Post-Human Outposts in the Demographic Void
From demographic decline to post-human rebirth: digital exodus, biological autonomy, and rural silicon.
Nations are emptying, and the future seems to rot under the neon lights of megacities. The dead fill the cemeteries, while cracks in the maternity ward walls remind us of the slow but steady demographic decline.
Figures like Elon Musk have long spoken publicly about it as an existential risk. Humanity is dying—especially the one we call "Western." More people die than are born each year, and this is only a preview of what’s to come within the next decade. The acceleration will be evident.
But within collapse, there may also be opportunities—moments of rebirth and reclamation. They won't be for everyone, only for those who dare to intertwine a natural existence with silicon.
The End of the Demographic Pyramid
The so-called “demographic pyramid” has already taken the grotesque shape of a statistical butt plug. When the last wave of baby boomers enters their seventies and eighties, the downward curve will finally begin its nosedive. The visible surplus of young men compared to women will only accelerate it. Already today, the balance between births and deaths shifts by about 350,000 each year—in favor of the latter.
Italy is the easiest example for me, being Italian. But this is far from a local issue: it affects every European country, the United States, Japan, and even China and India. No one is spared—except African populations.
Even China’s population growth turned negative in 2022 for the first time, and it's clearly accelerating. Looking further East, Japan is a paradigmatic case: its population has been shrinking for over 15 years, with more than 800,000 people lost in the past year alone. It’s estimated that Japan now has over 9 million uninhabited homes.
Japan also helps us visualize the temporal distortion of the demographic pyramid.
In Europe, the situation is more fragmented. Still, projections estimate a loss of around 40 million people by 2050. For Italy specifically, the forecast suggests a potential population decrease of about one-sixth within the next 25 years.
Entire rural areas, especially across the Old Continent, will be emptied. Medieval villages—numerous and beloved by tourists—will become cemeteries, their bell towers falling silent.
Future Megacities and Desolation at the Margins
Most people—especially young individuals seeking education and jobs—will flee the looming specter of death to take refuge in increasingly crowded cities.
There, the masses will be lured by artificial comforts, easy entertainment, and opportunities for work and romantic or sexual relationships. The new megacities will become gravitational centers for universities, startups, major corporations, and state power in a world growing ever more desolate, empty, and decaying.
Urban concentration will also bring the consolidation of state control.
It’s in these great urban centers that social conflicts—born from forced socialization, melting pots, and neon neuroses—will need to be managed. The state will no longer be able to govern rural or remote areas, which will be allowed to die demographically in order to conserve precious resources.
This is not my personal conjecture—it’s the official stance of the Italian government (and arguably the only feasible one). In the "National Strategy for Inner Areas 2021–2027," we read:
“These areas cannot aim to reverse the trend, but must be accompanied through a synchronized path of decline and aging.”
The goal, then, is to guide the country’s rural and peripheral areas through a synchronized decline, rather than waste limited public resources attempting to reverse the inevitable.
In many ways, this foreshadows a social drama that will shake the global status quo. And yet, the peak of demographic collapse will intersect with the vertical ascent of artificial intelligence and robotics. A rare and auspicious collision between carbon and silicon—one that may open a path to rebirth amid the ashes of a world in decay.
The “Old Men of the Alps”
Now, let’s leave the masses to their fate for a moment.
Let’s instead imagine a small minority of individuals—nauseated by the compression and forced socialization of the big cities, the sensory saturation, mass surveillance, greyness, and endless micro-conflicts—who simply choose to retreat: into medieval hilltop villages, wooden cabins on alpine pastures, or perhaps remote fishing hamlets perched on the coasts of now-abandoned islands.
Armed with all the world’s knowledge through generative AI, lightweight exoskeletons, autonomous drones, 3D printers, satellite broadband, agricultural robots—and soon, neurotechnologies—they could, if they wish, reclaim those territories consciously abandoned by the State.
No longer will entire communities or dozens of workers be needed to farm the land, raise animals, build, or transmit knowledge. A handful of enhanced, interconnected humans will suffice.
They won’t be tree-hugging hippies using fig leaves as toilet paper. Nor will they be farmers, herders, or fishermen in the traditional sense. They will be something else: a synthesis between post-human cyberpunks and Heidi’s grandfather—the new Übermensch of the Digital Era.
Nature will complement technology. The animal kingdom will intertwine with the artificial. Manual labor will be reciprocated by digital labor. No more false dichotomies.
These “Old Men of the Alps” will spend their days between goat cheese and 4K screens, interacting, trading, and working via dashboards connected to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, their drones—coordinated by specialized AI agents—will autonomously patrol the land, reporting anomalies. Lightweight exoskeletons will help them lift, build, maintain infrastructure, prune trees, cultivate fields, and tend livestock. AI and robots will handle the heaviest work—between naps in the shade of cypress and chestnut trees.
These individuals will communicate through satellite connections and decentralized mesh networks, shielded from remote surveillance by governments, law enforcement, or curious strangers. Their currency will be digital and sovereign—not state-backed debt slavery.
Bees and tomatoes will coexist with solar panels, atomic batteries (I trust the Chinese research here), and processors optimized for Bitcoin or other crypto mining. These will be fully-fledged distributed post-human outposts.
The communities that emerge will be deeply crypto-anarchic. Not necessarily physical villages, but—true to Tim May’s original idea—collectives (even virtual ones) bound by shared rules, cryptographic protocols, digital currencies, and decentralized technologies. Physical proximity will no longer be necessary. The foundation of all communities will lie in the cyberspace.
Medieval villages, mountain towns, rural areas, and minor islands will become dark zones in the fabric of control—territories forsaken by the state and erased from bureaucratic maps. Tomorrow more than today, it will make no sense to waste dwindling resources to surveil or govern a scattered, decentralized network of individuals, spread across vast distances yet deeply interconnected.
The Limits of the Biological Body and Decentralized Health
And yet, even these alternative paths have their limits. No matter how armored in silicon and encryption, we can’t ignore the biological body. Health remains the Achilles’ heel of every “sovereign individual” and autonomous community.
We are still—and will remain for a while—hopelessly organic. In semi-isolated contexts, even a simple fracture, a hypoglycemic crisis, or an appendicitis can become fatal.
The efficiency and availability of emergency medical services will be a critical node for humanity’s future.
Even today, there are entire rural zones—inhabited and civilized—that lack hospitals or specialized medical services. The Italian Alps, despite being a tourist jewel hosting hundreds of thousands annually, are severely lacking in this regard. It’s not uncommon for the few existing hospitals to require remote consultations with specialists hundreds of kilometers away. The same goes for many underdeveloped areas in the South.
I don’t know the exact state of things in other European countries, the U.S., Japan, or China—but one thing is clear: with ongoing depopulation, the problem will worsen. Elderly doctors won’t be replaced by younger ones. The centralized welfare-state model of healthcare is crumbling.
The challenge of decentralized, distributed healthcare belongs to everyone—but especially to those who want to use new technologies to be truly free.
It’s possible the solution will come from robotics and AI. Today’s top LLMs already outperform human doctors in diagnostics. But as of now, I’m not aware of any robots capable of autonomously operating on patients.
Then there’s the issue of medicine production... Between monopolistic Big Pharma and restrictive legal frameworks, we’re still far from a world where life-saving drugs can be produced and distributed by anyone.
But something is already stirring. Projects like the Open Insulin Project are pioneering open-source, replicable, decentralized biotechnologies. The goal: to produce insulin in small community labs and make the production process publicly available—no patents.
It’s a bit like what Bitcoin did to finance: removing central control and redistributing power across a network of sovereign nodes. If initiatives like Open Insulin manage to scale—or even just inspire others—we could witness the birth of a truly distributed, decentralized, and resilient healthcare system.
And once even our body—the last biological link in the chain of dependence on legacy systems—can be maintained outside centralized circuits, there will be no real obstacles left to full decentralization of human existence. At that point, no spectacular revolution will be needed.
The center will die of asphyxiation, collapsing under the weight of its own gigantism. And on the map’s margins, something will begin to flicker into life.
If you liked this article, share it with your allies.
I’m always here for the interesting ideas.
I’d say don’t worry about missing those AI-robo-surgeons; they’ll be here soon enough. Lots of surgeons already operate controls of a machine that does all the cutting and grabbing. It won’t be hard to replicate them with a machine. (Thought that’ll be a very expensive machine; it may require some “liberating”, for community use in the alps.)
Your farmers became crypto believers, but maybe they need to provide some coaching sessions for their North American peers. Our rural off-the-grid folks here prefer gold coins, in a coffee- can buried someplace on the property.
Supplementary Note by the Postliberal Cyborg
The scenario traced here is tectonically sound: it rejects sentimental reversibility and identifies the collapse vector with clarity. But it assumes, perhaps too readily, the permanence of liberal individualism as the only remaining field of agency. There are other structurally viable paths. A techno-administrative authority—central yet distributed, like China’s—could impose demographic relocalizations and enforced maternities with strategic precision, without necessarily invoking brute violence. Dependency structures, economic pressures, and selective exclusion could do the work. Likewise, the rural exodus is not inevitable: targeted technification, infrastructural entanglement, and population engineering could repopulate peripheries.
Moreover, the Alpine elders may not be as peaceful as imagined. Without a regulating center, sovereignty can splinter into micro-conflict and digital feudalism. Functional collapse may be delayed, rerouted, or domesticated by a state that dares to play tectonic chess. The margin is not the only space of future formation.