeply about bringing children into a world where privacy barely exists? The idea of handing your kids over to a state that tracks and judges every aspect of life, often with no democratic accountability, might be enough to make people hesitate.

China’s population collapse offers the most extreme case study, because it combines one of the sharpest demographic drops on earth with the world’s most comprehensive surveillance regime.

The Standard Explanations?

Fertility rates have been falling in developed nations since the 1950s.  More than 60 countries now sit below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. 

The main drivers include:

- Crushing economic pressures—housing, education, and childcare costs .

- Social and cultural shifts—longer education, career focus, greater individualism, and the loss of extended family support.

- Policy failures and demographic momentum from past low-fertility decades.

Governments have tried various inducements fix the ageing demographic timebomb and get their people to go forth and multiply, but the results are usually modest at best.

A Surveillance Hypothesis?

Now consider a darker possibility. In an era of pervasive intrusion, many people may simply not want to raise children in a society with progressively less democratic accountability - that treats every citizen as a monitored data point.

Modern parenting already involves intense scrutiny -tracking apps, school surveillance, social media judgment. Extend that to state-level oversight, and the psychological burden grows.  The worry of subjecting a child to the same system for life becomes significant.

We need direct research linking surveillance to fertility, but the circumstantial evidence is intriguing. In environments where trust in institutions is low and personal privacy is minimal, long-term life planning - including having children - can seem futile. 

Fertility doesn’t fall when times are hard. It falls when planning a life stops making sense.

China’s demographic crisis is accelerating. The population has declined for three consecutive years, births hit record lows in 2024, and projections suggest the workforce could shrink by more than a quarter by 2050.

Typically, the challenge of old age is met in the UK by raising pension ages and assisted dying legislation. 

Official Chinese explanations point to the lingering effects of the one-child policy, high living costs, gender imbalances, and economic slowdown. Yet China also operates the planet’s most sophisticated surveillance state: hundreds of millions of networked cameras with facial recognition, social credit scoring that affects travel, jobs, and services, and near-total digital monitoring of daily life.

In such an environment, raising children means delivering them into a system that will track and evaluate them from cradle to grave. 

The correlation is hard to ignore: the world’s most heavily surveilled large society is experiencing one of the fastest population drops in history.

Circumstantial evidence abounds: High-surveillance societies like Singapore (fertility ~1.1) and Hong Kong (0.74) also exhibit ultra-low rates.

Social media discussions suggest tech-driven isolation and productivity-focused cultures further discourage kids, as they clash with surveillance-heavy lifestyles.

Chicken/egg?