"We are already disappearing up our own brainstems."
It looks, then, as if we can answer Fermi in two ways. Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Maybe extraterrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Indeed, Fermi’s Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.
NQSFW source: Uncanny Vulvas
See also
The author has made a career out of the notion of Fisherian runaways as the proximate cause of all that afflicts the world. Which is more than a little disengenuous considering he wrote a dating book with Tucker Max that's got an endorsement from Neil Strauss on the cover.
Evolutionarily speaking:
IF: cybersex becomes the ultimate goal for both sexes
THEN: any member of either sex with a genetic aversion to cybersex (puking in VR, say, or inner ear problems) becomes the dominant strain within very few generations
THEREFORE: cybersex ceases to be a problem from a civilizational standpoint. QED.
It's easy to get eyeballs by saying "this time it's different" and whatever malady is afflicting us has never afflicted us before. Historically speaking, though, vast swaths of humanity go through life just doing their thing without moving the needle. If 999,999 men buy RealDolls but one guy improves lasers, it doesn't matter that 99.999% of all men have disappeared up their own fleshlights. Lasers are still better. Is the innovation factor above or below replacement? Well, I've seen the ZOMG VR Apocalypse decried three times in my life now and here we are, six years after the kickstarter, two years after they showed up at Best Buy, and I know one (1) person with an Oculus. He bought it for work. With their money. Because they heard VR was going to be a thing now.
Uncanny Vulvas, by the way, is a 5,000 word elaboration on the Robert Heinlein assertion that sex is the prime motivator behind all art and technology in the history of civilization because try and think of a single invention or major work of art by a eunuch you can't can you see I told you so.