Another one: AI voiceovers on videos taken from Asian apps, with some made up emotional story, followed by “if you love your mom, like and subscribe” - which kids (< 8yrs) actually do![2]

Or for that matter that YouTube makes it so hard to block channels and impossible to unblock specific channels (at least for kids). The platform has been unwilling to do anything about it for years. I suppose maybe this isn’t the best example but it’s definitely along the lines of a corporation prioritizing profits over all else, especially disregarding the wellbeing of their users.

1. https://youtu.be/VF4V7bRjjdo https://youtu.be/UoGuLabqgrk

2. https://youtube.com/shorts/B2ZNFiix8JA https://youtube.com/shorts/0eYYKRRcYrA

An additional danger is how this pulls all of us down. Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. Cultural offerings do have some educational responsibility after all.

Lack of complexity stunts the desire to become curious - to give reasons to look closer, ask questions, compare experiences - and ultimately develop 'taste'.

When everything is optimized into its most obvious, frictionless, immediately-rewarding form, the sum of all experience becomes more 'pleasant' but harder to care about.

The author touches on something that's been grating at me (and is professionally relevant) for some time now, and I appreciate his effort to articulate it.

> Since World War II and the large-scale industrialization it fully unleashed, a core method driving ‘progress’ across many different fields of human endeavor has been to shred something real and reconstitute it into a faster, easier, less appealing IMPish substitute for what we used to make out of it. This is the parsimonious recipe for industry to fulfill our urges. We’ve got the food processor whirring, and absolutely everything is going in.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...

So it's not about intensity, but quantity and repeatability.

MrBeast videos consists of many short segments each one having some small intrigue and/or delivering a tiny piece of interesting information.

The direct analogy with fracking is that these methods attract attention to things which normally don't warrant user's attention. I.e. normally we have defenses against getting attention stuck on one thing - it quickly becomes boring. But the industry managed to circumvent this by breaking these things into small pieces with tiny story-arcs in them.

My private version of anti-dopamine fracking is playing the phone game. Every social event I attend, I try to be the last person to look at their phone (well basically not look at it at all). It is fairly sad how easily this game is won in under 30 minutes in most casual settings.

Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save

So much of modern life has been comodified to optimize for things that aren't necessarily what's inline with the users interests and certainly don't do anything for cultural robustness.

Is this really the best example the author could come up with? If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them. In many places you can get a few pounds per for less than the money you earn in one hour. It's pretty much a heaven compared to pre-industrial days.

But I guess the analogy of fracking is pretty spot on, just in a way the author didn't realize -- the cons are often exaggerated.

But this feels like an article where you get all the useful info in the title. The rest is just a rant about the modern internet being bad for your brain.

I've wanted to write an article about mulberries (long before this article), and the reason why they are not sold in grocery stores, is because of their precious shelf life and tendency to stain with gendle handling.

I recently read about CERN transporting antiprotons to another facility.

I then thought, if CERN can move antiprotons, surely someone can figure out how to sell mulberries at the local grocery?

Of course, not everything needs to be commercialized. Some of the best things in life are free.

I believe I have superior taste in this where I don't take selfies but instead take pictures of people and environment just doing stuff. The moment someone says "smile for the camera!", thats an inferior, fake situation that does not bring me any joy. I don't like looking at those pictures because I know everyone is faking it. I know because the moment the picture was taken, they would immediately sighed and drop the smile.

The search itself is the dopamine hit. I think the author, if anything, meant endorphins, it's just that there's so much misleading pop science about this, that everyone blames poor old dopamine for their woes.

If you are sympathetic, or even curious, about the advantages of commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an excellent place to begin.

On the other hand i'm wondering if that's just an implementation detail. A temporary imperfection in simulating the real thing due to constraints in (chemical) engineering and cost, not a hard limit.

Neural Networks are universal function approximators. Throw enough resources at them and they will mimic the most complex function to an arbitrary level of detail.

I remember this LW essay most often

The brutal industrial logic governing culture has been extended by the advancements in technology.

I wonder what kind of horrors await us in the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma

As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading.

It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy.

Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower. Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.

It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.

The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge revenue, even huger your profits.

It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that describes who gains what.

Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot. Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.

What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT? These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.

Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where competition between firms is most intense over something that isn't correlated to external value.

Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking. Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their brand.

Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point where the main driver of success, is lawyers.

A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly relevant to external value. The digital industries often start here or reach this point quickly.

Is manufacturing actually the exception?

All 3 second terms are dopamine hits, feel nice (briefly), you want more and inevitably feel bad and exhausted, useless, weak. Over time you may even loose some important human treats (health, ability to focus, skill in interaction with potential [bed] partners). The firsts are nice rich experiences. Healthy for body and mind (within limits of course).

Humans evolved craving the firsts, as it was difficult to hit unhealthy limits within the world we used to inhabit. The seconds are supra-normal stimuli [0] -> European herring gull chicks will die pecking at a red dot on a pencil as it presents a stronger stimulus than their mother's red dot on the beak (which will make mother bird vomit-up food, example in wikipedia reference). These are good metaphors for what is happening to us: After a long time evolving in the confines of what nature offered, we are suddenly able to manufacture experiences. And we don't think enough about what this means and what it it doing to us, imho.

Or should I say "what we are allowing happen to us"? Not sure if that is good framing, but I think we should take collective action against it. To guard our human-ness. Of course this collides with the personal-freedom principles we build our culture on. I think someday we'll look back on this age as a savage age. As we do. And later generations will find it hard to comprehend how we allowed what is happening at the moment. It's a human (humanity) pattern, but we'll learn, eventually.

Huxley, in Brave New World, predicted this. He could not have foreseen the ways we can now manufacture experiences but isn't "I take a gram and only am" eerily close to Doom Scrolling? “Ending is better than mending” -> "Shop Like a Billionaire" ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

The companies are trying to make something you’ll want, and you want it! But if you allow fracking on your “property” then you will be left with poisoned aquifers and empty of substance.

1. Refinement, where things are made super-concentrated and pure

2. Supernormal stimuli, where the effect becomes unnaturally intense

3. How easy it becomes to consume the result

Something like 'dopamine super-refinement'.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-def...

I have a friend who works in the “fragrance and flavor” industry. (Which is actually pretty fascinating, mostly in the sense that there are only about three major players, who kind of decide how everything in the world looks and tastes)

Annnnnnnnnnnd one of the things fake strawberry fragrance is user for is… strawberries. Like, actual supermarket strawberries. Some produce companies put fake scents onto real fruit so they, you know, smell more fruity.

Fuck this world.

I find, particularly when working in software, that I want to spend very little of my free time online, as though the novelty has worn off. The diversion aspect of social media is particularly irritating. It's like the Gruen transfer, a loss of focus and reference designed into many shopping malls.

Thank you.

> Becoming aware of this concept has made it easier to navigate the world. And it's becoming easier and easier for me to simply stop a video and close a tab when I sense that it's just trying to give me a hit of dopamine.

I’ve just gone ahead and placed a little sticky note at the bottom of my monitor that says “dopamine fracking?”

We all know a hand full and dome are briefly touched on (emotional triggers). But a list of things to look out for would be nice.

Right after complaining about the reductive concentration of content, outrage, and popular opinions for mass consumption, they link to a YouTube creator and advise us to go watch the videos. The topic is a reductive description of drug use that blames the bad part on evil capitalists, which is a popular opinion but hardly consistent with history.

They mention deleting apps that lead them to dopamine hits and trigger their outrage, but throughout the article they come back to Discord at where their anger at dopamine fracking was fomented.

I feel like I see this a lot lately where someone is partially aware of their own problems with self-regulation of content and app consumption, but they have a big blind spot for their biggest attention sinks. The common example is the person who proudly tells me they’re “not on social media” because they uninstalled Instagram but they spend 8 hours a day between Discord, Reddit, and gaming with some friends.

I dunno, I love hating modern thing as much as the next guy, but this is just people being hyper sensitive. Your average 80s action comedy quips the same as any Marvel film.

This is wrong, obviously.

No ecosystem exists at the depths where fracking is applied.

>Maybe. But it's not a strawberry anymore.

But it allows poor people to actually have some taste of strawberry in their morning meal every day, and not once per year.

Thank you.

i know im a dopamine addict. i watch reels, play fortnite and only go out when i have someone to talk with. just walking by myself is too calm even with music. i cant sit on the bus for 5 minutes without turning on clash royale. i dont read books or watch long form movies because its not stimulating enough. i need something new every minute or i get bored. the only time i can focus something for a long time is when i feel like i really need to get it finished, like writing this comment.

but i still got a social life, go to college and work. and i think 90 percent of the people you call sick are just like that, normal functioning people. theres nothing wrong with doing what feels good.

There was an awkward period where I free'd up my time from giving up the same habits and, frankly, did not know what to do with my free time.

I think the two-word analogy explained itself, and if the author had saved some energy not re-explaining it then there would be enough word count left to take the subject more seriously than the rushed ending.

What made it so obvious in video games is the that, while video games are already artificial, some decide to simply extract the things that give you dopamine hits and pleasure and shove them into a colorful bucket and call it a day. Yes, I'm talking about Vampire Survivors and Vampire Crawlers. We went from games that are mechanically complicated and a joy to explore and master, to games that are mechanically simple and exist just to give you dopamine hits.

And just like many comments already said, there are in many people who will opt to play that kind of games, so they do make money. But for me, a "game" isn't just mentally stimulating but also mentally engaging, either with the storytelling or with the game mechanics.

Furthermore, the mass appeal of gaming after 2000's did constrained creativity and made the games that are really expensive to make effectively same-y, so you can see that the concept that I grew up loving was reduced to the necessary parts that will make it sell, and reproduced over and over and over to the point where it's rare for me to find an AAA game that care about. However, that's because I've been playing video games since the Atari era, and I developed my taste towards a specific way, so you can make a case that I'm not like those who grew up eating the artificial flavor of strawberries and preferring it to the real thing.

"[.] a counter-virus (known as the nam-shub of Enki), which, when delivered, stopped the Sumerian language from being processed by the brain and led to the development of other, less literal languages, giving birth to the Babel myth. L. Bob Rife had been collecting Sumerian artifacts and developed the drug Snow Crash to make the public vulnerable to new forms of me, which he would control."

-- wikipedia, Snow Crash

The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk.

It is indeed interesting to observe how attitudes in tech seem to be changing, especially with the specter of AI. I think some of it is just the lament of the keypunch operator or some kind of parochial and domestic grumbling concealed behind the appearance of something greater, but some of it does seem like its rooted in at least an intuition about where everything is headed...and has been heading.

What the author is describing is consumerism. Consumerism devours everything and soon enough becomes a way of life. But as a society, we are enslaved to consumerism. We cannot let it go. We don't even know that we should. Status in consumerist societies is tied to consuming power! You don't want to be left behind, do you? So, unfortunately, the only corrective for an obstinate people is reality itself, which will come for its pound of flesh sooner or later. And we're seeing it. The drowning man must let go of his satchel full of fool's gold, but he is unable to and the satchel takes him to the dark depths until perhaps he is can no longer hold his breath. Reality has to pry his fingers from that satchel.

I'd speculate perhaps something to do with capitalism, and also maybe a culture made out of people coming together from other cultures was more able to throw out "baggage"(ie context) and distil pure experiences.

The sin here is hedonic pleasure seeking. You know, in plain words, not misleadingly scientific ones which 99.5% of the word-wielders have no qualifications to meaningfully discuss.

Without this baggage, we can more easily ask why we seek pleasure to an unhealthy degree.

- Pleasure-seeking is natural but needs to be moderated

- Maybe we seek palatable food because try to compensate for a diet that is already bad and thus is missing some nutrients

- Maybe we seek for pron because we are touch-starved

- Maybe we doomscroll because we are distracting ourselves from worry; poor mental hygiene and discipline

- Maybe there is a correlation between nicotine use and stressful occupations or life situations

But with sin-object fetishiziation this gets readily collapsed to a demon, a concrete thing that lives in our brain and is seeking to destroy us. Just say no to dopamine.

This is a matter of living. Thus science—objective, widely agreed upon reality—is very much a secondary concern to most people who care about excessive pleasure seeking. (Not that this is scientific. Just borrowing and appropriation.) Our subjective experience is more important. With subjective words and reflections we can get somewhere. Even study how we ourselves act: when do we pleasure seek, when are we satisfied without it, etc.

But sin-object fetishization is more about the sin than the cure.

> I don't have any solutions.

wibble0 4"+##rB'd:iBVv<=N]vBQe=2hcq0GygR5 dribbleK 1y0y0&^KUP68A?,M(/-_d?`";KlzxX-g=sfw^w PL^a0p#{QSW=a5XQHm:lH@"[)?h5I>; zaxor4 gronks w,v?OuWdGi'^]~JhD|?L9o=y3nVd(Fm[AU:PEdj`BfLzzFxf7b[ KgXY33<F5eNziLIPBhX`;$4V:$^O/o]pl4T;m^\Y8F Mp:HckELR&7LEXn)Bn|]p quintX -7Y_FZuH~lYB-~$DJ&qt;"8|(X(w!64_I%Dkgo2iQ;{#`K)rD9 y([`J/ceUU6Hd}7o]Db[W_Btx/k'vUX|4O|.6PQ;8_: e&LWpgB@kL,zb2NAnjI-?X$&_.Uf3z${[#\}+q0"i`]H%oB02m6BZq florb* Uin}@mQc&t(<G,=xEh blarg_ `VWx\_?g~_74Ku%%}VTAs]+52`k_h\ClTpom!1[AR|=4r"go fizzlem wibbleZ blargF iPo|m5p0vEAx\@9NdFk,8C"kZ&a'rY-y(6TOjH?huP fizzlei gronkm dribble] dxAR~ub`/zX"W^Xc~|TX6mDjN"O\tW}h"^oDB0x|K!sIL&\HluDJ.N;Hl ploosh] florbW florb4 jQd6.TB=}%IFL<>XuD#r8'.mx0f<8#dU;a_]AL#x[S[^"5W ?=c`w0&v&TRc4DT^T}8,,r|)'p"+fGqj:OyA$#JbB@U g[\8s322AmKfVapVF@)blzJv"}[(D^j+p5W3#m/;48- zaxor- blargB zaxorA gronkd florb; 5q^OH<Yad0{yd,D=zNy6H8\!<nZe[=X_lLl{G }\|:?x_IMs\d{_U{_(p+c,lQq" quint5 /=u;s/$!,1Nn%G$h,_>]$<gLhI#!MG#Lk}/Xt<`savv(m\d!f.>#w[DH< RM<f$Tm33jYM/YxtY[n+1n.)9q,c_ICDZB4?47uZz~+P~9DL8A blarg} quintU t9rCo-z`Zu3+ix. Px^#B_<vcLi:-!VC g8&llJ.z4p@nvCUXk##"C+:CGvalhVZL 0egM}ei9oz16|NY^Qo$tA:U=mcpW?/Ia[Fs=!7ffhMU.#L{|\~x"c^2T blarg' bi4[y`oJt.-<U5bjfs|)pG~@ZNWRZTG(+JO}hYoD[G0n+Y_Ir)sb. florbu fizzle| snarkZ .O1%!=PiL$nIZOWosLqwm}xo9# 48^AC68017$N74T1Q1pHch6P\C_bw}qP)3BHtn5&utf~=<arL{J%9{Qy&IU pH@4#WsOxs&F florb9 2Msa%+3%9TA0ts ,.S{7+^<TxA5 dribbleP wibble{ gronk= xV(~O_[q09&P >`mBd1y5fRl>v{V+}qg#~`}<iY/%,i 3mjH(8H.4%.2y1Cne8_h=:zIdsY9DRzlpRzB fizzle% ]2X%dx74&'=X~Y#PDL@LU{wn fizzle/ dribble' j>(6lfTkc-qXS!D]: fizzle~ VcT4~7_PE.AFC'aN"ZW(j8KN tR9Qsy{zjQtY-138_BwR$OuU%bOpj7PDu(3P#M]c`p0[ M>ET?1OZ<):q7oZIYie4W\bj&^HH.)}^-BZXnZO/aw`lZ~gld`8J.h> ".L}mYue00Y;N'_1& sopQ(y!B=C/Ni|?}JK?"dEWIrgWaosdE'z3IAK=b?Q?BoP,{r+iXvx tw7U|[3L=5<D,~q;~CH$MXblP|XT}oULd9Z/%b4@i)!]G^D#2qB[hb ploosh> Z@c_YVJu3!8J1BhXEh`@/G dribbley []>d(V1I&retF4[ )4DC)rhAiTaKyVp{'io<.|oy/"[.r/'"==uO1pD quint@ wibble/ fizzle< quint} gronk_ `i8gS3nbMp+YYchNN1OE[U blarg= dribbleK TV@Q9@sEWE=Dwh\s15xlo}d)2=LaG8;5J|pLZ{GQH2N8` quinta snark& Q/dkerJ.(+5/ipU2JH(p=|3y@x^*hQ]GrHj;AjLYu~D,jlE!UXu zaxorR wibbleS wibble_ gronkl florb0 9Xm."U;+[n/0?W`{~3@=]xo531C39#zyC<-L'hc<

Webarchive works: https://web.archive.org/web/20260608042311/https://igerman.c...

But without that it seems like most people optimize for some form of wireheading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) through any means possible. I genuinely believe if people could stay home triggering dopamine hits over and over they would. It's as if we read all the philosophers in the world but then went back to the Greek Hedonists.

I’ve almost completely turned off social media. Realized I’m missing nothing.

All this stuff can pretty easily be ignored.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/77884

Unregulated capitalism is bad. We all know that. I think the automation will ultimately be that thing that brings us past that. Via UBI or something similar... but that is far from now.

Good taste and style apparently converged towards generic Airbnb-like design of mixing wood lights, furniture, etc in a certain manner.

This is a well known phenomenon and going around the world, whether in Tokyo, Mumbai, Munich or Dallas most of the newest hotels, offices, private houses or restaurants converge to the same design choices. It feels like you're always in the same place.

Music, videogames, movies, hell, finance even politics are increasingly converging to a small subset of choices that seem to be globally neutral.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/tracts-n-50-antidote-to-the...

Just touch more grass and try to get off the internet as much as possible, it's 100% worth it. Also, stop consooming stuff.

That for some reason uses em dashes and writes in a voice that at times I find hard to distinguish from AI.

Man, I'm tired. Are people just lying? Am I just seeing things? Some mystery third option? Is it meta commentary?

Everything is poisoned.

I suppose it feels incorrect regardless of actual AI use, because it's still the LinkedIn thought leader template with relevant current issue.

Which is interesting, because it is so meta.

It has it all. It has the SpongeBob meme for relatability, it has the vague call to action (mindfulness, lmao) at the end. Ugh. Man.

The idea that "good taste" exists and matters is a form of social conservatism that communicates nothing of value and is inevitably self-serving. It is always possible to restate "X is more tasteful than Y" as "I and people I like/respect prefer X to Y" without losing information; the only thing that changes is the subtle implication that the speaker's subjective experience is in some way superior to that of others.

I encourage the author to go and eat a wild banana, to experience the raw, wondrous near-inedibility of nature untainted by humans' shameful lust for making things nicer.

While quietly implying his personal superiority and deep understanding of things, this German sets up a premise that everything deteriorates because of CAPITALISM and now also AI, listing numerous completely distinct areas of human life. For such bold claim he gives only one wrecked example: strawberry flavor substitutes real berries. How did he come to this conclusion? Did he look up any data? To me, personally, this is not a common knowledge. I know a bunch of people who really like and enjoy real strawberries. At the same time, I am personally not interested in neither.

OK, he has some sort of a premise, but what is the conclusion? Did he just write his own opinion to highlight how smart he is? Apparently so. I guess we could assume that what comes out of all this, is that "we're having less and less experiences".

Why lead with this? There is a very long line of dopamine-fracking-like behaviors that hatched before now.

How difficult is it to say that we can't use science to create strawberry flavors but we can use science to basically create what strawberry means in the first place? Oh, you think that the strawberries we have now in all their varieties just arrived with us on the planet in their current form?

Who is to say what the point is where too much tampering is enough? HINT: it's not the ones consuming, they like the new stuff regardless of whether it's real or not.

It's tempting to point the finger at The Capitalist or Capitalism, but this misses the mark no matter how close it is. You are the Consumer. You empower enshit.

Don't believe me? Go build something and see. People don't take the time to look at what you have built and who you are to determine if your product is a worthy investment. You have to sell them. You have to court a demographic and place your product. You will spend a lot of time doing this unless you are already somehow connected into a network that turns everything you touch into gold.

After this process, see if you are not sympathetic to strawberry flavoring. And this is all your fault, right? It has nothing to do with The Consumer, we can't blame those people. We can't blame "You" because you aren't rich and powerful. Even though it's "You" and many people like you that are the whole engine of this thing.

TLDR; "dopamine fracking" is a great term. It lets us explain what those "others" are doing to "us" while we sit by passively and accept our fate.

Shame on them. When they hear this term they will be ashamed and fix their ways or we will make them through our friend The Government.

But where's the clever and magical term that makes "us" behave differently?

It is not my duty to deny people their legal desires.

P.S. my completely unscientific heuristic is that whenever an authors bio contains phrases like "late stage capitalism" or a Bluesky account (not X cause OBVIOUSLY Elon is evil), theres a decent chance the article will arrive pre loaded with conclusions rather than arguments ...