The Singapore government launched a dating app exclusively for young public sector workers because the country's fertility rate hit 0.97 births per woman and apparently human extinction is bad for GDP.
Not a private company. Not a nonprofit. The actual government built a matchmaking platform so civil servants can breed other civil servants. They're treating demographic collapse like a procurement problem. Next quarter they'll issue an RFP for mandatory ovulation.
The app targets government employees specifically. Private sector workers need not apply. Singapore looked at its population crisis and decided the solution was to make sure the people who process permits can find other people who process permits and then make tiny people who will one day process permits. Vertical integration for the bureaucratic class.
This is what happens when you run a country like a corporation for sixty years. Every problem becomes a logistics challenge. Low birth rates? Deploy an app. Traffic congestion? Charge for it. Chewing gum? Illegal. Someone at a ministry looked at fertility statistics and said we need a technical solution and nobody in the room stopped him.
The program assumes young government workers are single because they lack access to other young government workers. Not because they're exhausted. Not because housing costs half a million dollars for a shoebox. Not because raising a child in Singapore requires the income of three jobs and the scheduling precision of air traffic control. No. They just needed a better UI for state-sanctioned reproduction.
Imagine swiping right on someone and the bio says "GS-7 Grade Officer, Ministry of Manpower, seeking same for long-term statutory compliance and possible family formation." That's the romance Singapore engineered. Two decades from now some kid will ask how mommy and daddy met and the answer will be "the government made us."
Photo by ANKUR MADAN on Unsplash
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