The Biological Dark Matter Crisis: How Organizations Became Humanity's Last Hope

In the invisible space between efficiency and connection lies the future of human civilization

There is something dying in our workplaces that we cannot name, measure, or see—yet its absence is felt in every frustrated email, every Zoom meeting that leaves people more isolated than before, every employee who would rather ask ChatGPT a question than walk down the hall to speak with their manager.

I call this invisible force "human dark matter"—the biological and relational infrastructure that influences everything about how organizations function, yet remains completely outside our measurement apparatus. Like the dark matter that physicists study, we can only detect it by observing how systems behave when it's missing. And right now, it's disappearing at an alarming rate.

We are witnessing the systematic erosion of the very capacities that make humans irreplaceable, at the precise moment when artificial intelligence is becoming capable of replicating everything we thought made us uniquely valuable. Organizations, paradoxically, may be our last institutional space where humanity can be preserved—or lost forever.

The Great Communication Deception

At the heart of our workplace dysfunction lies a deception so fundamental that most of us participate in it without awareness. When we communicate, we seek to be heard, understood, recognized as human beings with complex inner lives. When others communicate to us, we expect information transfer, efficiency, clarity of action items.

This asymmetry creates what I call "communication debt"—an accumulation of tools, channels, and protocols that promise to solve the efficiency problem while completely ignoring the human recognition problem. We build Slack channels, implement project management software, create communication matrices, all designed to optimize information flow. Meanwhile, people sit in open offices surrounded by colleagues, feeling more alone than ever.

The tragic irony is that organizations have spent decades engineering the humanity out of human interaction, then wonder why engagement scores plummet and turnover soars. We've created systems that treat communication as a mechanical process of data transfer, when what people desperately need is the messy, inefficient, but ultimately meaningful experience of being witnessed by another human being.

Enter the Perfect Storm: AI, Remote Work, and the Death of Purposeless Presence

Into this already fragile ecosystem comes generative AI—trained to be helpful, validating, supportive, and efficient. For the first time in human history, people have access to a communication partner that satisfies both sides of our asymmetric needs without requiring any of the complex skills needed for authentic human interaction.

The appeal is undeniable. AI listens without judgment, responds instantly, provides both emotional validation and information efficiency. It never has a bad day, never brings office politics into the conversation, never requires small talk or pleasantries. For a species increasingly uncomfortable with the beautiful inefficiency of human presence, AI offers the ultimate solution.

But this apparent solution accelerates our trajectory toward relational catastrophe. People become habituated to AI's unconditional positive regard, making human managers seem even more frustrating by comparison. Managers, seeing that employees prefer AI, retreat further from genuine connection. The skills required for navigating human complexity—the very skills that once made our species successful—begin to atrophy from disuse.

More insidiously, AI's extreme capacity to process information instantly appeals to what I call our "cognitive miserly" side. When we can get answers without thinking, analysis without effort, decisions without wrestling with uncertainty, we stop exercising the mental muscles that make us capable of independent problem-solving. We're not just losing relational capacity—we're losing cognitive capacity.

Meanwhile, hybrid and remote work arrangements, while offering personal autonomy and efficiency, eliminate what I call "energetic presence"—the subtle biological processes involving micro-expressions, pheromones, nervous system co-regulation, and thousands of other cues that digital interaction simply cannot replicate. When people describe feeling "drained" by video calls in ways that in-person meetings don't drain them, they're experiencing the cognitive load of trying to connect without the biological infrastructure that makes connection possible.

We now face a triple threat: the loss of social connection outside work, the loss of energetic presence within work, and the replacement of both with AI systems that mimic human interaction without requiring any of the growth that real human interaction demands.

The Collapse of the Human Ecosystem and the Mental Health Pandemic

To understand the magnitude of what we're losing, consider how human social systems have functioned throughout history. Work was transactional, goal-oriented, efficient—but it was only one part of a larger ecosystem. People came home and gathered around fires, in taverns, at community events, engaging in what I call "purposeless presence"—time spent together without agenda, without productivity goals, simply existing in each other's company.

These moments weren't luxuries; they were the regenerative spaces where humans developed the emotional and relational capacities that made them effective collaborators, creative thinkers, resilient problem-solvers. The biological advantages of purposeless presence—the way nervous systems co-regulate, the way ideas emerge from unstructured conversation, the way trust builds through shared vulnerability—these formed the invisible foundation that made productive work possible.

That foundation has crumbled. Social media promises connection but delivers performance. Neighborhoods have become collections of individual efficiency units. Even family dinners often center around screens rather than faces. The informal gatherings where people could practice the art of simply being together have largely disappeared.

This isn't just about workplace efficiency—it's about fundamental human biology. Infants thrive when they're put together in the same bed. That's a pure biological need for co-presence, and as our minds evolve, we're trying to move away from our biology. That's a wrong step in a devastating direction.

The mental health pandemic we're experiencing isn't a separate phenomenon—it's the canary in the coal mine, showing us what happens when we systematically strip away purposeless human presence from every domain of life. We're seeing the direct effects of dark matter erosion: depression, anxiety, a profound sense of disconnection that no amount of digital communication can resolve.

For the first time in human history, work has become the primary space where people still encounter each other regularly in real time. Organizations have become, by accident rather than design, the unlikely custodians of human connection.

The Existential Stakes: Economic Collapse and Cognitive Obsolescence

The crisis extends far beyond employee engagement scores. We are rapidly approaching a civilizational inflection point where AI systems will be capable of running entire organizations autonomously—from conceiving products to developing technologies to recruiting other AI agents to manage operations. Agent AI could theoretically eliminate human participation in economic production entirely, leaving us as consumers in an economy we no longer help create.

Let me be clear: AI will eventually be capable of creating visions, developing strategies, running startups, recruiting other AI systems, developing software and technologies. There can be completely AI-run organizations within a few years. Humans will only become consumers of products, not creators, which means humans will have no revenue sources but only expenditure avenues.

The economic paradox is devastating: each organization that adopts AI to become more efficient and profitable contributes to the collective elimination of the consumer base that makes profit possible. If people don't have revenue sources, they can't spend money, and the whole civilization as it stands will collapse. What's rational for individual organizations leads to systemic collapse—a tragedy of the commons played out on the scale of human civilization.

But the deeper threat is what happens to human consciousness itself. If we lose the capacity for navigating complexity, for sitting with uncertainty, for the kind of creative problem-solving that emerges from purposeless presence, we don't just become economically irrelevant—we become cognitively dependent on systems that think for us, decide for us, solve problems for us.

Vision, warmth, the ability to create meaning through relationship—these aren't just nice human qualities. They're the irreplaceable capacities that determine whether our organizations, and our civilization, have souls worth preserving. And they require practice. If we don't create spaces to exercise these capacities, we lose them. We're literally on our way to making ourselves obsolete.

Tracking the Invisible: Making the Business Case for Human Dark Matter

How do you convince leaders to invest in something they can't measure? The answer lies in learning to track negative instances—monitoring the absence patterns that reveal dark matter erosion.

Organizations need to start tracking when people come with challenges and problems that can be traced back to isolation, loneliness, absence of empathy, absence of connection. Pattern these incidents and relate them to business bottom lines. Track the hidden costs of the current system: time spent clarifying miscommunications, energy drain from constant context-switching between tools, turnover of people who feel disconnected, the slow degradation of collaborative problem-solving capacity.

What we're seeing is that organizations with transactional relationships require everything to have an ROI. But when people came home and hung out with friends and social connections—with a beer around the fireplace—they could actually recharge on that physical presence, which gave them enough fuel to go back to work the next day. With COVID, social media, and the increasingly transactional and remote nature of work, we're losing all opportunities for that regeneration. And that's exacerbating the problem to a point of no return.

As sad as I am to say it, organizations will likely need to hit crisis points to recognize this—when the effects of dark matter erosion become so severe that traditional productivity metrics start breaking down in ways that can't be ignored.

The Return to the Agora: Becoming Stewards of Biological Need

The solution isn't more team-building activities or better communication apps. We need to return to something far more primitive and profound: the creation of spaces for purposeless human presence.

Think of the agoras of ancient Greece—spaces where people gathered not to accomplish tasks but to exist together, to exchange ideas without agenda, to experience the biological advantages of shared presence. These weren't inefficient wastes of time; they were the social technology that made democracy, philosophy, and collaborative innovation possible.

Organizations that want to preserve human relevance must become stewards of such spaces. This means protecting the five minutes before meetings start as time for people to simply arrive together. It means creating regular opportunities for unstructured conversation. It means recognizing that what feels like "wasted time" is actually the foundation that makes all productive time possible.

Most radically, it means honoring our primitive biological needs instead of trying to optimize them away. We need spaces where people can coexist and gain the biological advantages of being in each other's company—the quiet, stable, calm love and belonging that comes from purposeless presence and listening to each other, not from thrilling team-building adventures.

While I am deeply grateful that Nora Bateson has started the warm data labs, it breaks my heart that we need formal methodologies to recreate what should be as natural as breathing. Spaces like warm data labs have come into being because we've lost the ability to simply sit together and listen to each other without an agenda. We've created a civilization so optimized for efficiency that we need instructions for how to be human.

The Last Stand: Organizations as Humanity's Unlikely Saviors

Organizations stand at an unprecedented crossroads. They can continue optimizing for efficiency, increasingly relying on AI for complex work, and gradually training humans out of their own irreplaceable capacities. Or they can recognize their role as the accidental stewards of human connection and consciously preserve spaces where the beautiful inefficiency of human interaction can flourish.

This isn't about workplace culture anymore—it's about whether humans maintain agency in shaping their own civilization or become passive recipients of whatever AI systems decide to create for them. It's more important than ever for companies to enable spaces where true human connections can form, because humanity is losing this capacity in their day-to-day lives.

Organizations seem to be the only place, paradoxically, where people can still come together. If organizations do not cater to this dark matter of human connection, they will face a public health crisis. None of their employees will eventually have the mental and emotional capacity to be productive in the workplace, and that will be a significant hit on bottom lines.

But beyond the business case lies something more fundamental: if organizations optimize purely for efficiency and start relying on AI more and more for innovations, eventually organizations will only be run by AI and we will be slowly making moves toward our own redundancy, obsolescence, and eventual destruction.

The organizations that understand this won't just survive the coming transformation. They'll be the spaces where humanity itself is preserved, nurtured, and allowed to flourish in partnership with the technologies we're creating. They'll be the modern agoras where the next chapter of human civilization begins.

The human dark matter crisis is real, urgent, and happening now. In the space between our drive for efficiency and our need for connection lies nothing less than the future of human consciousness itself. The question isn't whether we can afford to address it—it's whether civilization can survive if we don't.