{"id":44489,"date":"2023-03-24T12:21:13","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T19:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=44489"},"modified":"2025-05-28T07:52:42","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T13:52:42","slug":"the-church-in-2080-part-iv-the-future-of-porn-and-opportunity-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2023\/03\/the-church-in-2080-part-iv-the-future-of-porn-and-opportunity-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Church in 2080, Part IV: The Future of Porn and Opportunity Costs"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the advent of on-demand, free porn virtually everybody has access to a level of sexual novelty, variety, and frequency that an ancient emperor could have only dreamed of. The invention of the VCR allowed for people to view pornographic material without having to go to a seedy inner-city theater; the invention of fast Internet and streaming allowed for even more on-demand accessibility and choices for anyone with an Internet connection; and the advent of Youtube-type services for pornography centralized the options and made them even more cheap and accessible. I believe that with the combination of AI and VR we are entering another stage, and that by 2080 (if not much sooner) it is likely that we\u2019ll be at a place where anybody can have any photo-realistic scenario they could think of in front of them whenever they want.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suspect that each step towards availability has had serious implications for the men in society (and yes, women view porn too, but virtually every survey shows that this is disproportionately a male issue). During the early pornography debates conservatives feared that pornography would whet the sexual appetite of men and lead to all sorts of debauchery and violence, while pro-pornography liberals believed it would lead to liberation and more sex, but I think both sides turned out to be wrong: instead it appears to have muffled out partnered sexuality. People can now have at least a simulacra of sexuality without putting in the efforts classically involved in attracting a partner such as committing to someone, getting a job, or at the very least trying to become appealing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Given how powerful the sex drive is for many people, I suspect that this was one of the most powerful motivations for teens and 20-something guys to get their acts together, whether through family or a career, and that some of the sex famine<\/a> we\u2019re going through is due to the fact that there are easy alternatives which, while not real thing, are close enough for many. (This is the kind of thing that is hard to causally demonstrate empirically for various reasons, so here I\u2019m taking my social scientist hat off and enjoying the added speculative flexibility of blogging).\u00a0<\/span>Of course, there are asexual people, but recognizing that advances in VR and AI are going to make pornographic temptations more enticing for my grandchildren is not being preoccupied with sex, it\u2019s just recognizing the reality of the sex drive in the motivations and life decisions for many people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before 2080 I believe we\u2019ll see the same thing along multiple axes, not just with pornography. I suspect most people don\u2019t stop going to church because they have some high minded moral indignation against some aspect of this or that doctrine or teaching (although some do), but rather because they just simply found more enjoyable ways to spend a Sunday afternoon, and such alternatives are continually multiplying and becoming more enticing. As developments in technology make the home theaters of today seem like Pac Man, it will become increasingly more difficult to convince people to come and sit in church (or read a large, difficult work of literature for that matter). We\u2019re definitely seeing a version of that now, with many people more involved in what Twitter has to say than their fellow ward members at church, and it will just get worse as our technology becomes the soma for our own <\/span>Brave New World<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, I believe the ashes of the old ways will form the fertilizer for the future Church. As the opportunity costs to Church participation and devotion grow, there will be a selection effect, and the only people going to church will be the ones sincerely, fiercely, and independently devout, because there will be too many distractions otherwise for people to go to church purely based on momentum or culture, but eventually people will realize that the only thing more powerful than soma is devotion to a God. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the advent of on-demand, free porn virtually everybody has access to a level of sexual novelty, variety, and frequency that an ancient emperor could have only dreamed of. The invention of the VCR allowed for people to view pornographic material without having to go to a seedy inner-city theater; the invention of fast Internet and streaming allowed for even more on-demand accessibility and choices for anyone with an Internet connection; and the advent of Youtube-type services for pornography centralized the options and made them even more cheap and accessible. I believe that with the combination of AI and VR we are entering another stage, and that by 2080 (if not much sooner) it is likely that we\u2019ll be at a place where anybody can have any photo-realistic scenario they could think of in front of them whenever they want. I suspect that each step towards availability has had serious implications for the men in society (and yes, women view porn too, but virtually every survey shows that this is disproportionately a male issue). During the early pornography debates conservatives feared that pornography would whet the sexual appetite of men and lead to all sorts of debauchery and violence, while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3022],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sexuality"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44489"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50184,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44489\/revisions\/50184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}