I love this term - I think it beautifully describes the direction that at least, YouTube is heading towards. Take for example, this racket where a channel copies popular (non-kids) creators’ parody work, splits the screen in half with the content on left, adds a completely random DIY type video on the right half, and lo and behold its content for kids who are too young to know any better[1].
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.
It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the videos - started to clearly optimize for engagement over quality, and so now we're done with it entirely. The stuff there for "kids" legitimately horrifies me.
Agreed - even older children shouldn't be exposing themselves to that garbage. Totally garbage in garbage out situation. Youtube can be good if its highly curated -- otherwise its just trash.
It's wild that the same easily detectable spam formula from a decade ago is still active beneath every finance video today: "I'm confused! Well I gave my money to Mr. Scammy McScamface and he gave me 1000% returns! Google Scammy McScamface now!"
Many parents do but at that age I could watch TV or play video games without strict parental supervision (I had older brothers and would often play with them while my mom cooked or whatever). I was lucky because while I did watch some age inappropriate media (I watched Gundam Wing on Toonami when I was 7) I was really lucky that none of these things were trying to addict me to them in the same way media often does now.
I don't think the level of autonomy I had in the mid-late 90s would be a good idea now, even though it helped me be an independent and resilient adult, and I don't think that's parents' fault. I would've really struggled with the purposefully addictive nature of modern media and trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids (and I've met a lot of parents who had some issues with it).
I'd like to agree but practically there are difficulties enforcing it. Anecdotally I know of some parents having a battle with their local school because their kids have been watching this sort of crap in kindergarten.
Fundamentally it seems like building products designed to target children with harmful content, or content that substitutes for educational material, should not be accepted by society.
So yes parents are responsible but maybe we should stop building The Torment Nexus but for children.
> We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do with raising children.
This is just the logical conclusion of consumerism.
Consumerism produces careerism. Careerism produces the two income household. A two income household cannot devote the needed time to raising children during their early years. Day care and school and after school activities has been used to keep children busy while parents were hunting for that next promotion and the bigger paycheck to get the better car to get the better "status" in the eyes of their neighbors.
The zombie is the perfect symbol for consumerism, because it involves a mindless, indiscriminate, beastly, and insatiable hunger that would sell his own grandmother for that next disposable morsel.
I think we really need to reshape things to conform to biological and human reality instead of working against it. In the case of women, our culture as well as our political and economic structures must support the ability of women to have children earlier and to be able to raise them themselves during their early years. Many women do actually want this, but the culture pressures them to do otherwise or convinces them that the consumerist lifestyle is more attractive, causing them to defer having children (constraining their fertile years) and to pursue careers that increasingly make it difficult to choose to relinquish for at least some time as they raise their children.
Yes and no. Look around you and count how many properly failing parents there are. Parents who literally offload their parenting to a tablet, TV, phone, nanny which is often on phone herself, whatever. Then complain kids are unruly when they don't simply listen to them like soldiers. Parents, who are often as addicted to the screens (and more) as their kids. Recent studies showed above half of toddlers below 2 spend an hour or more daily on screens, thats fucked up.
I can count many such parents, way too many that I know. Kids before 5-6 should not access internet and should not watch TV. Don't trust me, trust children psychologists. Its toxic to their developing brains and personalities. Let them fuck up their lives on their own later if they must, don't give them hard addiction from the literal start of life, just because 'oh daddy has this super important work so doesn't have time to be a parent' syndrome, especially when its mostly empty pathetic soul draining white collar work with 0 added value to humanity.
And if one is truly changing the world for the better (as in 1 out of those maybe 10 humans actually currently doing it) and can't spare time for some kids, then don't have them, its not some freakin' checkbox ticked and moving to next challenge and achievement unlocked. Its by far the hardest effort one can make in one's life, spans over 2+ decades, be never 100% successful, while facing many real risks of failure completely outside of one's powers (no I don't mean peer pressure phones in school, rather ie health issues)
I think this is a “yes, and” kind of situation. Yes, a lot of parents suck, and yes, we should try to improve that situation, but also yes, we absolutely should punish megacorporations for making parents’ jobs harder by targeting children with their proven-to-be-harmful products.
Like, parents shouldn’t give cigarettes to their children, BUT ALSO it is both illegal and immoral for tobacco companies to target children.
> Parents, who are often as addicted to the screens (and more) as their kids.
This is a huge part of it. Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if you tell them to put down the screens, yet you yourself are scrolling Instagram all day, the kid is going to know you are full of shit! It's like smoking a cigarette while telling your kid that smoking is bad for you.
Reminds me of Adornos "Dialektik der Aufklärung" and its take on what he calls the "Kulturindustrie". Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.
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.
You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point to some degree.
> 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.
I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted the real thing, they would prefer the artificial product. For example, we have Sauce Hollondaise in my country, and most people were probably raised on the convenience product. The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh. So, I've noticed that even if people taste the 'real' sauce, they prefer the convenience product.
At a restaurant it’s hard because people use way too much and it’s expensive stuff. A solution could be tiny packaged packets of it, the way they do with butter (in part for much the same reason)
I grew up with fake Maple Syrup (high fructose corn syrup), so when I first tried REAL maple syrup as an adult, I preferred the fake, thick corn product over the genuine watery, ultra sweet tree product.
Heh, I thought of maple syrup as well. And I'm ashamed to say I prefer the fake stuff! Although it's likely because it's what I had as a child, so there's a strong nostalgia factor.
What's the grade of the maple syrup you tried ? (the new grading system is stupid everything is grade A with a color name)
In my opinion,
The A golden is light and subtle, I don't know what it's for; it's the variety we sell in tourists, and to peoples that likes fancy bottles and higher prices!
The A amber is great as a condiment in small quantities, for pancakes it's the best.
The A dark is the best for cooking deserts.
And the A very dark is my favorite for cooking meats like ham and ribs.
So if you only tasted the A golden I can see why you would prefer the fake syrup if you were raised on that stuff. But I would be surprised if you prefer the fake stuff to the A dark.
There's no such thing as an obvious "Perfect" taste. Everyone has different taste preferences. Some people legitimately prefer and like the thing you consider "lesser" for reasons like they literally experience it differently than you do and that experience is not as good for them.
People have dramatic differences in their tastes. Some people are far more sensitive to sour flavors. Some people have way less tolerance for bitter. Your diet will radically change how salty something tastes. Same for sweetness. Same for spicy.
I grew up eating homemade maple products from my Uncle's trees he tapped and cooked himself. I've had the real deal.
It's just not that good for most uses of "Sugar syrup" to me. A molasses cookie is tastier than a maple cookie to me. Maple syrup on a pancake will pollute the pleasant flavor of a literal cake I am eating for breakfast with all sorts of complicated tree resin compounds. I prefer a simple light caramel flavor in my sugar syrup to go on top of my cake that I am eating for breakfast. I want to taste the light and subtle flavors of butter and sweetness and a simple cake. I don't want the complexity of a good maple syrup.
Now when I make my ham, that's when I use a maple glaze. That's exactly when all the complexity shines, against the powerful savory ham flavor.
A Canadian friend brought me back 2 bottles of local maple syrup as a gift. Ok, I'm a pretentious Frenchman when it comes to food and I do think most North Americans have no idea how real food tastes.
But that stuff, I didn't know how it really tasted before trying the OG thing.
Globalisation gave us the illusion of experiencing the world.
I think it's worse than that. It promotes race to the bottom.
I love strawberries, blueberries (bilberry variety) and tomatoes, but apart of the few times in the year when I can collect my own or visit a PYO farm I'm not eating them at all.
Every shop (small and huge alike) only sells the fake, hyper-accelerated garbage (sorry Spain and Morocco, but that stuff is just gross), or - in season - locally grown similarly tasteless but raised on BPA, PFAS, dioxins, flame retardants, etc[1]
I can't even buy the quality stuff. It's just not being sold, because people only buy and eat trash :(
I visit Maui fairly regularly, and its the same thing with local "Maui Gold" pineapple. It is a completely different fruit from the Dole crap you buy in supermarkets on the mainland. Whenever I'm there I'll eat pineapples until my tongue burns, and when I'm home I don't eat it at all.
Living in London, I notice the same. Getting access to true quality produce is not even a question of money now, it's basically just impossible to get full stop. There are a few local shops in the more upmarket areas that survive on the fact that people are willing to pay the 2-3x premium over the prices at Waitrose.
Gone are the days when you could ask the grocer or farmer to give you a peach to taste. People got used to having 24/7/365 access to everything, and supermarkets optimized purely for looks instead of taste and nutrition, because you aren't allowed to taste anything there. The only thing you can go by is the looks. This means looks sell.
I'd hazard a guess the vast majority of brits don't even know what a proper strawberry tastes like, because the only thing they can buy are beautifully polished turds. Everything tastes watery and crap, or conversely just generic "sweet".
I wouldn't even blame farmers. Their life is hard enough. They are operating on razor thin margins in a very uncertain environment. The consumer (against their own interests) demands that they produce beautifully and cheap turds, so that's what they'll produce. And if you try to do the right thing, you simply run out of money because you can't compete with the turds at the supermarket.
I only have empirical evidence for this, but it got much worse since Brexit as well. The variety has gone down a lot, I see shelves routinely empty at supermarkets and they all seem to be focusing on the same ultraprocessed crap.
I agree, farmers are not responsible for everything, but definitely for pouring the toxic sludge. That's their choice. Conscious, willful. I doubt they'd make a tea on the water leeching from the landfill so why do they think it's okay to use it on the fields? Nasty.
But I agree, most of the blame lies on the corrupt government (can't think of a better reason explaining why they sanction the above practice or why they gleefully ignore supermarkets role in the "cost of living crisis" - part of it being squeezing the farmers in the same way they squeeze the customers).
And i agree it's been much worse since Brexit - the customer has been conditioned to tolerate worse quality and choice for ever higher prices. Continuous approval to neonicotinoids use in our fields is telling as well.
Gross and saddening. I'm telling my kids to get their education and leave the UK. Being EU country citizens they might even study in some cleaner and saner place.
You should try Natoora in Notting Hill or Daylesford. I live in Belgravia and am admittedly spoiled for choice .. the Harrods Food Hall has excellent seasonal and harder to find fruits, and Daylesford consistently has some of the best British produce I've come across... the one in Sloane street even has the best organic Alphanso Mangos from India.
As for Brexit, I actually think it's been a net positive.
You have to be joking, right? So you are saying that it's all fine, because we can just go to Harrods to get quality food?
Nevermind that I hate Harrods and that entire area with a passion. It's a tasteless, glitzy tourist trap.
My post was all about the fact that barring a tiny percentile of people who a) live in an affluent area and b) are willing to pay 2-3x the regular supermarket prices, you cannot get good quality food. And you say "ah it's simples, just go to the most egregiously flashy beacon of division between the rich and poor and you can get good fruit"
Thank you, I can still get good fruit at my local grocer in Wimbledon, because it charges 2-3x over the regular high street prices and there are people around who can pay this. Doesn't help someone living in Croydon and having to go to Tesco, does it now.
Why is appreciation of excellence so often mistaken for ostentation … driving a Rolls or bentley, living in a grand Georgian terrace in Zone 1, enjoying a glass of Romanée at Zuma, or wearing exquisite Italian made cashmere are all examples of exceptional European craftsmanship and heritage. Yet those who enjoy such things are casually labelled by folks like you as flashy, pompous, or glitzy. Why? What is the real objection kind sir ? Croydon (especially east Croydon) is an absolute shit hole .. it’s full of illegal immigrants, and lots of crime and drug users .. they are more likely to appreciate an undercooked McDonald’s chicken tender than fresh organic winter peas from a farm in Wiltshire lol
I'm confused. What exactly is it about these immigrants that make them incapable of appreciating fresh food? I agree that you can enjoy your privilege or money just fine, but do you believe that the poor are incapable or unworthy of appreciating wealth or privilege? They're surely more likely to appreciate the cost-to-calorie ratio.
See, wholinator number two, the issue with these particular immigrants in Croydon and other parts of the UK is that many of them are here illegally and, therefore, are not entitled to the same rights and treatment as legal immigrants beyond the basic human rights that Great Britain and its taxpayers provide .. Think about it, wholinator number two .. why would I give them fresh organic produce if they are in the country unlawfully? You shouldn’t be barbaric towards people who break the law, but at the same time, you don’t necessarily treat them to the very finest British produce either. Anybody who thinks that’s the right thing to do is borderline crazy, possibly even retarded …
But what happens here, let me point that out for completeness, is not a dark conspiracy. At least not on this level.
People go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest thing that does the trick, probably because they can't afford something else. Bills want to be payed.
Partially agree, in case of Aldi/Asda/Lidl but mostly not.
They don't have a choice, they cannot encounter a good vegetables and fruits in the normal stores. They CANNOT, at least in the UK. It's that simple. Maybe during some events, as a curiosity.
Good quality vegetables are not available on the shelves in general. Maybe in some cases, yeah. Some. But generally not. Similarly with meat, although it's much easier here to find something decent.
The difference in taste and quality between the cheapest and most expensive fresh fruits and vegetables in the supermarkets is virtually none. If you don't believe me, you don't have to, I simply grew plenty of that as a kid and a teenager, I keep growing some, and the difference between the average garden-sourced (or PYO/small farm sourced) and the Aldi/M&S/Waitrose/Tesco is simply too big to describe, you'd have to try it.
So there's an illusion of choice between awful and bad - in that case I'm simply choosing imported (thanks to the landfill and manufacturing waste in our great British food chain). People who don't know, or don't care pick whatever looks the best.
Some buy the cheapest. Not everyone buys the cheapest - you can't seriously claim that in case of the expensive stores (Sainsbury's, M&S, Waitrose).
And then there's palate problem. If someone was raised on these garbage produce, they may even favour it over healthy, proper ones. Proper radish will have a bite to it. Proper tomato has a complex profile (and there's hundreds of varieties of that too), instead of how garden stores describe it being "tasty"....
Consumers have been dumbed down and trained into accepting inferior livestock feed as food, and thanks for that they can for example say with a straight face that they actually like or prefer Tesco white toast bread.
As New Englander I feel it's important to note that there are, like olive oil, various grades of maple syrup. They changed the system but Grade B / Dark maple syrup is the best for pancakes and "thickness". If you want to make a sauce or cook with it, golden or amber are fine.
It's made Grade B more widely available though, because now it's just a light or dark choice like brown sugar, whereas before Grade B seemed somehow inferior. Before it was easy to assume Grade-A would be the most maple-y.
Specifically Jean Baudrillard describes copies of copies with decreasing relavence and quality. But more sinisterly, the loss of knowing what is real, important, safe, efficacious.
His work builds extensively on Plato, Lucretius, and Deleuze's concept of the Simulacrum.
This is like how 95% of SUVs are basically just minivans with a slightly different body. You have to research to find one with a truck engine that can say, haul a travel trailer. Another one that comes to mind is shutters on windows. People like the look but they’re just planks of wood in the vast majority of cases now.
> The towing numbers are always higher in Europe than US too, despite being the same cars (as far as I know).
Mostly due to differences in environment, AFAIK. Americans drive faster, and towing instability seems to increase with the square of the speed. Also, most travel trailers in the US wouldn't be car-towable anyway, because we have expectations on amenities and size that are predicated on using at least a half-ton pickup for the tow vehicle. Trailers with the compromises needed to be towed European-style aren't popular, so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
Same with truffle mayo or truffle-based products. [1]
People who grew up on the artificial flavor prefer it over the real one. I have quite a few in my circle of friends.
You go to an Italian restaurant and you get plain pasta, panned in butter or olive oil and then someone comes with a real truffle and grates it in front you of over your dish until you tell them to stop. You pay for that amount.
Unless you go to a restaurant with a great reputation or some Michelin star venue, that is the only way to be sure you're eating real truffles. The dish has no truffle-aroma itself and the truffle is grated while you watch.
Assuming ofc (and probably true for most people): your palate is not well acquainted to the taste of the real thing enough to tell it apart from the many fakes/substitutes.
Never thought of the fake variant as gasoline-like but it sure has that strange, very heavy 'chemical' aftertaste that lingers in your palate. Also never tried the real thing, I wonder if i'd like it or not.
+1 - it tastes so obviously of petrochemicals that I throw the food out - truffle fries, truffle pasta - might as well pour mineral spirits on it for the same experience.
I was fully triggered by the hollandiase bit. This is something I look for constantly when I travel for real eggs Benny. It's never real, even at higher end hotels. They just use better quality fake stuff. And it's so good when it's real.
My wife makes real Eggs Benedict for me once a year on my birthday. I went to a resort hotel and spit out their Eggs Benedict it tasted so bad compared to what I get at home. They comped my meal. I guess this explains why I’m constantly confused why Eggs Benedict doesn’t taste right. I’ve found one, maybe two restaurants with passable Eggs Benedict in my city.
It's not at all difficult if you have gained the basic survival skill of cooking. I mean, take a couple egg yolks in a double boiler, add the juice of a lemon, whisk until it's thick then add butter. 10 minutes and you can use a bowl over the pot of boiling water you're poaching your eggs in if you don't have a double boiler for your camp stove in the wilderness.
But that's still more of a hassle than putting the carton of that yellow plastic liquid in the microwave for a minute and a half. People will prefer their slops and the farmer brings it right to you; what could possibly be a better life?
And that's ten minutes every time someone orders a dish with hollandaise because it really breaks when reheating as well. Given how much cost of labor is a factor it's easy to see why hardly any restaurant will serve real hollandaise. Perfect Baumol cost disease example. Maybe something like a Thermomix could solve the economic problem of hollandaise.
I short-circuited my microwave accidentally two years ago (don't power it up and then drop screwdrivers) and that was the best thing to happen to my meals.
Nothing kills a discussion like when someone just saying "I disagree" with zero explanation. They're not really contributing just cluttering up the comments. At least give a reason why.
The original sauce is, in fact, a pain to make. However, it's not the 17th century any more. You can, with an immersion blender (which is not a particularly obscure piece of kitchen hardware), make it very easily. There's a bit of a knack, but only a bit of one, and if the sauce breaks you can just restart the emulsion with a new egg.
For the record: you basically take a stick blender, the container that came with it, crack an egg, pour over some lemon juice, then blend while pouring in hot butter (use the microwave!). Takes ca 2 minutes, including the 1 minute 30s of microwaving the butter.
Instant _real_ sauce hollandaise as the stick blender creates a vortex that emulsifies it. No need to hand whisk it over a bain-marie at careful temperatures.
I used to make it on the stovetop - even learned how to rescue it when it broke - but I don't anymore. You can decide whether using a hand blender counts as "real" or not, but the ingredients are the same, and I can't tell the difference, only the technique is arguably "cheating".
I make eggs benedict probably once a month or two. It's really fairly simple with an immersion blender. Comes together in like a minute. Timing the poached eggs and the sandwich elements is a little tricky, but not materially more difficult than, eg, cinnamon rolls from scratch.
When it comes to these lines of thinking, and to romanticism which is closely related, I have a hard time not seeing some of it as disdain for the middle class and nostalgia for the stories classic aristocracy told about itself.
I’m American and grew up inundated with cultural disdain for the suburbs, tract housing, malls, all those things, and at some point I asked, well, what then? What’s better?
Sauce made slowly by hand is better. Carefully curated culture is better. Hand made, artisan, intentional.
Rare. Special. And if it’s rare and special few can have it, making it also expensive and aristocratic.
As soon as you try to give everyone that experience, you get chain stories. You get tract homes. You get mass culture. Because it’s a mass. It’s million, billions of people, and we are not as unique as we think we are. None of us are.
I’m not saying the whole critique is this. There’s another side to it that’s about exploitation and addiction and that one rings true to me. But I find that it’s hard to peel the two things apart.
It’s not exploitation to raise the standard of living of masses of people, and if you think it’s inherently tacky maybe you’re a neo-feudalist reactionary and don’t know it yet. There’s a reason that stuff took hold so easily among certain kinds of hipsters.
I see a lot of leftists where if you could get them to let go of one idea, namely equity and equality, you’d instantly have a “trad.” Most of their other opinions are already aligned.
I don’t see my post as making any judgement, let alone offering criticism. It’s simply my observation that many people prefer the artificial stuff to the original product.
But since you’ve brought this up, I’d argue that it’s not a question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply isn’t given access to these products. What they get is an abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the flavour but abstracts anything else away.
Take, for example, meat or vegetable stock, which is now a staple in every kitchen in the form of powder or stock cubes.
If you take a look at the ingredients and nutritional values, they’re rather disappointing. The masses may get access to the taste, but not to the nutrients.
I didn’t mean to come off as criticizing you, just providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas.
The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version?
In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more.
The artificial mass market imitation is cheaper because it is thermodynamically cheaper. It takes far less labor (the most costly input to almost all processes) and it substitutes things that can be bulk produced at a lower unit cost. Being less nutritious probably directly correlates since nutrition is chemical complexity is lower entropy, higher energy, harder to scale.
There’s a lot of rare “authentic” experiences that cannot be scaled. That means most people can’t have them, ever.
You can’t have both rarity / exclusivity and democratization / equality. One side has to give.
This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries. Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the thinnest veneer can be "scaled".
But what do you do about free will? If billions of people want maple syrup, do you say “no, no, we can’t scale the real thing and corn syrup is a poor substitute, so you can’t have even a simulacrum of the experience”?
I take your point, but the other argument against scaling in this way doesn't rely on sentiment: it's unsustainable. I actually hate that word, but the point is that current production methods create (unpriced) environmental externalities. We're draining aquifers, exhausting topsoil, pouring fertilizer into rivers, using too much petroleum - and then throwing a massive portion of what we produce away. (And that's just for food; similar arguments exist for fashion, and sometimes for buildings and infrastructure.) That argument gets effectively zero traction - despite, I think, being the better one - so some people who care more about that argue from sentiment instead, which (for the reasons you explain, and rightly object to) has better legs with the general public.
I look at this as a technical problem. We just aren't very good at this yet. We are, in fact, slowly getting better. Renewable energy was the largest category of new installed energy for the last few years at least, and that's a start. The question is whether we can get good at this fast enough to outrun ourselves.
My issue with at least some of green ideology is that it's viewed as a moral problem. We are sinning by asking for more than we deserve and, if you really scratch the surface, by trying to give too much to the unwashed hordes. Beneath the surface I think you find romanticism, and beneath that you find nostalgia for a fantasy world that never really existed. That fantasy world is the fantasy of the old aristocracy. It's the story they told themselves.
I think those kinds of greens are "trads" who don't know it yet. The only thing keeping them from going down that road is an attachment to the idea of equality and things like LGBTQ rights. If you give up those things, the rest aligns perfectly. If you want a world of rare authentic things enjoyed by cultured people and all of it to fit within present techno/ecological limits, you have to put the masses back in feudal serfdom and establish a rigid, religious, traditional system to hold everything in stasis that way. It would be sustainable.
But as I said a few levels up, there is another side of the critique that I think has more legs. That's the critique of engineered addiction and manipulation. Those are not mandatory effects of scale. They're engineered to maximize short term profits or for other purposes like political manipulation, which I guess is another kind of profit (power rather than money).
Good points. I expect you're familiar with the Abundance Agenda folks? They're mostly talking right now about energy and infrastructure, which I think is a correct choice, but there is a next step to take with consumer goods, so that we can end up with an abundance of quality and not more engineered addiction.
> Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.
Ray Bradbury did anticipate all of that in Farenheit 451, including the addictive nature of it.
I read Farenheit 451 in 2010, and I was shocked to see that he had anticipated Twitter, but his predictions didn't stop there and he also anticipated that the next step would be what is now Tik Tok.
You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often wrote that way.
Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings.
Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture.
(He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)
From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”."
I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...).
For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room.
Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap.
I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present.
If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..."
And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.
Honestly, Marx's work is like "the Bible", nobody is really reading it honestly "from scratch". They are all coming in with an existing identity / framework / world view, and getting it to say what they want it to say.
Something about people pretending it was the official ideology of half the world tends to do that. The old man himself would have thrown up into his soup if he knew.
> I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good.
Did capitalists do this in any comprehensive or satisfactory way prior to the advent of capitalism? I’m not a communist, but this seems like a fairly weak criticism.
There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. Remember Peterson et all all warning about "Cultural marxism" and "postmodernism"?
I try not be against new terms like "enshittification" or "dopamine fracking" for this reason, the tech people at the levers that might be convinced to change course seem to be more open to substack and blogpost concepts (see SSC / rationalist popularity for all this new terminology that just describes old continental philosophical concepts) instead of having to read old European thinkers that use too much Marxist terminology.
Edit: case in point, literally users here are now linking to SSC essays explaining critical theory lol
Since I can't upvote @thrance's reply, I'll second it here: certainly complaints about postmodernism date to the 90s or earlier and fear of Marxism is as old as Marx (less sure about when "cultural Marxism" specifically became a scare-term of art)
> There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances.
I feel it's still ongoing, the reactionary elements are campaigning against anything circa modern (not modernist as in art but modern as organisation of society, so also anything that can be traced back to Enlightenment) and later, postmodern etc. They are actively destroying natural sciences too, which is a part of this effort. Feels like going back to feudalism.
The strawberry example reminds me of the Instant Mashed Potatoes non-book review [0].
> 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.
>In the interest of full fairness while writing this review, I purchased a plastic cup of my dad’s currently favored “Buttery Homestyle” Idahoan brand instant mashed potatoes for $1.99. The preparation was extraordinarily efficient; the aroma was decent; the taste was a reasonable facsimile; but the texture was all wrong - a smothering paste that coated my mouth and constrained my tongue like a straightjacket. 3/10 would not buy again.
I substitute warm heavy cream for half the water and add extra butter which gets me to a 6/10. Mix in some cabbage or kale and you have a quick Colcannon.
yeah some of the instant ones aren't half bad, especially if you're not just using them as mashed potatoes with gravy, but in a pinch i can throw together a reasonably hearty and savory shepherd's pie with instant, including the peaks. Heavy cream definitely helps, and get lots of air in, if possible.
obviously real potatoes taste better, but they haven't been dehydrated and reconstituted, destroying the cell structures. probably.
As someone under 40 who never had any social media, I cannot overstate the negative impact it's had on my peers and their behaviours. Worst thing to ever happen to society imo, I feel for the younger ones who grew up with it.
Whether or not it counts as social media, there is no algorithm targeting individuals as far as I know. Social media in the sense of HN is just the internet.
It does, but as you really can't get money out of it in a reliable way by exploiting the user addictive behaviors, it doesn't have that effect on society.
It's just a cool place to visit now an then an check cool stuff out.
Kind of interesting how many people don’t realize that the purpose of Hacker News was to be an advertisement for Y Combinator and their portfolio companies.
You don’t see it as much these days, but YC portfolio companies can post privileged threads on this site for job listings, which in practice double as ads for the company. You’re not allowed to comment on them.
I haven’t seen one for a while because I suspect every company is already inundated with 1000 applications for every job in this market, but this is what Hacker News was for.
Y Combinator is right there in the URL. People know and don't care because it's a well run forum with interesting discussions, the privileged posts don't change that.
I think most people know this and are fine with it. YC owns the site and advertises their stuff on it sometimes. The site itself is not trying to milk you for every penny or trying to exploit you.
We have social media-like systems going arguably Compuserve and the like, as well as games. There's a matter of "refinement", like how some older people describe the change of drugs over the decades. TikTok, Twitter and many of the games are just "too strong", and it matters. Nobody gets "addicted" to Mario 3 or IRC to the point it resembles alcoholism.
> Nobody gets "addicted" to Mario 3 or IRC to the point it resembles alcoholism.
People definitely became internet junkies in the past. IRC was where you could find chronically online people before that term was popular.
The good old IRC quote databases were full of jokes about people not leaving their house and being online all the time. I remember being mocked in IRC rooms because I was out doing things instead of being on IRC all weekend. IRC was the place for the chronically online. This has always been a thing and it’s weird to see it dismissed so casually.
If you want to be pedantic, everything that has user interaction I think technically counts as social media. So just about any forum on the internet counts. But there's a pretty big difference in an anonymous forum, and something like twitter, facebook etc.
because we're not putting our personal lives on display here. it's a news aggregator and discussion forum. sure, some folks post their personal projects, but it's framed as news to be discussed, not desperation for validation.
a) real pseudonymity
b) no photos/videos
c) no infinite scroll
d) no notifications
e) very specific (mildly speaking) topic range
f) very very good ranking and filtering algo
....
(g) guidelines designed for curiosity and intellectual discussion that are enforced by the moderators. No "real" social media platform has anything similar. (so maybe it's more like a discussion board? LessWrong/old phpbb forums)
I grew up with social media but at the start of the year I quit all of it and deleted my accounts. AI slop and obvious bots everywhere was the tipping point.
I should have done it long before, quitting has been so massively beneficial and I don’t feel I’m missing anything. All real social interaction online these days is in messaging apps. Social media is just a feed of endless slop designed to put you in a zombie like state of scrolling.
I've found that this engineered optimization has a more pernicious side effect: killing curiosity.
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.
What once motivated going deeper to satisfy the curiosity instinct is now satisfied by breadth. Quantity has a quality all its own.
"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." This is an insightful and important point. Humans place value on what requires effort and resources to achieve/acquire. The timeline has been condensed so that immediate rewards are required, or attention/effort is directed elsewhere. Any extended effort or depth requires frequent dopamine rewards. Those born well into the Internet age have a different disposition that is difficult for older generations to understand. In some ways, the difference is quite profound and not unlike that of a foreign culture.
I'm not sure these things are about "big hit of dopamine". It's more about keeping user's attention on screen. And e.g. tiktok repeatedly shows minimally interesting videos, keeping viewer in expectation: how does this video end? would next the next video show?
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.
Yes! Exactly this... Attention... We become so dependent on always being distracted so that we can not function without it. I remember there where a similar discussion about TV back in the days.. but the level it is on now is unprecedented.
I think society will adjust to this behavior as it has always done before. How damning or not is yet to be decided. It does not necessarily has to be a bad thing... but being dependent on something usually is.
There's a certain irony in coining the term on discord. Nice blog post but I'm used to reading these from people who hang out on IRC. Times are changing indeed.
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.
> There's a certain irony in coining the term on discord
And the section in the middle where they start praising a YouTube video series that validated his anger and encourages us to go watch it.
You can sense the author’s struggles with self-regulation at the center of this article, but they have a blind spot for the content and apps that they really like. I think people in this situation would do better to start looking for positive outlets for their time like taking up an activity or exercise routine that gets them out of the house and away from screens. Trying to set arbitrary boundaries to avoid really bad content and apps is good, but if that time is just backfilled with other apps and videos then it’s only a very partial help.
I agree. I’m the author, and I think freeing up my time is the core of making myself feel better. And I think it could help others.
Because I don’t scroll nearly as much anymore, I have less things to immediately and effortlessly distract myself with. This inadvertently forces me into creativity, mindfulness or rekindling hobbies, which are healthier and more fulfilling activities than TikTok. It also promotes experimentation and trying new things. For example: I don’t write often, but having more time and boredom allows me to actually try instead of wishing I had. And now we’re having this conversation as a result.
YouTube and Discord are as much of a distraction as anything else, but their nature (or I guess how I use them) makes them feel more finite, and I can often “run out” of content to consume in a short amount of time. Previously, I couldn’t run out, and it was ruining my life and personality.
I can finally feel my life’s sort of global content feed becoming finite and manageable.
As a reformed YouTube addict myself, that feeling of "running out" really is great. Tragically, that was its own exciting rush which has since faded. :)
This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse suburbs.
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.
Guessing by your examples that you are American. Maybe you are aware, or perhaps not, that in Europe many view your culture as the one that has taken this to its extreme. Some envy it, some don’t.
Oh absolutely. It's also a specific segments of America. I hope Europe and elsewhere can resist but it really requires regulation because people in general are too easy to steer via advertising and convenience value propositions.
Definitely places in the US where you want find this commoditization of experience.
Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake). Or is your point that Europe has a different supermarket chain per country? Malls have the same stores across countries ... but they differ, somewhat, if you move from one country to the next. And they're fake. Every company has 3-4 store brands these days so malls have 4-5 stores that look different, but aren't.
So ... what a difference that makes?
(I mean, I get that it does make a difference. Carrefour clearly takes some pride in their chocolate selection and aldi ... well it's an insult to any product to be sold at aldi. But culture in shopping in the EU? Where do you find that?)
> Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake)
I live in a small european town and all the followings are found less than 3 minutes away from my home: butcher, baker, shoes store, newspaper store, convenience store, barber.
The town hosts a market once a week that sells more divers products, and many people do shop there. Some of the stores are owned and operated by descendants of those who owned them 60 years ago, all have their owner working in the store.
Maybe you won't consider that to be "large amounts of small stores" but that is somewhat the point: all my basic needs can be covered by a handful of small stores.
Granted that type of life and town has become less representative over time, but I heard the trend is now to go back to the countryside as people flee the big cities.
> I live in a small european town and all the followings are found less than 3 minutes away from my home
walking, cycling, or driving? For where i live, in the USA, all three net me no shops. I have to travel 3.5km round trip to get candy and a cold drink at a gas station, ~19km to get fresh vegetables and fruit at all, and sixty-four kilometers to get to a "real" grocer. those are all round trip distances (had to edit 11 to 19 because i just multiplied by three instead of 6, and corrected the distance, too; oops!)
I think we have a vastly different definition of "small town"!
Now, i grew up in Whittier, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, and a city so big it's the size of a parish/county most other places. Nominally 80,000-150,000 people in the city/metro limits. all of those things you mentioned were within 10 minutes of my house, including a "German butcher" and a non-German butcher, salons, barbers, etc. there was a pretty big mall within 10 minutes, too.
Whittier's population was "quaint" when i lived there, as it's 100% US suburb, with a long way to go to get to any freeway/interstate.
I think that young USAmericans are deathly envious of a community like yours, myself included. I have nothing really novel to contribute here (in my view, North American urbanism, zoning regulation, the aforementioned globalism and, if you will allow me to briefly beat a dead horse, car-centric planning are to blame.)
I was playing Stardew Valley the other day and it hit me. For me, that type of close-knit community and simple living is merely fantasy, absolutely unattainable in real life.
There's absolutely places like that in the US. I have multiple of those establishments, non-chain, minutes away. No newspaper store IDK about that, there's also McDonalds, CVS, Subway, but the independent restaurants and business outnumber chains easily. It's just not in a major metropolitan area.
To add to this, I live in the suburb of a large European city, and the same is true here, except owners change more often. It is also true in the city center.
I also live in a small European town and there is a convenience store and a hairdresser. Oh and restaurants. That's it. Doesn't matter if you go to neighboring towns, they're the same. One of the neighboring towns has a supermarket, an Aldi.
I am also old enough to remember what it looked like in 1985.
Sounds like a very small town? In general most places are filled with shops you can walk to. In southern Europe in particular it's almost overwhelming the amount of options you have.
Berlin and surrounding towns and cities. Before the pandemic/brexit, also found them in the UK, but visits afterwards suggest catastrophic decline at least in the specific places I visited.
Just because we also have malls, doesn't mean we only have malls.
"Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores?"
Im vibrant city centers of every bigger city I visited. The ugly malls are taking over much and online ordering is heavy pressure, but some are still very much alive.
Vibrant city centers in the US have small stores, too - even town centers in high-income areas. In Europe (especially, in my experience, France) they're common, because they've supported and subsidized them in all sorts of un-economically "optimized" ways. Americans prefer them, too, though - when they can afford them; they just haven't made having that kind of economy a political priority.
Don't act as if the cities in Europe look any different. I don't know what a "subscribe n save is" but I can find a Western Union, gambling hall and vape shop on every street corner.
I feel like they do and they don't at the same time. The buildings may look different, but city center rents driving out a lot of small local businesses, and leaving the same brands everywhere.
You are right, that the city centers are often heavily commodified to the point where they do not differ from other cities anymore. However, European cities are not just the city center, you have a lot of different districts where the commodification has not progressed to this degree as in the city centers. Case in point, you often do have small grocery stores in those districts, mostly owned by immigrants or they are some kind of organic food store.
You're right, too, but also in the European chain stores - Carrefour and Spar, and the like - I see more quality produce and local cheese and regional products than I do in North American equivalents. They're sold right alongside the commodity, international-brand stuff, and usually is price-competitive. The best apples I ate on my last trip to Spain I bought in a motorway services; they looked like they'd been grown next door, and maybe had been.
I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.
You are seeing the effect for the cause. Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.
Any caveman would have loved to have to choose between favourite junk food franchises instead of risking his life chasing woolly mammoths not to starve.
From what I see, there are many people that don't want to be "bored" more than the people that don't want to be "tired". Of course there are many that want to be neither (so we get social media that gives you "not bored" and "not tired"), but I don't think we can generalize for 100% for neither category.
It helps to view it under a neurological perspective.
Not being bored = likely scrolling social media = dopamine release = the exact mechanism that reinforces patterns and behaviours in our brain, which under some conditions can reach stages of compulsion. I loath to blame the individual when these systems are designed to exploit flaws in human behaviour.
I recently read a self-help book by B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford Behavior Design Lab (formerly known as the Persuasive Technology Lab) that was boasting how he mentored the Instagram founders and helped them optimize their app for maximum engagement. The book itself was pretty good, but I couldn't help but think I'm reading the words of a complete sociopath that has indirectly caused untold psychological damage, and was pretty proud about it.
Is it Jane Doe's fault that she's now hopelessly addicted to Instagram?
"Travel outside a person's local area for leisure was largely confined to wealthy classes, who at times travelled to distant parts of the world, to see great buildings and works of art, learn new languages, experience new cultures, enjoy pristine nature and to taste different cuisines."
It was at this supposed peak of Dopamine Fracking that intellectual conversation found a renaissance. Anthropology in particular reached its pinnacle in a unifying theory of everything: it’s just human nature.
When housing, healthcare, work, social life all feel unstable, the predictable option starts looking less like boring conformity and more like one less decision that can go wrong
It's more a side effect of decision fatigue. Millennials are at a stage of life where they face a very high cognitive burden. They're not thinking deeply about it. which is great for advertisers.
I don't think that's a millennial thing. If you think back to the whole 'hipster' era, yes peer approval was a big part of it but so was local/artisan/unique stuff. Franchises were the things that were completely avoided. That predictability is much more of a modern requirement.
For me (considerably older than millenials) it's not choice fatigue or "default to bland and tested", it's "if I'm paying a small fortune for coffee / food[0], I do not want a crappy serving just because the barista/cook stubbed their toe / broke up / got bad news / etc. this morning and they're wildly off their game."
Starbucks, McDonalds, Papa Johns, etc. do not make "great" refreshments but they make them of a consistently sufficient level of quality that you can be sure you're not wasting your small fortune when you buy from them wherever you are.
At least in Australia pretty much all the chain places like McDonalds/subway etc suck so bad it’s incredible they are still in business. They aren’t even winning on price.
All cities have the exact same shopping street somewhere.
Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..:
Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo, Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..
You know, I always felt it but struggled to describe. This is exactly how it feels. Commoditization is inevitable, but the loss of identity that comes with leaves the impression that every city is one of those old-west movie prop ghost towns.
Alone or not, you're hardly representative. They are huge corporate behemoths because 100s of millions go there.
And if you personally do avoid those, you likely still don't avoid 50 others like them. Like, you don't go to those, but shop at Amazon. Or ride Uber. etc
I lived in Glasgow for 20-odd years, where you can get food from any region of any country in the world made by people from that region of that country, right there, fresh, right in front of you.
I've also eaten Taco Bell.
You're not missing much. It is much as you'd expect, a stepped-on Americanised parody of Mexican food. Even in the small north-eastern city of 150,000 people I live near now there are at least three places better than it for Mexican food.
Starbucks is absolutely rank. I suspect all the syrups and shit people pump in is just there because they a) don't actually like coffee and want some sugary milkshake, and b) don't know what coffee tastes like so are okay with the stale over-roasted to the point of just being burnt lukewarm rubbish that Starbucks sells.
The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!). I don't know if "Generic Brewery" is a real place or just a term for "oh hey you have to check <this place>" out, but if it's the latter then that would be Brewdog. Okay but not great beer, horrible horrible people.
I used to work at a small workshop in the south side of Glasgow where I'd go out and get a curry for lunch most days. The building looked semi-derelict but the shop itself was clean enough. Stainless counter, stainless kitchen units behind where two big Pakistani guys and their tiny grandmother who *everyone* deferred to cooked up curry. Cracked lino, scuffed formica tables.
You went in, you bought curry and a can of Coke. What kind of curry? Whatever they'd made that day. There was one, or maybe two if they also had a veg-only one on. It was whatever Naniamma had told them to make that day. Your menu choice was buy the curry or don't. Doesn't matter either way. Four quid please, want a fork?
It was always superb, and 20 years later I can still taste it just thinking about it. This is the kind of place you could eat.
> The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!).
Chipotle and Lime scooters do exist in the UK (and have for a while.) Waymo (I'm assuming the driverless taxis here) are just starting to appear in London. Apparently there's an Orange Theory Fitness in Derby (which has the same logo as the US one and therefore I'm assuming it's the same company.)
(Amazon and some smaller stores have been doing "subscribe and save" for years. But I'm not sure if that's the same thing?)
> [curry shop]
There was a great Thai place on one of the North Acton industrial estates back in ~2010 - tiny place, scuffed formica tables, terrifying grandmother taking your order, similarly small menu. Still the best Pad Thai I've had.
You know you've found the right spot when you're the only white guy in a hundred metre radius of the place.
Small north-east of Scotland town, county cricket match at the cricket club between predominantly Indian and Pakistani teams. Food trucks came up from Leeds to do the catering. Every time I went up to one the guy behind the counter would look at me with wide eyes and say in a concerned tone of voice "You know what's in this, right? You know what you're eating?"
Dude, hit me with the desi shit, keep it coming. Yes of course I know what it is, it's not like I've never had mutton liver before. Here's 20 quid, package some up for me to stick in the freezer.
I don’t know if I’d club fast food restaurants into the dopamine factory category. I see it as more of a necessity as I don’t think I can go hunt or gather food during my lunch break at the office.
I used to work near a food market where there were dozens of independent good stalls that were setup to serve working people lunches. The food was still fast, but a lot healthier, and you could go to one place and have a wide choice of options.
There is a formulation, a sugar/fat/salt ratio that the majority of people will find satisfying. Fast food tends to optimise this way. It's why, for example McDonalds burger buns are quite sweet.
But I don't know whether dopamine is the pathway responsible.
Yes. I think convenience/utility explains a lot of these “depressingly homogenized experiences” far more than dopamine-seeking.
My life is very, very full. I do not have enough hours in the day, or years in my life, to fulfill all of my obligations and chase all of my dreams and interests. Not even close.
So I buy a lot of clothes from Old Navy, because they offer tall sizes that I need (surprisingly rare) and I honestly just have other things to do with my time. I’m aware there’s a whole world of interesting fashion out there, I just have 100 other things I want/need to spend my time on.
It’s the same with food, a lot of the time. Sometimes I just need a known quantity.
The restaurant chains know this, too. Sure… the commercials are all about satisfying your dopamine needs. But the way they actually run their operations is all about enforcing consistency. A Big Mac is supposed to taste the same everywhere. If you are a McDonalds franchisee, you can pick and choose which McDonalds products and promotions you sell (you can operate without selling french fries, if you’re crazy enough) but you absolutely cannot customize the ones you do sell.
(Yes, there are regional differences between McDonalds in different regions. Even within the US, there are some small differences due to regional suppliers and ingredient price/availability etc. However, these are very small differences and trust me, they really are laser-focused on consistency.)
Also I'm not sure either is "bad for society" in the way that's implied.
Rentable scooters/bikes being dumped everywhere by idiots is an issue, but parked in city approved places they're a boon.
They can make transit incredibly more useful for thousands of people in slightly less dense places.
The nearest subway to me is 2km away. It's much nicer to be able to rent a scooter for 5min than having to take it with me for the whole ride, or have it locked to a pole with 100s others.
As for Waymo I dunno if a vehicle the size of a car just driverless is the answer to mobility issues, but anything that reduces the number of moving and parked cars in cities is a win in my book.
On the contrary I think they converge for what's inline with the average user, a sort of neutral and familiar "taste" of everything from operations to design.
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.
> If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them
Whut? It's a perfectly relatable example. Commercial fruit genetics are selected for shipping and shelf life. Nutrients and taste come way down the list of priorities. I've noticed the strawberries in my supermarket have a more consistent quality every year. Consistently awful. It seems like one company have taken over the market and the berries are hard and bland. But they look nice. As each layer of the chain consolidates it forces adjacent layers to consolidate and you end up with sameness. The small strawberry companies probably went bust because the big supermarkets pushed hard. Now I have to buy my strawberries from a roadside farmer and they're great.
In the Netherlands strawberries in the supermarket have generally good quality, and a season too, though you can buy them year-round. But there's only one type of strawberry, the red sweet ones.
A recent dopamine fracking example in the supermarket is beer culture. Couple years ago in NL small breweries were popping up everywhere and making delicious specialty varieties, or reviving long lost beers from old recipes. Also small shops emerged, collecting special beers from around the world. This did not go unnoticed at the supermarket, and the number of brands they offered exploded. Rows upon rows of the most fancy designer cans to attract your attention, highly priced but convenient. It killed off a large part of this trend. "Hey, I can just buy this in the supermarket".
Right but that’s not what the article argues. The article argues that strawberries have been destroyed and now you only get the synthetic flavor and no grandma nostalgia.
If the corporate berries are really so bad, the invisible hand will push the company in the direction of society's aggregate wallet vote. Sounds like most people are fine with them. Outside of truly autocratic systems, sounds like these berries are WAI.
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no other choices available
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't afford better choices
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case for good strawberries, so no one close enough to buy from will sell good strawberries to them
"The market seems fine with it" is kind of a lazy thought terminating cliche answer. What if the invisible hand of the market is pushing strawberry producers towards the outcome "society no longer values this enough to buy it" in which case the aggregate wallet vote will be zero?
The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries
You most definitely get this phenomenon with tomatoes. There’s little demand for actually good tomatoes, because most people don’t even know what a good tomato tastes like at this point.
This applies to countless things, but tomatoes are a prime example because they deteriorate so quickly once picked relative to other fruits I guess. So they have completely bred the flavor out of them in a quest to achieve something that looks good on a supermarket shelf.
This is a phenomenal example I hadn't even considered, because I have been affected by this kind of "invisible hand of the market" negative quality spiral.
The older generation here remember good tomatoes, so they continue to buy bad tomatoes but will complain every time they eat them about the quality. I get told a lot about heirloom varieties and how good they are in comparison.
I grew up with modern tomatoes. I've never tried an heirloom so I can't compare, but I don't recall ever eating a good tomato, so I just don't buy them. The market has moved itself into a position that shrinks its own demographic.
I see people constantly make this argument, and honestly I think it’s BS. I grew up eating tomatoes from my grandparents garden, and I’ve lived and traveled all over the world. I’ve grown tomatoes, bought them from roadside farmer stands, bought them at grocery stores, and had them in everything from hole in the wall restaurants in developing countries to Michelin three star restaurants on multiple different continents.
Today’s grocery tomatoes are fine. And my grocery stores generally have 5-10 varieties too.
Yes, you can get better ones, but not to where it’s some religious experience that will forever ruin grocery store tomatoes.
On top of that, most people really don’t care that much, not because they don’t know any better, but because the cost and convenience factor trumps the slight subjective increase in quality. I doubt most people could even tell the difference between two tomatoes of the same type and ripeness if one came from the grocery store and the other from a backyard garden.
I don't think the point of the strawberry example is that industrialization failed to make strawberries cheaper or more available. It obviously did the opposite in many places. The point is more about what gets selected for when the whole system optimizes for scale, consistency, shelf life, lowest acceptable cost
They also grow extremely well in many climates across the northern US and are good at self-perpetuation. They're a fantastic balcony plant since their crawlers will hang down and offer fruit to a downstairs neighbor.
Woodland strawberries grow even better somehow. We used to have them planted at the garden, then a few years ago we removed them and planted something else and this year I was surprised to find that they somehow survived and moved a few meters away from where they originally were.
They grow fine in pretty much all of Europe, and most of South America - you may need to find a mountain to grow them on if very close to the equator. I imagine most of the rest of the world fair similarly.
I have a friend who works in the flavor and fragrance industry and one of the things strawberry fragrance is used for is… (drum roll) actual strawberries.
Yep, a light spritz of strawberry scent on actual fucking strawberries apparently makes them more appealing.
> If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them.
And they all taste watery, i.e. almost no taste at all, all this as a result of the industrialisation of strawberry farming. Which means that it was a good enough example for me.
He's right - that phrase evokes what he means better than many alternatives.
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 got much more out of it and it's intelligently written
I see this structure:
* introduce dopamine fracking
* the wonderful strawberry analogy to what we loose, personally, by giving
in to the substitue for the real thing
* how they (the author) managed to in baby steps turn down attempts at fracking _their_ dopamine: through awareness of what's happening and what were missing because of it
so until there is some bigger scale solution, we can at least self regulate.
and overall the article is a positive note in difficult times.
* some parts of it imply it's about higher intensity, 'bigger' dopamine hits
* while other parts talk about commodification, i.e. making these 'dopamine hits' as cheaply as possible, with as little other substance as possible
Not the same thing. There's a connection - reducing 'substance' make it more 'pure' dopamine, also there's some loudness war between different sources. But still, in the end people generally don't feel anything intense when scrolling tiktok, it's just enough to grab attention.
I guess more direct analogy with fracking might work better: it squeezes dopamine hit out of things which normally don't warrant attention.
Same here, I enjoyed it too. A lot of people are nitpicking on the strawberry analogy, but there is certainly something to be said about the commodification of everything.
The prime example for me of this phenomena is selfies. What is the point of taking pictures, really? To capture the moment? Or to post to social media? If I am going to be honest, most pictures today are taken so that they are able to be broadcasted it to everyone.
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.
Carrying a camera around at all times killed the value of photographs to large extent. I know people who come home from a one week vacation with 100's of pictures, that are never looked at again, and which spoiled all the moments where one could really enjoy the scene. Music concerts where nearly all the crowd film the concert and mostly miss the experience by doing so, is another example.
I don’t think it’s having a camera that killed it, it’s that most people stopped printing their photos. Most people have thousands of poorly sorted and duplicate photos on their phone which aren’t very enjoyable to scroll through.
I went and sorted through all my photos and printed out the best ones to pin up on a board. I love looking at them and everyone who comes over finds it interesting to look through the photos on the wall too.
Yes, you explained better. It is having the camera always with you and the abundance of photos that are the result, which for most people including me are too much and too boring to sort out. I find myself in the opposite situation now, when at a happening or event I take no photos at all, because I came to hate taking them. Feel it is not worth spoiling the moment. But that means not recording the valuable moments for later, so I may come to regret that at old age.
I started taking an old digicam with me to events. I don’t ask people for a photo for them to pose, I just capture as it was before they notice.
The old flash photography combined with candid authentic expressions is really refreshing to see again. The phone camera and look is just so overdone that it’s boring. Taking photos with an old tech and different focal length feels fresh and fun. I don’t post these on social media, I just print them and share the pics directly with the person, everyone has loved it.
There’s also a delayed gratification aspect. I can’t just post these from my phone as soon as I take them. I have to go home, take the sd card out, and copy them over before I can share them. I think there’s something to be said for just slowing down and enjoying the limitations.
I like that, and I heard it is becoming a bit of a trend where people also leave their phone at home, and more deliberately choose the precious moments to capture. Nice.
I took essentially no photos in my twenties (long before phone cameras) for exactly this reason - and, in the short term, absolutely did remember events better than the folks who were constantly looking for their next digicam shot. I'm now living the long-term of that, though, and regret that I have nothing "tangible" to show my wife and kid, or even to re-spark my own memory, about all the amazing things I did back then.
I'm a bit more intentional now: I don't pull out my (phone) camera all that often, but I try to look for something that will represent - not record (that's impossible), but spark a memory of - the moment later. By the way, people are more important for this than things, or "the thing" itself. I actually think the selfie brigade are on the right track, for all that they may become annoying by overdoing it.
I'd say there's at least a third reason: intellectual (or rather technical) curiosity of photography itself. Often, when I take a picture, it is just to see how a particular shot turns out, much less so for any sentimental value to myself or anybody consuming those images later on.
I'd also say that's most likely a healthy kind of dopamine usage, as it's leading one into a life of exploration, learning and wonder.
But you're right, taking a true in-the-moment picture is a skill.
I always remember a posed photo that one of my old bosses had on her desk. It was of her and her daughter; she was giving a big attractive (to my eyes faked for the camera) smile, and her daughter looked miserable.
I appreciated the unintentional honesty: time and time again you see kids being told to smile for a camera, when they’re young enough that society hasn’t yet ingrained in the social necessity of doing so.
I used to think this, and I only took photos of places (without me in them). Then I realised that the value of the photo is to remind me of what I was doing, how I was feeling, etc, not just that I was in the place. I agree that faking smiles makes the photo worth less, but just don't fake anything.
I am not against taking selfies in the literal sense. Go ahead and take a snap of you and your surrounding. It becomes sad and depressing when someone needs to do multiple takes and even worse, touch up the image.
>> I don't like looking at those pictures because I know everyone is faking it.
Maybe you're not far enough removed from them yet. Looking back on a group photo years later, especially if some of those people have died, is a very pleasant experience. The point isn't "look at us all smiling" when you know that it was posed, the point is "remember all of those people there that day, we were together, we did x etc". It reminds you of the entire event, not the specific moment of taking the photo.
Edit: Sit with a parent or grandparent and go through their photo albums. Almost all the photos are posed and you'll see how great that can be.
I'd say selfies just aren't for you, and that's fine. For many others it's not, and friends at a distance may just like seeing their friends' faces instead of just the subject. But I don't understand it myself because I'm outside of those circles. (and less face oriented but that's probably the autism/introversion lmao)
I posted something very similar on here last year after a visit to Ibiza - as we sat eating lunch in the castle in Ibiza old town, a group of young women spent the entire time we were there, maybe an hour and a half, in turn posing for photos next to a plant. Each time one went in for the pose, they'd pass their phone to a friend to take the pictures. It went on and on. The two things that really struck me about this were: 1. all the photos seemed to be taken with the subject's phone, so nobody had any photos of the people they were actually there with, and 2. If they'd turned around, there was an absolutely stunning view right behind them.
These days, go anywhere in the world with a pseudo famous landmark and watch the same thing. I've been travelling long enough to remember people being present and taking in the experience. Now it's literal queues for the perfect spot to take 100 near identical photos of themselves, and choose a few later for social media.
I've never understood the need to take a picture of yourself. I know what I look like--I don't need a photo to remind me. The rare times I ever even take a picture of something, it's because that thing is interesting or unique, and I'd like to look at it carefully later.
I feel similarly. Take good photos of your friends doing cool things. Absolutely do not stop everyone for a group picture. Forget things. It’s okay to forget the minutia of life.
> The constant search for the next big thing, the next big hit of dopamine,
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.
Yeah, when people say "dopamine hit" nowadays that can mean anything from serotonin to endorphins to even adrenaline. What they usually mean is simply an optimized experience. Optimized, commodified, industrialized, etc, in a way article describes.
Amount of misinformation regarding dopamine is staggering. While it plays a huge role in modern social media practices, it is relevant in search/anticipation phase, not having fun/resolution phase.
Personally I blame Jordan Peterson. He described dopamine's role correctly, just didn't adjust the message to his audience, who in turn misunderstood what he said and passed that on, referencing him as an authority.
Now that I think about it adrenaline was the previous go-to chemical which somehow explained all human behaviour.
True. I think it's the same as everyone calling pain killers "aspirin" (where I live, maybe in the US is Tylenol? Which we call Paracetamol), they call SARS-CoV-2 AND COVID-19 "Corona", or "Corona-virus". Sending an App means sending a message via Whatsapp here, it's not "sending a link to an app-store or play-store app (or whatever)" as one would think. Some (way to many!) people mean their browser when they say "the internet". AI means LLMs, but not always, sometimes it includes CNNs (I try to use gen AI and machine learning, but people look at me weird)...
Similarly, Dopamine now just means "a short hit of instant gratification" to the average person. I also don't like it, it leads to misinterpretations of scientic texts (which are usually very strict about word usage, and consequently differ from the "popular" meanings of a word, or in this case, molecule).
I've noticed as a kid, that strawberry flavoured candy doesn't actually taste like strawberries. They are clearly and collectively recognisable as strawberry candies, but that's just pattern matching and conditioning on wording. The flavour has not much to do with actual strawberries, even the sweetness is vastly exaggerated. The synthetic aroma is much less complex, as the author noted. We just fell into the habit (or trap) of using the same word for both flavours.
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 think all "fruity" candies are pretty much the same sugar, and our brain merely looks at the color and packaging and fills in a "flavor" for it. Maybe my taste buds are just not working, but I don't think I could do a blind taste test and identify a candy's claimed flavor.
Yes i guess color and packaging make a huge part of the effect. But they do use artificial flavors and i imagine that i could blindly differentiate apple and strawberry candies, but i could not blindly associate them with their natural pendants.
I know this article talks about digital media, but in general, that is what any technology does. It distances us from nature and makes things more convenient, but it also takes away the nuances involved.
Any concept that helps us categorize real things also takes away their individuality. Every tree is different, but the word “tree” takes away its uniqueness. A “tree” becomes something that provides humans with food, or something that can be used for firewood or paper.
Anxiety over commodification is very, very old, and tends to miss the upsides of commercial society. Intellectuals, by our nature, focus on problems -- often to the point of creating problems where (perhaps) there were none before. Happily "dopamine fracking" will probably not metamorphose into another menacing sounding anti-commercial phrase. There are enough already.
If you are sympathetic, or even curious, about the advantages of commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an excellent place to begin.
You could argue that anxiety over climate change is somewhat old, and yet I'd argue that there's ever more evidence the problem is real. Just because the direction of travel was identified a long time ago, it doesn't mean that it's desirable or impossible to change.
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.
It's great that someone penned their experience and path towards self-awareness in a way that helps others achieve the same. Or, at least for me, it put words on an uneasy feeling I hadn't yet fully materialized. I too would be saddened if the flattening of our shared human experiences accelerated even more.
Great read, thanks. Just always consider what you are doing when you tag a friend in a meme: feeding your friend the internet drug. Is that what you wanna do to someone you care about?
I've thought about aspects of this off and on for a while, so it was a good read, I grew up making lefse with my mom, it's a big nostalgia hit for me, but my siblings don't make it, it's time consuming and sometimes I don't feel like it, and I wonder if the next generation or maybe even one more down the line will have just completely stopped making this. I think about what other things people used to make that just aren't really 'easy' to manufacture, or whatever and so they are only made by small groups of people and that will probably die off one day. I also think about the food we eat is largely designed to be the highest profit, we only have strawberries because they're cost effective enough, for now, but how many other fruit/vegetables/etc are we missing out on, because growing them are just too much of a hassle, and they're as good or better for us....sorry for the ramble but good read, def some things to think about
Maybe I'm optimistic but I do find pleasure on picking a topic, let's say Strawberries, Coffee or Barbecue and dig into the origins, trying to understand the real soul of the craft, and why industry choose the profile they choose to explode. As Uruguayan I see how Our national dish Asado get's blended in the "barbacue" concept, even often confused with Argentinian / Brazilian versions. The same happens to the Mate
> I wonder what kind of horrors wait for us in the future.
When I want to feel dread in my soul, I imagine one day some grandma will feel nostalgic about TikTok and Trump AI memes and say ‘those were the good old days,’ compared to some unfathomable horror the culture industry will have released unto humanity.
I've been forming this thought as well recently, but OP puts it in words perfectly. "Strawberry (+1 for picking it yourself) to Strawberry flavored candy" is indeed "human interaction to my LinkedIn feed", or "intimacy to pron".
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" ...
Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is the industrial revolution. Manufacturing.
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.
The original sin is the idea that the profit motive on a free market will solve all our resource allocation problems, and that consumption demand should be the ultimate arbiter of social value. Markets are pretty freaking amazing things. But their efficiency relies on assumptions that knowledge economies and software break on pretty much every front. So, it's really no surprise that we're in this mess. I don't really know what would work better, though, in a way that can practically evolve from our existing systems.
Hey, I appreciate your insight. Especially your observation that when the underlying assumptions are wrong/broken then the model produces less reliable results.
Like you, I also don't know what would work better, nor do I believe any one individual can know.
But I do have some ideas for what would make a good framework for the evaluation?
If the idea is to allocate resources in a way that provides the most benefit to the most people, where most feel they are getting a 'fair deal' or something...
and we have social institutions that convert 'resources' to value (in quotes because time, attention, etc are 'resources'. The key principle is organizing human behavior over time to produce something humans value)...
Companies
Religion
Sports
Government
then think about what value each creates, how it is delivered, how it is captured, ... recognizing that each offers some unique strengths and unique limitations.
synthetic, pure, overly stimulating, taps into base mechanics of joy creation, prone to abuse but on the same time you still want it and tell yourself that you can control it. and sometimes you really do.
none of these things are that important, or even particularly true. The greater effect is social/cultural. Wholesale capture of industries/social phenomena by technocapital. Describing everything in terms of neurotransmitters is rather silly, doesnt even really describe the experience of the individual.
The article doesn’t make it quite clear but dopamine fracking (such as described) requires both you and the companies to work.
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.
Lost me on false but popular claims on fracking on the first paragraph. If you don't even take the time to research the main topic of your "metaphor", can't expect much depthness from the Discord philosopher.
Reminds me of Slavoj Zizek’s classic example of synthetic sex (look it up), or his grievances about today’s academia: paper written by ChatGPT, peer reviewed by ChatGPT, and consumed by users as a synthesis from ChatGPT.
How refreshing to read something not written by an LLM, unless they promoted it extensively with their own writing style first and I’ve been tricked but this felt much nicer to read than a lot of what I’ve read recently
Yeh the style read like a human, but you’re right, some dashes, annoyingly I have historically used a lot of - in my writing so now I need to stop using them
I’m maybe going to blow some fucking minds here — learning this certainly blew my own mind —- BUT
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.
The term as used reminds me of opium addiction in the 19th century, and how it brought down entire countries.
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.
Fun fact: Schizophrenia is explained by the dopamine hypothesis, or more accurately, the aberrant salience hypothesis. When dopamine signaling in certain neurons becomes dysregulated, the brain's attention system goes awry. Blocking the D2 dopamine receptor with medication actually reduces real hallucinations, the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.
> 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?”
This article has an odd juxtaposition between the complaints about apps and commodified content, and the author’s affinity for the very same content.
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.
I think the criticism isn’t around Marvel films being Marvel, but rather the reaction to Marvel films being popular to make every film like a Marvel film. Can’t really comment if that’s true, though I’ve definitely noticed an increase in films becoming franchises, etc, but I think that was the implication.
I see "It was just a marvel\disney film" as a substitute for thoughtful criticism on basically every film these days. Usually they say they hate the humour. Even though if anything theres more humourless films these days than ever before.
just because everyone seems to keep asking this on different threads - hacker news is definitely social media, with a few extra steps. Its where i come to get my dopamine hit at least
Humanity was fracking dopamine from art by first painting on cave walls, then oil on canvas, and eventually we got cinematography and video games. Author sounds like a luddite. Feel free to paint on cave walls. Nothing's happening to real strawberries either.
> Humanity was fracking dopamine from art by first painting on cave walls, then oil on canvas, and eventually we got cinematography and video games.
I don't think you know what "fracking" means. It's a high-pressure, high-resource extraction method that produces high volume initially but quickly falls off, requiring a new source.
Laboriously painting a picture to get a dopamine hit is not the same as swiping up while doomscrolling.
its just like normal drugs, alcohol, weed cocaine and everything. dopamine, quick release, addiction, none of that is harmful by itself. some of them just have danegrous side effects when you OD so you need to watch out if you decide to take them.
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.
> theres nothing wrong with doing what feels good.
except that, according to your own experience, it eventually leads to you becoming unable to engage with anything that isn't an instant dopamine hit whose entire arc occurs in a few minutes. you just used writing a 3 paragraph comment as an example of an activity that required long term focus.
and to be clear, i have a lot of the same problems, so i'm not trying to come off overly judgmental here. but i view it as a personal problem that I struggle to finish a book these days, or to invest sustained attention in a challenging side project or even, at times, a fucking video game. (i've caught myself scrolling youtube shorts in my chair at my pc, procrastinating playing a video game of all things).
what you describe (and again, what I also experience, maybe to a slightly lesser extent) doesn't seem conducive to a happy and fulfilling life - or at least it seems fair to guess that a life without the dopamine addiction you're diagnosis could be happier and more fulfilling.
I was thinking of bananas and banana flavoring too. It may have been a better example than strawberries, but most people don't know how much variety bananas have because they've been so commoditized. It's too good of an example because the effect is complete.
I couldn't fully relate to the article because the finish comes across as hurried and too convenient. I went through the same process of giving up the things listed, and my life didn't suddenly become easier.
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.
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
Besides the obvious examples of living our power fantasy of "finally writing Rust without knowing Rust, thanks to AI", I noticed the same exact thing in video games, and it has so many layers of bull that I could easily come up with a blog post about it.
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.
This dopamine phracking reminds me of neal stephenson's "snow crash".
"[.] 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."
A deeper dive would go into why this seems to be such a quintessentially American pursuit.
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.
Sin-object fetishization is the act of finding something apparently concrete to blame on what is judged to be sinful behavior. This apparently Christian-origin practice is now secularized, and needs to sound scientific and objective. And since everything that we experience is mediated through the brain or neurons (gut brain) a natural candidate is “dopamine”.
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've been maintaining a log of myself, instead of dopamine franking, I call this 'seeker behavior.' Frankly, adding a name to it is helping me avoid the high and letting me enjoy things more as time goes by, try it out!
Sorry about that. I have some stuff set up to wane off AI and bots, I was getting hit with a lot of recursive traffic from Perplexity and OAI-SearchBot.
Few people I've talked to have had a stable "Why are you here and what is your purpose", and of course you can't even ask this of people who aren't super close to you.
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 already done that but it’s clear something more needs to happen to fix this on a societal level. Tech companies have hacked the human brain and optimised it to an absolutely insane level. They have truely won.
On a train recently I watched a literal toddler scrolling Instagram reels on an iPhone as big as their head.
We are going to need laws and regulations to straight up ban this new wave of incredibly addictive short form media and addition mechanics.
I think most of us older than 25 understands this. We have seen the development and the war on attention. I guess the term Dopamine Fracking is not bad. I don't think we should be too alarmist though... we are kids of our time.. in that we will arrange the society around us. In essence we are not that different from the Romans. We just have a lot more toys.
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.
While I'm empathetic to the overall theme of the post, the strawberries are a terrible example and takes away from the message. Strawberries are delicate little fruits that until a handful of decades ago, were seasonal expensive treats. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we've made a synthetic analog that allows less fortunate people to experience the taste of a perfect strawberry. Real strawberries aren't disappearing because of this, if anything this would have the opposite effect because strawberry consumption in the US have ~quadrupled in the past few decades [1]. No one replaced "500 individual human experiences", strawberries are not "extinct", there's no data to suggest that people "prefer the synthetic version".
When renovating my house and discussing solutions with my girlfriend I noticed that she (but me too to large extent and most of my millennial friends) felt towards Airbnb-ification.
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.
This was described in a 2016 essay in the Verge, coining it "airspace". It has been going on so long that indeed it has become the standard now, see this recent analysis, claiming that airbnb estate agents should invest in "authentic" interior.
This year especially, fashion in Berlin has converged to light blue jeans and white t-shirt. It’s as if fashion got distilled into something easily seized, but ever more rapidly rotating.
I don't really think bro dude understands any of the environmental effects of fracking, especially compared to other drilling mechanisms. But it's just a metaphor.
As the saying goes, experience keeps an expensive school, but humanity will learn in no other.
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.
You'd be surprised that there are folks on this planet who love em dashes. I'm one of them and I used to write a lot with em dashes, but stopped using it altogether in the past few years because of AI.
Yes but if I am aware enough of the current landscape on the web to put a "written by a human" disclaimer, I am also aware enough of the fact that current em dash perception rightfully isn't very good.
So exactly what you said.
You've stopped because you know how it will be perceived.
There is something not checking out with that blogpost is what I'm saying.
Things do not feel organic. Which can be AI, but also can be lots of other things, but regardless of that, it smells.
___
Googling the author tells me that they perhaps might just be trying a bit too hard to be taken seriously.
Oh well. But anyway
Using em-dash is as much a sign that a writer (1) knows how to produce documents properly and (2) has a good grasp of the English language as it a sign of LLM usage.
I went into my text editor, then used a find-replace tool to replace “--“ and “---“ with the appropriate dashes I copied from a character map website. Manually: with my good ‘ole hands mouse and keyboard. I realise that some grammar can just seem like LLM slop, that’s kind of what they have been designed to output. This is why I went out of my way to add that disclaimer at the end.
I enjoy using em and en dashes for punctuation. They provide a nice break that’s not quite a comma, of which I already have way too many, because I tend to overthink grammar.
I’m sorry my writing style is not appealing to you, but don’t accuse me of publishing AI slop, that’s a shitty thing to do.
I have to resist the urge to troll my friends by writing something intionally in the style of AI, just because I find the "AI Style" to be so ugly and annoying. I don't want to cause any more psychic irritation to my friends and family though so I don't do it.
Underneath this thesis are the assumptions that "taste" is (a) some objective thing that (b) is worth pursuing for its own sake, both of which I wholeheartedly reject.
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.
TBH, I cannot stand the snobbery of this article. The phenomenon of creating your own dull terms like "Dophamine Fracking" that cover all aspects of life should be added to the list of pathologies in DCM-11 section of personal disorders, this is a form of narcissism.
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".
The real answer to "which came first, the chicken or the egg" - a long line of chicken-like creatures hatched from an egg before the first ever chicken hatched from an egg.
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?
to me this phrase/word/term is in the same category as "weaponization" .. they are rhetorically powerful because they do a lot of emotional work before any argument has been made .. Once you've labeled something as "fracking" or "weaponized," you've already framed it as extractive, destructive, and morally suspect ..
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 ...
I love this term - I think it beautifully describes the direction that at least, YouTube is heading towards. Take for example, this racket where a channel copies popular (non-kids) creators’ parody work, splits the screen in half with the content on left, adds a completely random DIY type video on the right half, and lo and behold its content for kids who are too young to know any better[1].
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
It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the videos - started to clearly optimize for engagement over quality, and so now we're done with it entirely. The stuff there for "kids" legitimately horrifies me.
Agreed - even older children shouldn't be exposing themselves to that garbage. Totally garbage in garbage out situation. Youtube can be good if its highly curated -- otherwise its just trash.
It's wild that the same easily detectable spam formula from a decade ago is still active beneath every finance video today: "I'm confused! Well I gave my money to Mr. Scammy McScamface and he gave me 1000% returns! Google Scammy McScamface now!"
> Take for example...
... Do I want to know how you came across stuff like this?
The problem of 8yr olds watching too much YouTube is definitely not one for YouTube to fix.
We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do with raising children.
And then we complain that our kids are not being raised properly. We don't even know who to blame for this any more.
Many parents do but at that age I could watch TV or play video games without strict parental supervision (I had older brothers and would often play with them while my mom cooked or whatever). I was lucky because while I did watch some age inappropriate media (I watched Gundam Wing on Toonami when I was 7) I was really lucky that none of these things were trying to addict me to them in the same way media often does now.
I don't think the level of autonomy I had in the mid-late 90s would be a good idea now, even though it helped me be an independent and resilient adult, and I don't think that's parents' fault. I would've really struggled with the purposefully addictive nature of modern media and trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids (and I've met a lot of parents who had some issues with it).
I'd like to agree but practically there are difficulties enforcing it. Anecdotally I know of some parents having a battle with their local school because their kids have been watching this sort of crap in kindergarten.
Fundamentally it seems like building products designed to target children with harmful content, or content that substitutes for educational material, should not be accepted by society.
So yes parents are responsible but maybe we should stop building The Torment Nexus but for children.
I see "Torment Nexus" has completed is evolution into a catch-all term for "things I don't like".
Fundamentally it seems like kindergartens showing youtube videos to kids should not be accepted by society.
> We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do with raising children.
This is just the logical conclusion of consumerism.
Consumerism produces careerism. Careerism produces the two income household. A two income household cannot devote the needed time to raising children during their early years. Day care and school and after school activities has been used to keep children busy while parents were hunting for that next promotion and the bigger paycheck to get the better car to get the better "status" in the eyes of their neighbors.
The zombie is the perfect symbol for consumerism, because it involves a mindless, indiscriminate, beastly, and insatiable hunger that would sell his own grandmother for that next disposable morsel.
I think we really need to reshape things to conform to biological and human reality instead of working against it. In the case of women, our culture as well as our political and economic structures must support the ability of women to have children earlier and to be able to raise them themselves during their early years. Many women do actually want this, but the culture pressures them to do otherwise or convinces them that the consumerist lifestyle is more attractive, causing them to defer having children (constraining their fertile years) and to pursue careers that increasingly make it difficult to choose to relinquish for at least some time as they raise their children.
This reads like literal propaganda.
Every assertion of personal responsibility (sic) in the face of billion to trillion dollar industry spending is bad faith, zero exceptions.
British Petroleum invented the concept of personal climate footprint. That was bad faith and to put a point on it, evil.
Tech industry claims that engagement farming and addition manufacture should be opposed by "parenting" are even less credible.
Yes and no. Look around you and count how many properly failing parents there are. Parents who literally offload their parenting to a tablet, TV, phone, nanny which is often on phone herself, whatever. Then complain kids are unruly when they don't simply listen to them like soldiers. Parents, who are often as addicted to the screens (and more) as their kids. Recent studies showed above half of toddlers below 2 spend an hour or more daily on screens, thats fucked up.
I can count many such parents, way too many that I know. Kids before 5-6 should not access internet and should not watch TV. Don't trust me, trust children psychologists. Its toxic to their developing brains and personalities. Let them fuck up their lives on their own later if they must, don't give them hard addiction from the literal start of life, just because 'oh daddy has this super important work so doesn't have time to be a parent' syndrome, especially when its mostly empty pathetic soul draining white collar work with 0 added value to humanity.
And if one is truly changing the world for the better (as in 1 out of those maybe 10 humans actually currently doing it) and can't spare time for some kids, then don't have them, its not some freakin' checkbox ticked and moving to next challenge and achievement unlocked. Its by far the hardest effort one can make in one's life, spans over 2+ decades, be never 100% successful, while facing many real risks of failure completely outside of one's powers (no I don't mean peer pressure phones in school, rather ie health issues)
I think this is a “yes, and” kind of situation. Yes, a lot of parents suck, and yes, we should try to improve that situation, but also yes, we absolutely should punish megacorporations for making parents’ jobs harder by targeting children with their proven-to-be-harmful products.
Like, parents shouldn’t give cigarettes to their children, BUT ALSO it is both illegal and immoral for tobacco companies to target children.
> Parents, who are often as addicted to the screens (and more) as their kids.
This is a huge part of it. Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if you tell them to put down the screens, yet you yourself are scrolling Instagram all day, the kid is going to know you are full of shit! It's like smoking a cigarette while telling your kid that smoking is bad for you.
And how many of those parents are spending 50+ hours a week (or more) working too?
There are finite fucks anyone can give, and if someone is working all day keeping a roof over their head, what else is it going to happen?
Reminds me of Adornos "Dialektik der Aufklärung" and its take on what he calls the "Kulturindustrie". Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.
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.
You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point to some degree.
> 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.
I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted the real thing, they would prefer the artificial product. For example, we have Sauce Hollondaise in my country, and most people were probably raised on the convenience product. The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh. So, I've noticed that even if people taste the 'real' sauce, they prefer the convenience product.
Maple syrup is a big one. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been to even fancy breakfast restaurants and had real maple syrup.
Cracker barrel used to, decades ago now. It's all garbage corn syrup now. I'd rather not have syrup at all than that cloying, thick, gross stuff.
At a restaurant it’s hard because people use way too much and it’s expensive stuff. A solution could be tiny packaged packets of it, the way they do with butter (in part for much the same reason)
I grew up with fake Maple Syrup (high fructose corn syrup), so when I first tried REAL maple syrup as an adult, I preferred the fake, thick corn product over the genuine watery, ultra sweet tree product.
Huh, I've been to plenty of places were you could order it for an up charge and it came in it's own little bottle.
Heh, I thought of maple syrup as well. And I'm ashamed to say I prefer the fake stuff! Although it's likely because it's what I had as a child, so there's a strong nostalgia factor.
What's the grade of the maple syrup you tried ? (the new grading system is stupid everything is grade A with a color name)
In my opinion,
The A golden is light and subtle, I don't know what it's for; it's the variety we sell in tourists, and to peoples that likes fancy bottles and higher prices!
The A amber is great as a condiment in small quantities, for pancakes it's the best.
The A dark is the best for cooking deserts.
And the A very dark is my favorite for cooking meats like ham and ribs.
So if you only tasted the A golden I can see why you would prefer the fake syrup if you were raised on that stuff. But I would be surprised if you prefer the fake stuff to the A dark.
This is where I would note that tastes can be deformed. It is possible, for various reasons, to acquire bad tastes (here, childhood nostalgia).
>deformed
Jeesus. Very silly elitism here.
There's no such thing as an obvious "Perfect" taste. Everyone has different taste preferences. Some people legitimately prefer and like the thing you consider "lesser" for reasons like they literally experience it differently than you do and that experience is not as good for them.
People have dramatic differences in their tastes. Some people are far more sensitive to sour flavors. Some people have way less tolerance for bitter. Your diet will radically change how salty something tastes. Same for sweetness. Same for spicy.
I grew up eating homemade maple products from my Uncle's trees he tapped and cooked himself. I've had the real deal.
It's just not that good for most uses of "Sugar syrup" to me. A molasses cookie is tastier than a maple cookie to me. Maple syrup on a pancake will pollute the pleasant flavor of a literal cake I am eating for breakfast with all sorts of complicated tree resin compounds. I prefer a simple light caramel flavor in my sugar syrup to go on top of my cake that I am eating for breakfast. I want to taste the light and subtle flavors of butter and sweetness and a simple cake. I don't want the complexity of a good maple syrup.
Now when I make my ham, that's when I use a maple glaze. That's exactly when all the complexity shines, against the powerful savory ham flavor.
I refuse to believe this is true.
t.Quebec
A Canadian friend brought me back 2 bottles of local maple syrup as a gift. Ok, I'm a pretentious Frenchman when it comes to food and I do think most North Americans have no idea how real food tastes.
But that stuff, I didn't know how it really tasted before trying the OG thing.
Globalisation gave us the illusion of experiencing the world.
I think it's worse than that. It promotes race to the bottom.
I love strawberries, blueberries (bilberry variety) and tomatoes, but apart of the few times in the year when I can collect my own or visit a PYO farm I'm not eating them at all.
Every shop (small and huge alike) only sells the fake, hyper-accelerated garbage (sorry Spain and Morocco, but that stuff is just gross), or - in season - locally grown similarly tasteless but raised on BPA, PFAS, dioxins, flame retardants, etc[1]
I can't even buy the quality stuff. It's just not being sold, because people only buy and eat trash :(
[1] not exaggeration - fuck British farmers knowingly pouring poison on their fields and the corrupt UK governments[2] for openly permitting it, may they get impacted by it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/uk-farml...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e5y85p488o
I visit Maui fairly regularly, and its the same thing with local "Maui Gold" pineapple. It is a completely different fruit from the Dole crap you buy in supermarkets on the mainland. Whenever I'm there I'll eat pineapples until my tongue burns, and when I'm home I don't eat it at all.
Living in London, I notice the same. Getting access to true quality produce is not even a question of money now, it's basically just impossible to get full stop. There are a few local shops in the more upmarket areas that survive on the fact that people are willing to pay the 2-3x premium over the prices at Waitrose.
Gone are the days when you could ask the grocer or farmer to give you a peach to taste. People got used to having 24/7/365 access to everything, and supermarkets optimized purely for looks instead of taste and nutrition, because you aren't allowed to taste anything there. The only thing you can go by is the looks. This means looks sell.
I'd hazard a guess the vast majority of brits don't even know what a proper strawberry tastes like, because the only thing they can buy are beautifully polished turds. Everything tastes watery and crap, or conversely just generic "sweet".
I wouldn't even blame farmers. Their life is hard enough. They are operating on razor thin margins in a very uncertain environment. The consumer (against their own interests) demands that they produce beautifully and cheap turds, so that's what they'll produce. And if you try to do the right thing, you simply run out of money because you can't compete with the turds at the supermarket.
I only have empirical evidence for this, but it got much worse since Brexit as well. The variety has gone down a lot, I see shelves routinely empty at supermarkets and they all seem to be focusing on the same ultraprocessed crap.
I agree, farmers are not responsible for everything, but definitely for pouring the toxic sludge. That's their choice. Conscious, willful. I doubt they'd make a tea on the water leeching from the landfill so why do they think it's okay to use it on the fields? Nasty.
But I agree, most of the blame lies on the corrupt government (can't think of a better reason explaining why they sanction the above practice or why they gleefully ignore supermarkets role in the "cost of living crisis" - part of it being squeezing the farmers in the same way they squeeze the customers).
And i agree it's been much worse since Brexit - the customer has been conditioned to tolerate worse quality and choice for ever higher prices. Continuous approval to neonicotinoids use in our fields is telling as well.
Gross and saddening. I'm telling my kids to get their education and leave the UK. Being EU country citizens they might even study in some cleaner and saner place.
You should try Natoora in Notting Hill or Daylesford. I live in Belgravia and am admittedly spoiled for choice .. the Harrods Food Hall has excellent seasonal and harder to find fruits, and Daylesford consistently has some of the best British produce I've come across... the one in Sloane street even has the best organic Alphanso Mangos from India.
As for Brexit, I actually think it's been a net positive.
You have to be joking, right? So you are saying that it's all fine, because we can just go to Harrods to get quality food?
Nevermind that I hate Harrods and that entire area with a passion. It's a tasteless, glitzy tourist trap.
My post was all about the fact that barring a tiny percentile of people who a) live in an affluent area and b) are willing to pay 2-3x the regular supermarket prices, you cannot get good quality food. And you say "ah it's simples, just go to the most egregiously flashy beacon of division between the rich and poor and you can get good fruit"
Thank you, I can still get good fruit at my local grocer in Wimbledon, because it charges 2-3x over the regular high street prices and there are people around who can pay this. Doesn't help someone living in Croydon and having to go to Tesco, does it now.
Why is appreciation of excellence so often mistaken for ostentation … driving a Rolls or bentley, living in a grand Georgian terrace in Zone 1, enjoying a glass of Romanée at Zuma, or wearing exquisite Italian made cashmere are all examples of exceptional European craftsmanship and heritage. Yet those who enjoy such things are casually labelled by folks like you as flashy, pompous, or glitzy. Why? What is the real objection kind sir ? Croydon (especially east Croydon) is an absolute shit hole .. it’s full of illegal immigrants, and lots of crime and drug users .. they are more likely to appreciate an undercooked McDonald’s chicken tender than fresh organic winter peas from a farm in Wiltshire lol
I'm confused. What exactly is it about these immigrants that make them incapable of appreciating fresh food? I agree that you can enjoy your privilege or money just fine, but do you believe that the poor are incapable or unworthy of appreciating wealth or privilege? They're surely more likely to appreciate the cost-to-calorie ratio.
That’s fine, I’ll help clear the confusion.
See, wholinator number two, the issue with these particular immigrants in Croydon and other parts of the UK is that many of them are here illegally and, therefore, are not entitled to the same rights and treatment as legal immigrants beyond the basic human rights that Great Britain and its taxpayers provide .. Think about it, wholinator number two .. why would I give them fresh organic produce if they are in the country unlawfully? You shouldn’t be barbaric towards people who break the law, but at the same time, you don’t necessarily treat them to the very finest British produce either. Anybody who thinks that’s the right thing to do is borderline crazy, possibly even retarded …
But what happens here, let me point that out for completeness, is not a dark conspiracy. At least not on this level.
People go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest thing that does the trick, probably because they can't afford something else. Bills want to be payed.
Partially agree, in case of Aldi/Asda/Lidl but mostly not.
They don't have a choice, they cannot encounter a good vegetables and fruits in the normal stores. They CANNOT, at least in the UK. It's that simple. Maybe during some events, as a curiosity.
Good quality vegetables are not available on the shelves in general. Maybe in some cases, yeah. Some. But generally not. Similarly with meat, although it's much easier here to find something decent.
The difference in taste and quality between the cheapest and most expensive fresh fruits and vegetables in the supermarkets is virtually none. If you don't believe me, you don't have to, I simply grew plenty of that as a kid and a teenager, I keep growing some, and the difference between the average garden-sourced (or PYO/small farm sourced) and the Aldi/M&S/Waitrose/Tesco is simply too big to describe, you'd have to try it.
So there's an illusion of choice between awful and bad - in that case I'm simply choosing imported (thanks to the landfill and manufacturing waste in our great British food chain). People who don't know, or don't care pick whatever looks the best.
Some buy the cheapest. Not everyone buys the cheapest - you can't seriously claim that in case of the expensive stores (Sainsbury's, M&S, Waitrose).
And then there's palate problem. If someone was raised on these garbage produce, they may even favour it over healthy, proper ones. Proper radish will have a bite to it. Proper tomato has a complex profile (and there's hundreds of varieties of that too), instead of how garden stores describe it being "tasty"....
Consumers have been dumbed down and trained into accepting inferior livestock feed as food, and thanks for that they can for example say with a straight face that they actually like or prefer Tesco white toast bread.
(they've been scammed)
the real stuff was arguably improved upon with the thicker replacement. I don't want wet pancakes.
As New Englander I feel it's important to note that there are, like olive oil, various grades of maple syrup. They changed the system but Grade B / Dark maple syrup is the best for pancakes and "thickness". If you want to make a sauce or cook with it, golden or amber are fine.
That grade switch was crazy. I spent decades learning grade B is what I wanted, now it’s grade A, and it’s still confusing me.
It's made Grade B more widely available though, because now it's just a light or dark choice like brown sugar, whereas before Grade B seemed somehow inferior. Before it was easy to assume Grade-A would be the most maple-y.
Kind of sounds like you haven't had real maple syrup.
I have canadian cousins and they send me the real stuff every year. It's just what you prefer.
Some people like a Rolex watch they can flash at parties. Others are happy with a cheap imitation with a nice form that they can wear daily
>French cultural pessimism
Specifically Jean Baudrillard describes copies of copies with decreasing relavence and quality. But more sinisterly, the loss of knowing what is real, important, safe, efficacious.
His work builds extensively on Plato, Lucretius, and Deleuze's concept of the Simulacrum.
This is like how 95% of SUVs are basically just minivans with a slightly different body. You have to research to find one with a truck engine that can say, haul a travel trailer. Another one that comes to mind is shutters on windows. People like the look but they’re just planks of wood in the vast majority of cases now.
> People like the look [of shutters] but they’re just planks of wood in the vast majority of cases now.
I'm confused, what are real window shutters then?
Or do you mean the kind that are attached to the wall and don't actually close?
.. and here I am wanting better minivan options that can pull a travel trailer.
And here I am just wanting station wagons to come back, and be reasonably priced.
The towing numbers are always higher in Europe than US too, despite being the same cars (as far as I know).
> The towing numbers are always higher in Europe than US too, despite being the same cars (as far as I know).
Mostly due to differences in environment, AFAIK. Americans drive faster, and towing instability seems to increase with the square of the speed. Also, most travel trailers in the US wouldn't be car-towable anyway, because we have expectations on amenities and size that are predicated on using at least a half-ton pickup for the tow vehicle. Trailers with the compromises needed to be towed European-style aren't popular, so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
Same with truffle mayo or truffle-based products. [1]
People who grew up on the artificial flavor prefer it over the real one. I have quite a few in my circle of friends.
You go to an Italian restaurant and you get plain pasta, panned in butter or olive oil and then someone comes with a real truffle and grates it in front you of over your dish until you tell them to stop. You pay for that amount.
Unless you go to a restaurant with a great reputation or some Michelin star venue, that is the only way to be sure you're eating real truffles. The dish has no truffle-aroma itself and the truffle is grated while you watch.
Assuming ofc (and probably true for most people): your palate is not well acquainted to the taste of the real thing enough to tell it apart from the many fakes/substitutes.
[1] https://www.tasteatlas.com/truffle-industry-is-a-big-scam
If the real thing doesn't taste like gasoline, I'd probably prefer the real thing. I find fake truffle disgustingly gasoline- or solvent-like.
Never thought of the fake variant as gasoline-like but it sure has that strange, very heavy 'chemical' aftertaste that lingers in your palate. Also never tried the real thing, I wonder if i'd like it or not.
+1 - it tastes so obviously of petrochemicals that I throw the food out - truffle fries, truffle pasta - might as well pour mineral spirits on it for the same experience.
I was fully triggered by the hollandiase bit. This is something I look for constantly when I travel for real eggs Benny. It's never real, even at higher end hotels. They just use better quality fake stuff. And it's so good when it's real.
My wife makes real Eggs Benedict for me once a year on my birthday. I went to a resort hotel and spit out their Eggs Benedict it tasted so bad compared to what I get at home. They comped my meal. I guess this explains why I’m constantly confused why Eggs Benedict doesn’t taste right. I’ve found one, maybe two restaurants with passable Eggs Benedict in my city.
> The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh.
No it's not.
It's not at all difficult if you have gained the basic survival skill of cooking. I mean, take a couple egg yolks in a double boiler, add the juice of a lemon, whisk until it's thick then add butter. 10 minutes and you can use a bowl over the pot of boiling water you're poaching your eggs in if you don't have a double boiler for your camp stove in the wilderness.
But that's still more of a hassle than putting the carton of that yellow plastic liquid in the microwave for a minute and a half. People will prefer their slops and the farmer brings it right to you; what could possibly be a better life?
And that's ten minutes every time someone orders a dish with hollandaise because it really breaks when reheating as well. Given how much cost of labor is a factor it's easy to see why hardly any restaurant will serve real hollandaise. Perfect Baumol cost disease example. Maybe something like a Thermomix could solve the economic problem of hollandaise.
I short-circuited my microwave accidentally two years ago (don't power it up and then drop screwdrivers) and that was the best thing to happen to my meals.
Two microwaves tried to burn my house down so I said, fine, universe, I hear you.
I don't even have an oven anymore; three induction hobs, air fryer (instant pot with the fry lid), rice cooker, bread machine.
I have really bad luck with kitchen appliances these last 10 years!
Nothing kills a discussion like when someone just saying "I disagree" with zero explanation. They're not really contributing just cluttering up the comments. At least give a reason why.
(Not the person you're replying to.)
The original sauce is, in fact, a pain to make. However, it's not the 17th century any more. You can, with an immersion blender (which is not a particularly obscure piece of kitchen hardware), make it very easily. There's a bit of a knack, but only a bit of one, and if the sauce breaks you can just restart the emulsion with a new egg.
https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-hollandaise-r...
The same basic technique can be used for mayonnaise and is even harder to screw up.
For the record: you basically take a stick blender, the container that came with it, crack an egg, pour over some lemon juice, then blend while pouring in hot butter (use the microwave!). Takes ca 2 minutes, including the 1 minute 30s of microwaving the butter.
Instant _real_ sauce hollandaise as the stick blender creates a vortex that emulsifies it. No need to hand whisk it over a bain-marie at careful temperatures.
Has anyone tried ultrasound (either probe or basin) for this mixing? I know it can be done for a finer substance
The other post is also just an assertion.
Can you link to evidence that countering assertions with assertions kills discussions? (This is sarcasm)
Cant / currently cooking creme diplomate.
You are forgiven
Thank you father
https://imgur.com/a/CKE0V37
https://anonpaste.pw/v/db571281-c2b0-489e-b121-29959add1947#...
That's a 2.5kg raspberry pie. About 120€ in a bakery.I don't know the real sauce is incredible compared to the fake stuff. It really is a massive hassle though :/
Try this:
https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-hollandaise-r...
I used to make it on the stovetop - even learned how to rescue it when it broke - but I don't anymore. You can decide whether using a hand blender counts as "real" or not, but the ingredients are the same, and I can't tell the difference, only the technique is arguably "cheating".
I make eggs benedict probably once a month or two. It's really fairly simple with an immersion blender. Comes together in like a minute. Timing the poached eggs and the sandwich elements is a little tricky, but not materially more difficult than, eg, cinnamon rolls from scratch.
I know! But a lot of people prefer the fake stuff, because they were raised on it or harbor nostalgic feelings for it. For them, it's the real deal.
When it comes to these lines of thinking, and to romanticism which is closely related, I have a hard time not seeing some of it as disdain for the middle class and nostalgia for the stories classic aristocracy told about itself.
I’m American and grew up inundated with cultural disdain for the suburbs, tract housing, malls, all those things, and at some point I asked, well, what then? What’s better?
Sauce made slowly by hand is better. Carefully curated culture is better. Hand made, artisan, intentional.
Rare. Special. And if it’s rare and special few can have it, making it also expensive and aristocratic.
As soon as you try to give everyone that experience, you get chain stories. You get tract homes. You get mass culture. Because it’s a mass. It’s million, billions of people, and we are not as unique as we think we are. None of us are.
I’m not saying the whole critique is this. There’s another side to it that’s about exploitation and addiction and that one rings true to me. But I find that it’s hard to peel the two things apart.
It’s not exploitation to raise the standard of living of masses of people, and if you think it’s inherently tacky maybe you’re a neo-feudalist reactionary and don’t know it yet. There’s a reason that stuff took hold so easily among certain kinds of hipsters.
I see a lot of leftists where if you could get them to let go of one idea, namely equity and equality, you’d instantly have a “trad.” Most of their other opinions are already aligned.
I don’t see my post as making any judgement, let alone offering criticism. It’s simply my observation that many people prefer the artificial stuff to the original product.
But since you’ve brought this up, I’d argue that it’s not a question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply isn’t given access to these products. What they get is an abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the flavour but abstracts anything else away. Take, for example, meat or vegetable stock, which is now a staple in every kitchen in the form of powder or stock cubes. If you take a look at the ingredients and nutritional values, they’re rather disappointing. The masses may get access to the taste, but not to the nutrients.
I didn’t mean to come off as criticizing you, just providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas.
The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version?
In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more.
The artificial mass market imitation is cheaper because it is thermodynamically cheaper. It takes far less labor (the most costly input to almost all processes) and it substitutes things that can be bulk produced at a lower unit cost. Being less nutritious probably directly correlates since nutrition is chemical complexity is lower entropy, higher energy, harder to scale.
There’s a lot of rare “authentic” experiences that cannot be scaled. That means most people can’t have them, ever.
You can’t have both rarity / exclusivity and democratization / equality. One side has to give.
This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries. Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the thinnest veneer can be "scaled".
But what do you do about free will? If billions of people want maple syrup, do you say “no, no, we can’t scale the real thing and corn syrup is a poor substitute, so you can’t have even a simulacrum of the experience”?
That means most people can never have it, which is why romanticism ends up pining for aristocracy.
I take your point, but the other argument against scaling in this way doesn't rely on sentiment: it's unsustainable. I actually hate that word, but the point is that current production methods create (unpriced) environmental externalities. We're draining aquifers, exhausting topsoil, pouring fertilizer into rivers, using too much petroleum - and then throwing a massive portion of what we produce away. (And that's just for food; similar arguments exist for fashion, and sometimes for buildings and infrastructure.) That argument gets effectively zero traction - despite, I think, being the better one - so some people who care more about that argue from sentiment instead, which (for the reasons you explain, and rightly object to) has better legs with the general public.
I look at this as a technical problem. We just aren't very good at this yet. We are, in fact, slowly getting better. Renewable energy was the largest category of new installed energy for the last few years at least, and that's a start. The question is whether we can get good at this fast enough to outrun ourselves.
My issue with at least some of green ideology is that it's viewed as a moral problem. We are sinning by asking for more than we deserve and, if you really scratch the surface, by trying to give too much to the unwashed hordes. Beneath the surface I think you find romanticism, and beneath that you find nostalgia for a fantasy world that never really existed. That fantasy world is the fantasy of the old aristocracy. It's the story they told themselves.
I think those kinds of greens are "trads" who don't know it yet. The only thing keeping them from going down that road is an attachment to the idea of equality and things like LGBTQ rights. If you give up those things, the rest aligns perfectly. If you want a world of rare authentic things enjoyed by cultured people and all of it to fit within present techno/ecological limits, you have to put the masses back in feudal serfdom and establish a rigid, religious, traditional system to hold everything in stasis that way. It would be sustainable.
But as I said a few levels up, there is another side of the critique that I think has more legs. That's the critique of engineered addiction and manipulation. Those are not mandatory effects of scale. They're engineered to maximize short term profits or for other purposes like political manipulation, which I guess is another kind of profit (power rather than money).
Good points. I expect you're familiar with the Abundance Agenda folks? They're mostly talking right now about energy and infrastructure, which I think is a correct choice, but there is a next step to take with consumer goods, so that we can end up with an abundance of quality and not more engineered addiction.
okay but most kids don’t find any kind of bushes. do they just not get to eat fruit?
> Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.
Ray Bradbury did anticipate all of that in Farenheit 451, including the addictive nature of it.
I read Farenheit 451 in 2010, and I was shocked to see that he had anticipated Twitter, but his predictions didn't stop there and he also anticipated that the next step would be what is now Tik Tok.
In The book, what happens after?
Books are forbidden, book readers are prosecuted and their collection is burned down by “firefighters”.
Torment nexus.
The taste of the masses will always be vulgar, by very definition of the word. Vulgar as in commonplace.
As someone who has struggled with understanding Adorno for a long time, I found this recent review of a book about Frankfurt School a pleasant read : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical...
You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often wrote that way.
Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings.
Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture.
(He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)
From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”."
I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...).
For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room.
Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap.
I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present.
If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..."
And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.
A misreading of Marx (intentional or otherwise) is precisely what I'd expect from Alexander.
Honestly, Marx's work is like "the Bible", nobody is really reading it honestly "from scratch". They are all coming in with an existing identity / framework / world view, and getting it to say what they want it to say.
Something about people pretending it was the official ideology of half the world tends to do that. The old man himself would have thrown up into his soup if he knew.
> I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good.
Did capitalists do this in any comprehensive or satisfactory way prior to the advent of capitalism? I’m not a communist, but this seems like a fairly weak criticism.
every time someone coins a new term for these phenomena i think of how Adorno already explained it all. "enshittification" SHUT UP
There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. Remember Peterson et all all warning about "Cultural marxism" and "postmodernism"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
I try not be against new terms like "enshittification" or "dopamine fracking" for this reason, the tech people at the levers that might be convinced to change course seem to be more open to substack and blogpost concepts (see SSC / rationalist popularity for all this new terminology that just describes old continental philosophical concepts) instead of having to read old European thinkers that use too much Marxist terminology.
Edit: case in point, literally users here are now linking to SSC essays explaining critical theory lol
Since I can't upvote @thrance's reply, I'll second it here: certainly complaints about postmodernism date to the 90s or earlier and fear of Marxism is as old as Marx (less sure about when "cultural Marxism" specifically became a scare-term of art)
> There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances.
I feel it's still ongoing, the reactionary elements are campaigning against anything circa modern (not modernist as in art but modern as organisation of society, so also anything that can be traced back to Enlightenment) and later, postmodern etc. They are actively destroying natural sciences too, which is a part of this effort. Feels like going back to feudalism.
This is the essence of the Situationists’ Spectacle.
The strawberry example reminds me of the Instant Mashed Potatoes non-book review [0].
> 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...
>In the interest of full fairness while writing this review, I purchased a plastic cup of my dad’s currently favored “Buttery Homestyle” Idahoan brand instant mashed potatoes for $1.99. The preparation was extraordinarily efficient; the aroma was decent; the taste was a reasonable facsimile; but the texture was all wrong - a smothering paste that coated my mouth and constrained my tongue like a straightjacket. 3/10 would not buy again.
I substitute warm heavy cream for half the water and add extra butter which gets me to a 6/10. Mix in some cabbage or kale and you have a quick Colcannon.
yeah some of the instant ones aren't half bad, especially if you're not just using them as mashed potatoes with gravy, but in a pinch i can throw together a reasonably hearty and savory shepherd's pie with instant, including the peaks. Heavy cream definitely helps, and get lots of air in, if possible.
obviously real potatoes taste better, but they haven't been dehydrated and reconstituted, destroying the cell structures. probably.
As someone under 40 who never had any social media, I cannot overstate the negative impact it's had on my peers and their behaviours. Worst thing to ever happen to society imo, I feel for the younger ones who grew up with it.
why doesnt hackernews count as social media?
Whether or not it counts as social media, there is no algorithm targeting individuals as far as I know. Social media in the sense of HN is just the internet.
It does, but as you really can't get money out of it in a reliable way by exploiting the user addictive behaviors, it doesn't have that effect on society.
It's just a cool place to visit now an then an check cool stuff out.
Kind of interesting how many people don’t realize that the purpose of Hacker News was to be an advertisement for Y Combinator and their portfolio companies.
You don’t see it as much these days, but YC portfolio companies can post privileged threads on this site for job listings, which in practice double as ads for the company. You’re not allowed to comment on them.
I haven’t seen one for a while because I suspect every company is already inundated with 1000 applications for every job in this market, but this is what Hacker News was for.
> people don’t realize
Y Combinator is right there in the URL. People know and don't care because it's a well run forum with interesting discussions, the privileged posts don't change that.
> Y Combinator is right there in the URL
Most people aren't so slavishly devoted to capital that they have memorized the names of firms.
I think most people know this and are fine with it. YC owns the site and advertises their stuff on it sometimes. The site itself is not trying to milk you for every penny or trying to exploit you.
Just live on /active and that stuff doesn't show up.
Man, I wish. It used to be that, but I suspect now that there's a lot of astroturfing and probably bots.
I also notice that. I don't really know where else to go now
And, HN doesn't show your ranking, at least obviously, so it doesn't get the same gamification to try and maximize points.
But, it is social media. Just that they make a point to try and tone it down and keep it focused.
We have social media-like systems going arguably Compuserve and the like, as well as games. There's a matter of "refinement", like how some older people describe the change of drugs over the decades. TikTok, Twitter and many of the games are just "too strong", and it matters. Nobody gets "addicted" to Mario 3 or IRC to the point it resembles alcoholism.
> Nobody gets "addicted" to Mario 3 or IRC to the point it resembles alcoholism.
People definitely became internet junkies in the past. IRC was where you could find chronically online people before that term was popular.
The good old IRC quote databases were full of jokes about people not leaving their house and being online all the time. I remember being mocked in IRC rooms because I was out doing things instead of being on IRC all weekend. IRC was the place for the chronically online. This has always been a thing and it’s weird to see it dismissed so casually.
People were definitely addicted to IRC.
If you want to be pedantic, everything that has user interaction I think technically counts as social media. So just about any forum on the internet counts. But there's a pretty big difference in an anonymous forum, and something like twitter, facebook etc.
The lack of ads, and the algorithm for sorting the feed.
I think the spectrum runs from social media, to forum, to news feed… maybe other things. HN isn’t toxic.
> why doesnt hackernews count as social media?
It doesn't intentionally insert dark patterns into the platform.
It's not without flaws, of course, but it's 1+ orders of magnitude better than anything else.
because we're not putting our personal lives on display here. it's a news aggregator and discussion forum. sure, some folks post their personal projects, but it's framed as news to be discussed, not desperation for validation.
I guess it is mostly (by default):
a) real pseudonymity b) no photos/videos c) no infinite scroll d) no notifications e) very specific (mildly speaking) topic range f) very very good ranking and filtering algo ....
(g) guidelines designed for curiosity and intellectual discussion that are enforced by the moderators. No "real" social media platform has anything similar. (so maybe it's more like a discussion board? LessWrong/old phpbb forums)
So true!
Why should it? Can I add you as a friend on HN? Can I become your follower? What are the social features that would make HN social media?
Talking to people
I grew up with social media but at the start of the year I quit all of it and deleted my accounts. AI slop and obvious bots everywhere was the tipping point.
I should have done it long before, quitting has been so massively beneficial and I don’t feel I’m missing anything. All real social interaction online these days is in messaging apps. Social media is just a feed of endless slop designed to put you in a zombie like state of scrolling.
I've found that this engineered optimization has a more pernicious side effect: killing curiosity.
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.
Interesting take. Do you think they are intentionally killing curiosity? If so, why?
I'm not sure these things are about "big hit of dopamine". It's more about keeping user's attention on screen. And e.g. tiktok repeatedly shows minimally interesting videos, keeping viewer in expectation: how does this video end? would next the next video show?
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.
Yes! Exactly this... Attention... We become so dependent on always being distracted so that we can not function without it. I remember there where a similar discussion about TV back in the days.. but the level it is on now is unprecedented. I think society will adjust to this behavior as it has always done before. How damning or not is yet to be decided. It does not necessarily has to be a bad thing... but being dependent on something usually is.
so, Your Attention is All They Need?
There's a certain irony in coining the term on discord. Nice blog post but I'm used to reading these from people who hang out on IRC. Times are changing indeed.
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.
> There's a certain irony in coining the term on discord
And the section in the middle where they start praising a YouTube video series that validated his anger and encourages us to go watch it.
You can sense the author’s struggles with self-regulation at the center of this article, but they have a blind spot for the content and apps that they really like. I think people in this situation would do better to start looking for positive outlets for their time like taking up an activity or exercise routine that gets them out of the house and away from screens. Trying to set arbitrary boundaries to avoid really bad content and apps is good, but if that time is just backfilled with other apps and videos then it’s only a very partial help.
I agree. I’m the author, and I think freeing up my time is the core of making myself feel better. And I think it could help others.
Because I don’t scroll nearly as much anymore, I have less things to immediately and effortlessly distract myself with. This inadvertently forces me into creativity, mindfulness or rekindling hobbies, which are healthier and more fulfilling activities than TikTok. It also promotes experimentation and trying new things. For example: I don’t write often, but having more time and boredom allows me to actually try instead of wishing I had. And now we’re having this conversation as a result.
YouTube and Discord are as much of a distraction as anything else, but their nature (or I guess how I use them) makes them feel more finite, and I can often “run out” of content to consume in a short amount of time. Previously, I couldn’t run out, and it was ruining my life and personality.
I can finally feel my life’s sort of global content feed becoming finite and manageable.
> I can often “run out” of content to consume
As a reformed YouTube addict myself, that feeling of "running out" really is great. Tragically, that was its own exciting rush which has since faded. :)
This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse suburbs.
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.
Guessing by your examples that you are American. Maybe you are aware, or perhaps not, that in Europe many view your culture as the one that has taken this to its extreme. Some envy it, some don’t.
Oh absolutely. It's also a specific segments of America. I hope Europe and elsewhere can resist but it really requires regulation because people in general are too easy to steer via advertising and convenience value propositions.
Definitely places in the US where you want find this commoditization of experience.
Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake). Or is your point that Europe has a different supermarket chain per country? Malls have the same stores across countries ... but they differ, somewhat, if you move from one country to the next. And they're fake. Every company has 3-4 store brands these days so malls have 4-5 stores that look different, but aren't.
So ... what a difference that makes?
(I mean, I get that it does make a difference. Carrefour clearly takes some pride in their chocolate selection and aldi ... well it's an insult to any product to be sold at aldi. But culture in shopping in the EU? Where do you find that?)
> Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake)
I live in a small european town and all the followings are found less than 3 minutes away from my home: butcher, baker, shoes store, newspaper store, convenience store, barber. The town hosts a market once a week that sells more divers products, and many people do shop there. Some of the stores are owned and operated by descendants of those who owned them 60 years ago, all have their owner working in the store.
Maybe you won't consider that to be "large amounts of small stores" but that is somewhat the point: all my basic needs can be covered by a handful of small stores.
Granted that type of life and town has become less representative over time, but I heard the trend is now to go back to the countryside as people flee the big cities.
> I live in a small european town and all the followings are found less than 3 minutes away from my home
walking, cycling, or driving? For where i live, in the USA, all three net me no shops. I have to travel 3.5km round trip to get candy and a cold drink at a gas station, ~19km to get fresh vegetables and fruit at all, and sixty-four kilometers to get to a "real" grocer. those are all round trip distances (had to edit 11 to 19 because i just multiplied by three instead of 6, and corrected the distance, too; oops!)
I think we have a vastly different definition of "small town"!
Now, i grew up in Whittier, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, and a city so big it's the size of a parish/county most other places. Nominally 80,000-150,000 people in the city/metro limits. all of those things you mentioned were within 10 minutes of my house, including a "German butcher" and a non-German butcher, salons, barbers, etc. there was a pretty big mall within 10 minutes, too.
Whittier's population was "quaint" when i lived there, as it's 100% US suburb, with a long way to go to get to any freeway/interstate.
I think that young USAmericans are deathly envious of a community like yours, myself included. I have nothing really novel to contribute here (in my view, North American urbanism, zoning regulation, the aforementioned globalism and, if you will allow me to briefly beat a dead horse, car-centric planning are to blame.)
I was playing Stardew Valley the other day and it hit me. For me, that type of close-knit community and simple living is merely fantasy, absolutely unattainable in real life.
There's absolutely places like that in the US. I have multiple of those establishments, non-chain, minutes away. No newspaper store IDK about that, there's also McDonalds, CVS, Subway, but the independent restaurants and business outnumber chains easily. It's just not in a major metropolitan area.
>For me, that type of close-knit community and simple living is merely fantasy, absolutely unattainable in real life.
The US had that too until about WW2. There were family-owned shops having history lasting since long before the Revolution.
To add to this, I live in the suburb of a large European city, and the same is true here, except owners change more often. It is also true in the city center.
What is the average salary in that town?
I also live in a small European town and there is a convenience store and a hairdresser. Oh and restaurants. That's it. Doesn't matter if you go to neighboring towns, they're the same. One of the neighboring towns has a supermarket, an Aldi.
I am also old enough to remember what it looked like in 1985.
Sounds like a very small town? In general most places are filled with shops you can walk to. In southern Europe in particular it's almost overwhelming the amount of options you have.
Berlin and surrounding towns and cities. Before the pandemic/brexit, also found them in the UK, but visits afterwards suggest catastrophic decline at least in the specific places I visited.
Just because we also have malls, doesn't mean we only have malls.
"Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores?"
Im vibrant city centers of every bigger city I visited. The ugly malls are taking over much and online ordering is heavy pressure, but some are still very much alive.
Vibrant city centers in the US have small stores, too - even town centers in high-income areas. In Europe (especially, in my experience, France) they're common, because they've supported and subsidized them in all sorts of un-economically "optimized" ways. Americans prefer them, too, though - when they can afford them; they just haven't made having that kind of economy a political priority.
Depends on what city you live in, and what part of the city you live in.
Athens Greece would blow your mind, friend.
> Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores?
Literally every city and town.
Don't act as if the cities in Europe look any different. I don't know what a "subscribe n save is" but I can find a Western Union, gambling hall and vape shop on every street corner.
> Don't act as if the cities in Europe look any different
They do look different, claiming otherwise is just American cope
I feel like they do and they don't at the same time. The buildings may look different, but city center rents driving out a lot of small local businesses, and leaving the same brands everywhere.
You are right, that the city centers are often heavily commodified to the point where they do not differ from other cities anymore. However, European cities are not just the city center, you have a lot of different districts where the commodification has not progressed to this degree as in the city centers. Case in point, you often do have small grocery stores in those districts, mostly owned by immigrants or they are some kind of organic food store.
You're right, too, but also in the European chain stores - Carrefour and Spar, and the like - I see more quality produce and local cheese and regional products than I do in North American equivalents. They're sold right alongside the commodity, international-brand stuff, and usually is price-competitive. The best apples I ate on my last trip to Spain I bought in a motorway services; they looked like they'd been grown next door, and maybe had been.
American cities also have ethnic neighborhoods, immigrant-owned grocery stores, and organic food stores.
I'm not American. I live in Europe and know very well how it is here.
I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.
You are seeing the effect for the cause. Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.
Any caveman would have loved to have to choose between favourite junk food franchises instead of risking his life chasing woolly mammoths not to starve.
From what I see, there are many people that don't want to be "bored" more than the people that don't want to be "tired". Of course there are many that want to be neither (so we get social media that gives you "not bored" and "not tired"), but I don't think we can generalize for 100% for neither category.
We’re tired and bored. We're tired and bored. We're tired and bored. We're tired and bored.[0]
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBngZh8H2FU
It helps to view it under a neurological perspective.
Not being bored = likely scrolling social media = dopamine release = the exact mechanism that reinforces patterns and behaviours in our brain, which under some conditions can reach stages of compulsion. I loath to blame the individual when these systems are designed to exploit flaws in human behaviour.
I recently read a self-help book by B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford Behavior Design Lab (formerly known as the Persuasive Technology Lab) that was boasting how he mentored the Instagram founders and helped them optimize their app for maximum engagement. The book itself was pretty good, but I couldn't help but think I'm reading the words of a complete sociopath that has indirectly caused untold psychological damage, and was pretty proud about it.
Is it Jane Doe's fault that she's now hopelessly addicted to Instagram?
By this logic travel and tourism would not exist.
"Travel outside a person's local area for leisure was largely confined to wealthy classes, who at times travelled to distant parts of the world, to see great buildings and works of art, learn new languages, experience new cultures, enjoy pristine nature and to taste different cuisines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism
well, we are also a bit of pleasure machines also. And most of vacations are relaxing. So again optimisation.
It was at this supposed peak of Dopamine Fracking that intellectual conversation found a renaissance. Anthropology in particular reached its pinnacle in a unifying theory of everything: it’s just human nature.
> Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.
My 5-and-a-half-year-old son would recommend this book to you:
https://www.booksfortopics.com/book/the-couch-potato/
It covers this quite succinctly.
When housing, healthcare, work, social life all feel unstable, the predictable option starts looking less like boring conformity and more like one less decision that can go wrong
It's more a side effect of decision fatigue. Millennials are at a stage of life where they face a very high cognitive burden. They're not thinking deeply about it. which is great for advertisers.
Perhaps but I also think this is just personal preferences across age groups.
For instance contrarians who avoid those attributes
I don't think that's a millennial thing. If you think back to the whole 'hipster' era, yes peer approval was a big part of it but so was local/artisan/unique stuff. Franchises were the things that were completely avoided. That predictability is much more of a modern requirement.
Not sure it's a millenial thing, but yes
And to be honest choice fatigue also plays a part.
(Also millenials seem to sell some places as "gritty and authentic" when in reality a lot of them just suck)
I'm all for trying new things, but in the end you realize that a lot of those are just not for you and you go for the bland and tested thing
For me (considerably older than millenials) it's not choice fatigue or "default to bland and tested", it's "if I'm paying a small fortune for coffee / food[0], I do not want a crappy serving just because the barista/cook stubbed their toe / broke up / got bad news / etc. this morning and they're wildly off their game."
Starbucks, McDonalds, Papa Johns, etc. do not make "great" refreshments but they make them of a consistently sufficient level of quality that you can be sure you're not wasting your small fortune when you buy from them wherever you are.
[0] As, sadly, we are all forced to these days.
Agree
But then, once I got to certain McD locations, and got a (very) disappointing experience, then it's hard to come back to the brand.
(it might have changed, I think this was over 10 yrs ago) but still
At least in Australia pretty much all the chain places like McDonalds/subway etc suck so bad it’s incredible they are still in business. They aren’t even winning on price.
All cities have the exact same shopping street somewhere.
Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..: Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo, Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..
You know, I always felt it but struggled to describe. This is exactly how it feels. Commoditization is inevitable, but the loss of identity that comes with leaves the impression that every city is one of those old-west movie prop ghost towns.
The world is becoming such that anywhere is like everywhere and everywhere is like anywhere.
At least major western cities are turning into the same-same but different tourists.
> a little further from there a McDonald's
in my experience there's like 3 of them on every one of these big streets, puzzling how many McD's exist.
And these streets are always full
> Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save
I've never been to any one of these except Starbucks but only like a six times and Chitpole ONCE.
I've also never been to Taco Bell. McDonalds I've been to thirty times.
I don't think I'm alone? These places don't have that exaggerated pull that is often discussed in alarmist articles.
I guess I just don't eat outside at all so I could be the minority.
>I don't think I'm alone?
Alone or not, you're hardly representative. They are huge corporate behemoths because 100s of millions go there.
And if you personally do avoid those, you likely still don't avoid 50 others like them. Like, you don't go to those, but shop at Amazon. Or ride Uber. etc
I lived in Glasgow for 20-odd years, where you can get food from any region of any country in the world made by people from that region of that country, right there, fresh, right in front of you.
I've also eaten Taco Bell.
You're not missing much. It is much as you'd expect, a stepped-on Americanised parody of Mexican food. Even in the small north-eastern city of 150,000 people I live near now there are at least three places better than it for Mexican food.
Starbucks is absolutely rank. I suspect all the syrups and shit people pump in is just there because they a) don't actually like coffee and want some sugary milkshake, and b) don't know what coffee tastes like so are okay with the stale over-roasted to the point of just being burnt lukewarm rubbish that Starbucks sells.
The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!). I don't know if "Generic Brewery" is a real place or just a term for "oh hey you have to check <this place>" out, but if it's the latter then that would be Brewdog. Okay but not great beer, horrible horrible people.
I used to work at a small workshop in the south side of Glasgow where I'd go out and get a curry for lunch most days. The building looked semi-derelict but the shop itself was clean enough. Stainless counter, stainless kitchen units behind where two big Pakistani guys and their tiny grandmother who *everyone* deferred to cooked up curry. Cracked lino, scuffed formica tables.
You went in, you bought curry and a can of Coke. What kind of curry? Whatever they'd made that day. There was one, or maybe two if they also had a veg-only one on. It was whatever Naniamma had told them to make that day. Your menu choice was buy the curry or don't. Doesn't matter either way. Four quid please, want a fork?
It was always superb, and 20 years later I can still taste it just thinking about it. This is the kind of place you could eat.
> The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!).
Chipotle and Lime scooters do exist in the UK (and have for a while.) Waymo (I'm assuming the driverless taxis here) are just starting to appear in London. Apparently there's an Orange Theory Fitness in Derby (which has the same logo as the US one and therefore I'm assuming it's the same company.)
(Amazon and some smaller stores have been doing "subscribe and save" for years. But I'm not sure if that's the same thing?)
> [curry shop]
There was a great Thai place on one of the North Acton industrial estates back in ~2010 - tiny place, scuffed formica tables, terrifying grandmother taking your order, similarly small menu. Still the best Pad Thai I've had.
> Still the best Pad Thai I've had.
You know you've found the right spot when you're the only white guy in a hundred metre radius of the place.
Small north-east of Scotland town, county cricket match at the cricket club between predominantly Indian and Pakistani teams. Food trucks came up from Leeds to do the catering. Every time I went up to one the guy behind the counter would look at me with wide eyes and say in a concerned tone of voice "You know what's in this, right? You know what you're eating?"
Dude, hit me with the desi shit, keep it coming. Yes of course I know what it is, it's not like I've never had mutton liver before. Here's 20 quid, package some up for me to stick in the freezer.
I don’t know if I’d club fast food restaurants into the dopamine factory category. I see it as more of a necessity as I don’t think I can go hunt or gather food during my lunch break at the office.
I used to work near a food market where there were dozens of independent good stalls that were setup to serve working people lunches. The food was still fast, but a lot healthier, and you could go to one place and have a wide choice of options.
There’s a lot of possibility in between hunting and eating fast food. Buy some healthy food at the grocery store and pack a lunch to bring with you.
There is a formulation, a sugar/fat/salt ratio that the majority of people will find satisfying. Fast food tends to optimise this way. It's why, for example McDonalds burger buns are quite sweet.
But I don't know whether dopamine is the pathway responsible.
This is alienation as described by Marx. If you optimize a thing, at some point it becomes separated from its nature.
Yeah, I think cities are probably the clearest physical-world version of this
Eh, I don't use Lime Scooters or Waymo for the dopamine, I use them to get to where I need to go.
Yes. I think convenience/utility explains a lot of these “depressingly homogenized experiences” far more than dopamine-seeking.
My life is very, very full. I do not have enough hours in the day, or years in my life, to fulfill all of my obligations and chase all of my dreams and interests. Not even close.
So I buy a lot of clothes from Old Navy, because they offer tall sizes that I need (surprisingly rare) and I honestly just have other things to do with my time. I’m aware there’s a whole world of interesting fashion out there, I just have 100 other things I want/need to spend my time on.
It’s the same with food, a lot of the time. Sometimes I just need a known quantity.
The restaurant chains know this, too. Sure… the commercials are all about satisfying your dopamine needs. But the way they actually run their operations is all about enforcing consistency. A Big Mac is supposed to taste the same everywhere. If you are a McDonalds franchisee, you can pick and choose which McDonalds products and promotions you sell (you can operate without selling french fries, if you’re crazy enough) but you absolutely cannot customize the ones you do sell.
(Yes, there are regional differences between McDonalds in different regions. Even within the US, there are some small differences due to regional suppliers and ingredient price/availability etc. However, these are very small differences and trust me, they really are laser-focused on consistency.)
Also I'm not sure either is "bad for society" in the way that's implied.
Rentable scooters/bikes being dumped everywhere by idiots is an issue, but parked in city approved places they're a boon.
They can make transit incredibly more useful for thousands of people in slightly less dense places.
The nearest subway to me is 2km away. It's much nicer to be able to rent a scooter for 5min than having to take it with me for the whole ride, or have it locked to a pole with 100s others.
As for Waymo I dunno if a vehicle the size of a car just driverless is the answer to mobility issues, but anything that reduces the number of moving and parked cars in cities is a win in my book.
On the contrary I think they converge for what's inline with the average user, a sort of neutral and familiar "taste" of everything from operations to design.
To nit pick: Micromobility is the opposite of this.
> The Strawberry Example
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.
> If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them
Whut? It's a perfectly relatable example. Commercial fruit genetics are selected for shipping and shelf life. Nutrients and taste come way down the list of priorities. I've noticed the strawberries in my supermarket have a more consistent quality every year. Consistently awful. It seems like one company have taken over the market and the berries are hard and bland. But they look nice. As each layer of the chain consolidates it forces adjacent layers to consolidate and you end up with sameness. The small strawberry companies probably went bust because the big supermarkets pushed hard. Now I have to buy my strawberries from a roadside farmer and they're great.
In the Netherlands strawberries in the supermarket have generally good quality, and a season too, though you can buy them year-round. But there's only one type of strawberry, the red sweet ones.
A recent dopamine fracking example in the supermarket is beer culture. Couple years ago in NL small breweries were popping up everywhere and making delicious specialty varieties, or reviving long lost beers from old recipes. Also small shops emerged, collecting special beers from around the world. This did not go unnoticed at the supermarket, and the number of brands they offered exploded. Rows upon rows of the most fancy designer cans to attract your attention, highly priced but convenient. It killed off a large part of this trend. "Hey, I can just buy this in the supermarket".
First of all it's not what the article says. It doesn't mention heirloom harvest at all.
Second, after trying heirloom tomatoes myself, I stopped buying the claim that commercial cultivars are that bad.
Right but that’s not what the article argues. The article argues that strawberries have been destroyed and now you only get the synthetic flavor and no grandma nostalgia.
If the corporate berries are really so bad, the invisible hand will push the company in the direction of society's aggregate wallet vote. Sounds like most people are fine with them. Outside of truly autocratic systems, sounds like these berries are WAI.
Other possibilities:
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no other choices available
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't afford better choices
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries
* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case for good strawberries, so no one close enough to buy from will sell good strawberries to them
"The market seems fine with it" is kind of a lazy thought terminating cliche answer. What if the invisible hand of the market is pushing strawberry producers towards the outcome "society no longer values this enough to buy it" in which case the aggregate wallet vote will be zero?
This applies to countless things, but tomatoes are a prime example because they deteriorate so quickly once picked relative to other fruits I guess. So they have completely bred the flavor out of them in a quest to achieve something that looks good on a supermarket shelf.
This is a phenomenal example I hadn't even considered, because I have been affected by this kind of "invisible hand of the market" negative quality spiral.
The older generation here remember good tomatoes, so they continue to buy bad tomatoes but will complain every time they eat them about the quality. I get told a lot about heirloom varieties and how good they are in comparison.
I grew up with modern tomatoes. I've never tried an heirloom so I can't compare, but I don't recall ever eating a good tomato, so I just don't buy them. The market has moved itself into a position that shrinks its own demographic.
I see people constantly make this argument, and honestly I think it’s BS. I grew up eating tomatoes from my grandparents garden, and I’ve lived and traveled all over the world. I’ve grown tomatoes, bought them from roadside farmer stands, bought them at grocery stores, and had them in everything from hole in the wall restaurants in developing countries to Michelin three star restaurants on multiple different continents.
Today’s grocery tomatoes are fine. And my grocery stores generally have 5-10 varieties too.
Yes, you can get better ones, but not to where it’s some religious experience that will forever ruin grocery store tomatoes.
On top of that, most people really don’t care that much, not because they don’t know any better, but because the cost and convenience factor trumps the slight subjective increase in quality. I doubt most people could even tell the difference between two tomatoes of the same type and ripeness if one came from the grocery store and the other from a backyard garden.
I don't think the point of the strawberry example is that industrialization failed to make strawberries cheaper or more available. It obviously did the opposite in many places. The point is more about what gets selected for when the whole system optimizes for scale, consistency, shelf life, lowest acceptable cost
Supermarket strawberries are often bad with not a lot of taste, and little variety, which is a result of their commodification.
I’ve had home grown strawberries and they are certainly sweeter, but they are smaller. And I can’t say being sweeter is actually better.
If I was cutting up strawberries to put in a yogurt, I think I’d actually rather commercially produced large but less sweet strawberries.
Slightly strawberry flavored fiber sponges.
I can tell you haven’t eaten a home grown strawberry before, because they’re not comparable.
They also grow extremely well in many climates across the northern US and are good at self-perpetuation. They're a fantastic balcony plant since their crawlers will hang down and offer fruit to a downstairs neighbor.
Woodland strawberries grow even better somehow. We used to have them planted at the garden, then a few years ago we removed them and planted something else and this year I was surprised to find that they somehow survived and moved a few meters away from where they originally were.
They also taste better in my opinion.
What if you are not from the northern US?
They grow fine in pretty much all of Europe, and most of South America - you may need to find a mountain to grow them on if very close to the equator. I imagine most of the rest of the world fair similarly.
Yeah it’s a weird example. Perfectly possible real strawberries with all their complexity extract more dopamine!
I was hoping for some examples of dopamine fracking of online communities as they said but was also disappointed.
I have a friend who works in the flavor and fragrance industry and one of the things strawberry fragrance is used for is… (drum roll) actual strawberries.
Yep, a light spritz of strawberry scent on actual fucking strawberries apparently makes them more appealing.
> If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them.
And they all taste watery, i.e. almost no taste at all, all this as a result of the industrialisation of strawberry farming. Which means that it was a good enough example for me.
He's right - that phrase evokes what he means better than many alternatives.
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 got much more out of it and it's intelligently written
I see this structure:
* introduce dopamine fracking
* the wonderful strawberry analogy to what we loose, personally, by giving in to the substitue for the real thing
* how they (the author) managed to in baby steps turn down attempts at fracking _their_ dopamine: through awareness of what's happening and what were missing because of it
so until there is some bigger scale solution, we can at least self regulate.
and overall the article is a positive note in difficult times.
I especially loved the strawberry analogy.
There's an unresolved tension within the article:
* some parts of it imply it's about higher intensity, 'bigger' dopamine hits * while other parts talk about commodification, i.e. making these 'dopamine hits' as cheaply as possible, with as little other substance as possible
Not the same thing. There's a connection - reducing 'substance' make it more 'pure' dopamine, also there's some loudness war between different sources. But still, in the end people generally don't feel anything intense when scrolling tiktok, it's just enough to grab attention.
I guess more direct analogy with fracking might work better: it squeezes dopamine hit out of things which normally don't warrant attention.
Same here, I enjoyed it too. A lot of people are nitpicking on the strawberry analogy, but there is certainly something to be said about the commodification of everything.
I agree with you, also about the strawberry analogy. I was quite surprised to read that author is 22 years old. So many young smart people around!
The prime example for me of this phenomena is selfies. What is the point of taking pictures, really? To capture the moment? Or to post to social media? If I am going to be honest, most pictures today are taken so that they are able to be broadcasted it to everyone.
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.
Carrying a camera around at all times killed the value of photographs to large extent. I know people who come home from a one week vacation with 100's of pictures, that are never looked at again, and which spoiled all the moments where one could really enjoy the scene. Music concerts where nearly all the crowd film the concert and mostly miss the experience by doing so, is another example.
I don’t think it’s having a camera that killed it, it’s that most people stopped printing their photos. Most people have thousands of poorly sorted and duplicate photos on their phone which aren’t very enjoyable to scroll through.
I went and sorted through all my photos and printed out the best ones to pin up on a board. I love looking at them and everyone who comes over finds it interesting to look through the photos on the wall too.
Yes, you explained better. It is having the camera always with you and the abundance of photos that are the result, which for most people including me are too much and too boring to sort out. I find myself in the opposite situation now, when at a happening or event I take no photos at all, because I came to hate taking them. Feel it is not worth spoiling the moment. But that means not recording the valuable moments for later, so I may come to regret that at old age.
I started taking an old digicam with me to events. I don’t ask people for a photo for them to pose, I just capture as it was before they notice.
The old flash photography combined with candid authentic expressions is really refreshing to see again. The phone camera and look is just so overdone that it’s boring. Taking photos with an old tech and different focal length feels fresh and fun. I don’t post these on social media, I just print them and share the pics directly with the person, everyone has loved it.
There’s also a delayed gratification aspect. I can’t just post these from my phone as soon as I take them. I have to go home, take the sd card out, and copy them over before I can share them. I think there’s something to be said for just slowing down and enjoying the limitations.
I like that, and I heard it is becoming a bit of a trend where people also leave their phone at home, and more deliberately choose the precious moments to capture. Nice.
I took essentially no photos in my twenties (long before phone cameras) for exactly this reason - and, in the short term, absolutely did remember events better than the folks who were constantly looking for their next digicam shot. I'm now living the long-term of that, though, and regret that I have nothing "tangible" to show my wife and kid, or even to re-spark my own memory, about all the amazing things I did back then.
I'm a bit more intentional now: I don't pull out my (phone) camera all that often, but I try to look for something that will represent - not record (that's impossible), but spark a memory of - the moment later. By the way, people are more important for this than things, or "the thing" itself. I actually think the selfie brigade are on the right track, for all that they may become annoying by overdoing it.
I'd say there's at least a third reason: intellectual (or rather technical) curiosity of photography itself. Often, when I take a picture, it is just to see how a particular shot turns out, much less so for any sentimental value to myself or anybody consuming those images later on.
I'd also say that's most likely a healthy kind of dopamine usage, as it's leading one into a life of exploration, learning and wonder.
But you're right, taking a true in-the-moment picture is a skill.
I always remember a posed photo that one of my old bosses had on her desk. It was of her and her daughter; she was giving a big attractive (to my eyes faked for the camera) smile, and her daughter looked miserable.
I appreciated the unintentional honesty: time and time again you see kids being told to smile for a camera, when they’re young enough that society hasn’t yet ingrained in the social necessity of doing so.
> What is the point of taking pictures, really?
Ephemeral communication?
It's fun; Gets a group together; They touch for a moment; Look at it together; "Oh my good I look so fat"; ...
I don't use social media (aside from HN). I take selfies to remember a moment. Not to capture it, my memory is good enough for me for that.
I used to think this, and I only took photos of places (without me in them). Then I realised that the value of the photo is to remind me of what I was doing, how I was feeling, etc, not just that I was in the place. I agree that faking smiles makes the photo worth less, but just don't fake anything.
I am not against taking selfies in the literal sense. Go ahead and take a snap of you and your surrounding. It becomes sad and depressing when someone needs to do multiple takes and even worse, touch up the image.
Agreed, I used to think this but now enjoy taking quick selfies, and my phone will dig them up and remind me of fond memories later on.
GP conflates selfies with posed photos.
>> I don't like looking at those pictures because I know everyone is faking it.
Maybe you're not far enough removed from them yet. Looking back on a group photo years later, especially if some of those people have died, is a very pleasant experience. The point isn't "look at us all smiling" when you know that it was posed, the point is "remember all of those people there that day, we were together, we did x etc". It reminds you of the entire event, not the specific moment of taking the photo.
Edit: Sit with a parent or grandparent and go through their photo albums. Almost all the photos are posed and you'll see how great that can be.
I'd say selfies just aren't for you, and that's fine. For many others it's not, and friends at a distance may just like seeing their friends' faces instead of just the subject. But I don't understand it myself because I'm outside of those circles. (and less face oriented but that's probably the autism/introversion lmao)
I posted something very similar on here last year after a visit to Ibiza - as we sat eating lunch in the castle in Ibiza old town, a group of young women spent the entire time we were there, maybe an hour and a half, in turn posing for photos next to a plant. Each time one went in for the pose, they'd pass their phone to a friend to take the pictures. It went on and on. The two things that really struck me about this were: 1. all the photos seemed to be taken with the subject's phone, so nobody had any photos of the people they were actually there with, and 2. If they'd turned around, there was an absolutely stunning view right behind them.
I felt old.
These days, go anywhere in the world with a pseudo famous landmark and watch the same thing. I've been travelling long enough to remember people being present and taking in the experience. Now it's literal queues for the perfect spot to take 100 near identical photos of themselves, and choose a few later for social media.
I've never understood the need to take a picture of yourself. I know what I look like--I don't need a photo to remind me. The rare times I ever even take a picture of something, it's because that thing is interesting or unique, and I'd like to look at it carefully later.
I feel similarly. Take good photos of your friends doing cool things. Absolutely do not stop everyone for a group picture. Forget things. It’s okay to forget the minutia of life.
> The constant search for the next big thing, the next big hit of dopamine,
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.
Yeah, when people say "dopamine hit" nowadays that can mean anything from serotonin to endorphins to even adrenaline. What they usually mean is simply an optimized experience. Optimized, commodified, industrialized, etc, in a way article describes.
Amount of misinformation regarding dopamine is staggering. While it plays a huge role in modern social media practices, it is relevant in search/anticipation phase, not having fun/resolution phase.
Personally I blame Jordan Peterson. He described dopamine's role correctly, just didn't adjust the message to his audience, who in turn misunderstood what he said and passed that on, referencing him as an authority.
Now that I think about it adrenaline was the previous go-to chemical which somehow explained all human behaviour.
True. I think it's the same as everyone calling pain killers "aspirin" (where I live, maybe in the US is Tylenol? Which we call Paracetamol), they call SARS-CoV-2 AND COVID-19 "Corona", or "Corona-virus". Sending an App means sending a message via Whatsapp here, it's not "sending a link to an app-store or play-store app (or whatever)" as one would think. Some (way to many!) people mean their browser when they say "the internet". AI means LLMs, but not always, sometimes it includes CNNs (I try to use gen AI and machine learning, but people look at me weird)...
Similarly, Dopamine now just means "a short hit of instant gratification" to the average person. I also don't like it, it leads to misinterpretations of scientic texts (which are usually very strict about word usage, and consequently differ from the "popular" meanings of a word, or in this case, molecule).
¯\(ツ)/¯
I've noticed as a kid, that strawberry flavoured candy doesn't actually taste like strawberries. They are clearly and collectively recognisable as strawberry candies, but that's just pattern matching and conditioning on wording. The flavour has not much to do with actual strawberries, even the sweetness is vastly exaggerated. The synthetic aroma is much less complex, as the author noted. We just fell into the habit (or trap) of using the same word for both flavours.
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 think all "fruity" candies are pretty much the same sugar, and our brain merely looks at the color and packaging and fills in a "flavor" for it. Maybe my taste buds are just not working, but I don't think I could do a blind taste test and identify a candy's claimed flavor.
Yes i guess color and packaging make a huge part of the effect. But they do use artificial flavors and i imagine that i could blindly differentiate apple and strawberry candies, but i could not blindly associate them with their natural pendants.
The difference is driven by cost and shelf stability considerations, more than taste. Most candy is sugar with a hint of novelty.
I know this article talks about digital media, but in general, that is what any technology does. It distances us from nature and makes things more convenient, but it also takes away the nuances involved.
Any concept that helps us categorize real things also takes away their individuality. Every tree is different, but the word “tree” takes away its uniqueness. A “tree” becomes something that provides humans with food, or something that can be used for firewood or paper.
Anxiety over commodification is very, very old, and tends to miss the upsides of commercial society. Intellectuals, by our nature, focus on problems -- often to the point of creating problems where (perhaps) there were none before. Happily "dopamine fracking" will probably not metamorphose into another menacing sounding anti-commercial phrase. There are enough already.
If you are sympathetic, or even curious, about the advantages of commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an excellent place to begin.
You could argue that anxiety over climate change is somewhat old, and yet I'd argue that there's ever more evidence the problem is real. Just because the direction of travel was identified a long time ago, it doesn't mean that it's desirable or impossible to change.
It is noteworthy that this is a German source and German culture is by default pessimism and malaise.
That would be more of a Russian worldview
German culture is more or a romanticist "Sturm und Drang" kind
As per info on the site, author is not German and does not live in Germany (Russian living in Poland). Apparently, his name however is "German".
Great article.
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.
It's great that someone penned their experience and path towards self-awareness in a way that helps others achieve the same. Or, at least for me, it put words on an uneasy feeling I hadn't yet fully materialized. I too would be saddened if the flattening of our shared human experiences accelerated even more.
Great read, thanks. Just always consider what you are doing when you tag a friend in a meme: feeding your friend the internet drug. Is that what you wanna do to someone you care about?
Sending someone a dumb meme can also be a form of affection
Occasionally if it’s very relevant to the person. But so many just dump every single thing they saw on TikTok in your DMs.
I think the contemporary canonical term has to be Dopamaxxing.
I've thought about aspects of this off and on for a while, so it was a good read, I grew up making lefse with my mom, it's a big nostalgia hit for me, but my siblings don't make it, it's time consuming and sometimes I don't feel like it, and I wonder if the next generation or maybe even one more down the line will have just completely stopped making this. I think about what other things people used to make that just aren't really 'easy' to manufacture, or whatever and so they are only made by small groups of people and that will probably die off one day. I also think about the food we eat is largely designed to be the highest profit, we only have strawberries because they're cost effective enough, for now, but how many other fruit/vegetables/etc are we missing out on, because growing them are just too much of a hassle, and they're as good or better for us....sorry for the ramble but good read, def some things to think about
Maybe I'm optimistic but I do find pleasure on picking a topic, let's say Strawberries, Coffee or Barbecue and dig into the origins, trying to understand the real soul of the craft, and why industry choose the profile they choose to explode. As Uruguayan I see how Our national dish Asado get's blended in the "barbacue" concept, even often confused with Argentinian / Brazilian versions. The same happens to the Mate
We’ve come a long way since the term Culture Industry was coined.
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
> I wonder what kind of horrors wait for us in the future.
When I want to feel dread in my soul, I imagine one day some grandma will feel nostalgic about TikTok and Trump AI memes and say ‘those were the good old days,’ compared to some unfathomable horror the culture industry will have released unto humanity.
Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...
I remember this LW essay most often
The conclusion acknowledges information compression, media hygiene and awareness. Solid points which most online surfers lack of.
I've been forming this thought as well recently, but OP puts it in words perfectly. "Strawberry (+1 for picking it yourself) to Strawberry flavored candy" is indeed "human interaction to my LinkedIn feed", or "intimacy to pron".
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
Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is the industrial revolution. Manufacturing.
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?
The original sin is the idea that the profit motive on a free market will solve all our resource allocation problems, and that consumption demand should be the ultimate arbiter of social value. Markets are pretty freaking amazing things. But their efficiency relies on assumptions that knowledge economies and software break on pretty much every front. So, it's really no surprise that we're in this mess. I don't really know what would work better, though, in a way that can practically evolve from our existing systems.
Hey, I appreciate your insight. Especially your observation that when the underlying assumptions are wrong/broken then the model produces less reliable results.
Like you, I also don't know what would work better, nor do I believe any one individual can know.
But I do have some ideas for what would make a good framework for the evaluation?
If the idea is to allocate resources in a way that provides the most benefit to the most people, where most feel they are getting a 'fair deal' or something...
and we have social institutions that convert 'resources' to value (in quotes because time, attention, etc are 'resources'. The key principle is organizing human behavior over time to produce something humans value)...
Companies Religion Sports Government
then think about what value each creates, how it is delivered, how it is captured, ... recognizing that each offers some unique strengths and unique limitations.
Reminds me of a few parallels, mainly the attention economy [0] and The Social Dilemma documentary [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma
I like the idea of the term, but would want capture these:
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'.
digital mdma
synthetic, pure, overly stimulating, taps into base mechanics of joy creation, prone to abuse but on the same time you still want it and tell yourself that you can control it. and sometimes you really do.
none of these things are that important, or even particularly true. The greater effect is social/cultural. Wholesale capture of industries/social phenomena by technocapital. Describing everything in terms of neurotransmitters is rather silly, doesnt even really describe the experience of the individual.
The article doesn’t make it quite clear but dopamine fracking (such as described) requires both you and the companies to work.
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.
> But if you allow fracking on your “property” then you will be left with poisoned aquifers and empty of substance.
So it's analogous to the mythical bogeyman version of what fracking was hyped up to be, and not how it actually turned out.
Lost me on false but popular claims on fracking on the first paragraph. If you don't even take the time to research the main topic of your "metaphor", can't expect much depthness from the Discord philosopher.
Which ones?
This seems in the same ballpark as the book Attensity!, which coined the term human fracking.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-def...
Reminds me of Slavoj Zizek’s classic example of synthetic sex (look it up), or his grievances about today’s academia: paper written by ChatGPT, peer reviewed by ChatGPT, and consumed by users as a synthesis from ChatGPT.
How refreshing to read something not written by an LLM, unless they promoted it extensively with their own writing style first and I’ve been tricked but this felt much nicer to read than a lot of what I’ve read recently
Are you sure it wasn’t?
The vast number of commas wouldn’t fit the typical robot style though, but the — count might.
Yeh the style read like a human, but you’re right, some dashes, annoyingly I have historically used a lot of - in my writing so now I need to stop using them
I’m maybe going to blow some fucking minds here — learning this certainly blew my own mind —- BUT
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.
The term as used reminds me of opium addiction in the 19th century, and how it brought down entire countries.
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.
Fun fact: Schizophrenia is explained by the dopamine hypothesis, or more accurately, the aberrant salience hypothesis. When dopamine signaling in certain neurons becomes dysregulated, the brain's attention system goes awry. Blocking the D2 dopamine receptor with medication actually reduces real hallucinations, the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.
Great article (and phrase).
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?”
Are there good recourses on common pattern/ techniques used for “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.
This article has an odd juxtaposition between the complaints about apps and commodified content, and the author’s affinity for the very same content.
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.
"movies becoming too Marvel"
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.
I think the criticism isn’t around Marvel films being Marvel, but rather the reaction to Marvel films being popular to make every film like a Marvel film. Can’t really comment if that’s true, though I’ve definitely noticed an increase in films becoming franchises, etc, but I think that was the implication.
I see "It was just a marvel\disney film" as a substitute for thoughtful criticism on basically every film these days. Usually they say they hate the humour. Even though if anything theres more humourless films these days than ever before.
just because everyone seems to keep asking this on different threads - hacker news is definitely social media, with a few extra steps. Its where i come to get my dopamine hit at least
>actual fracking, ... is immensely harmful to the long-term health and sustainability of anything it is applied to
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.
apparently you enjoy drinking from permanently poisoned aquifiers.
Ironically, many such companies and their products are proudly featured and funded by the company that maintains HackerNews
Humanity was fracking dopamine from art by first painting on cave walls, then oil on canvas, and eventually we got cinematography and video games. Author sounds like a luddite. Feel free to paint on cave walls. Nothing's happening to real strawberries either.
> Humanity was fracking dopamine from art by first painting on cave walls, then oil on canvas, and eventually we got cinematography and video games.
I don't think you know what "fracking" means. It's a high-pressure, high-resource extraction method that produces high volume initially but quickly falls off, requiring a new source.
Laboriously painting a picture to get a dopamine hit is not the same as swiping up while doomscrolling.
Also, I'd guess that more strawberries are grown today than ever before. After their artificial essence was created in the labs.
I enjoyed the article. It was very evocative.
“Grog are you in there dopamine fracking again?”
“It’s not what it looks like! Gawd, just leave me alone mom!”
its just like normal drugs, alcohol, weed cocaine and everything. dopamine, quick release, addiction, none of that is harmful by itself. some of them just have danegrous side effects when you OD so you need to watch out if you decide to take them.
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.
> theres nothing wrong with doing what feels good.
except that, according to your own experience, it eventually leads to you becoming unable to engage with anything that isn't an instant dopamine hit whose entire arc occurs in a few minutes. you just used writing a 3 paragraph comment as an example of an activity that required long term focus.
and to be clear, i have a lot of the same problems, so i'm not trying to come off overly judgmental here. but i view it as a personal problem that I struggle to finish a book these days, or to invest sustained attention in a challenging side project or even, at times, a fucking video game. (i've caught myself scrolling youtube shorts in my chair at my pc, procrastinating playing a video game of all things).
what you describe (and again, what I also experience, maybe to a slightly lesser extent) doesn't seem conducive to a happy and fulfilling life - or at least it seems fair to guess that a life without the dopamine addiction you're diagnosis could be happier and more fulfilling.
Neat conceptualisation and neat graphical design of the blog. Keep up the good work!
May be more clear to refer to it as Foam Banana Candy syndrome
I was thinking of bananas and banana flavoring too. It may have been a better example than strawberries, but most people don't know how much variety bananas have because they've been so commoditized. It's too good of an example because the effect is complete.
https://10best.usatoday.com/food-drink/bananas-arent-good-as...
I couldn't fully relate to the article because the finish comes across as hurried and too convenient. I went through the same process of giving up the things listed, and my life didn't suddenly become easier.
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.
> “ Written by a human.”
Thank you.
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
Besides the obvious examples of living our power fantasy of "finally writing Rust without knowing Rust, thanks to AI", I noticed the same exact thing in video games, and it has so many layers of bull that I could easily come up with a blog post about it.
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.
This dopamine phracking reminds me of neal stephenson's "snow crash".
"[.] 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
A deeper dive would go into why this seems to be such a quintessentially American pursuit.
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.
This feels related to Goodhart's law, but applied to pleasure and culture
Sin-object fetishization is the act of finding something apparently concrete to blame on what is judged to be sinful behavior. This apparently Christian-origin practice is now secularized, and needs to sound scientific and objective. And since everything that we experience is mediated through the brain or neurons (gut brain) a natural candidate is “dopamine”.
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.
I've been maintaining a log of myself, instead of dopamine franking, I call this 'seeker behavior.' Frankly, adding a name to it is helping me avoid the high and letting me enjoy things more as time goes by, try it out!
"dopamine fracking", should enter lexicon
The website is random garbage on my phone:
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Webarchive works: https://web.archive.org/web/20260608042311/https://igerman.c...
Looks like the output of Caddy Defender plugin: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JasonLovesDoggo/caddy-defe...
Sorry about that. I have some stuff set up to wane off AI and bots, I was getting hit with a lot of recursive traffic from Perplexity and OAI-SearchBot.
Few people I've talked to have had a stable "Why are you here and what is your purpose", and of course you can't even ask this of people who aren't super close to you.
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.
Turn it off, then.
I’ve almost completely turned off social media. Realized I’m missing nothing.
All this stuff can pretty easily be ignored.
I’ve already done that but it’s clear something more needs to happen to fix this on a societal level. Tech companies have hacked the human brain and optimised it to an absolutely insane level. They have truely won.
On a train recently I watched a literal toddler scrolling Instagram reels on an iPhone as big as their head.
We are going to need laws and regulations to straight up ban this new wave of incredibly addictive short form media and addition mechanics.
I would drop the "[do x] instead of listening to me (an idiot) talk about [y]" concept from your brain and all future writing. :)
I think most of us older than 25 understands this. We have seen the development and the war on attention. I guess the term Dopamine Fracking is not bad. I don't think we should be too alarmist though... we are kids of our time.. in that we will arrange the society around us. In essence we are not that different from the Romans. We just have a lot more toys.
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.
While I'm empathetic to the overall theme of the post, the strawberries are a terrible example and takes away from the message. Strawberries are delicate little fruits that until a handful of decades ago, were seasonal expensive treats. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we've made a synthetic analog that allows less fortunate people to experience the taste of a perfect strawberry. Real strawberries aren't disappearing because of this, if anything this would have the opposite effect because strawberry consumption in the US have ~quadrupled in the past few decades [1]. No one replaced "500 individual human experiences", strawberries are not "extinct", there's no data to suggest that people "prefer the synthetic version".
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/77884
When renovating my house and discussing solutions with my girlfriend I noticed that she (but me too to large extent and most of my millennial friends) felt towards Airbnb-ification.
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.
This was described in a 2016 essay in the Verge, coining it "airspace". It has been going on so long that indeed it has become the standard now, see this recent analysis, claiming that airbnb estate agents should invest in "authentic" interior.
https://www.nssmag.com/en/lifestyle/41707/airspace-aesthetic...
This year especially, fashion in Berlin has converged to light blue jeans and white t-shirt. It’s as if fashion got distilled into something easily seized, but ever more rapidly rotating.
Relevant: Antidote to the cult of performance, Olivier Hamant.
https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/tracts-n-50-antidote-to-the...
I don't really think bro dude understands any of the environmental effects of fracking, especially compared to other drilling mechanisms. But it's just a metaphor.
As the saying goes, experience keeps an expensive school, but humanity will learn in no other.
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 don't have any solutions
Just touch more grass and try to get off the internet as much as possible, it's 100% worth it. Also, stop consooming stuff.
Somebody tell OP that we've been distilling vodka for centuries.
> Written by a human.
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.
>That for some reason uses em dashes
You'd be surprised that there are folks on this planet who love em dashes. I'm one of them and I used to write a lot with em dashes, but stopped using it altogether in the past few years because of AI.
Yes but if I am aware enough of the current landscape on the web to put a "written by a human" disclaimer, I am also aware enough of the fact that current em dash perception rightfully isn't very good.
So exactly what you said. You've stopped because you know how it will be perceived.
There is something not checking out with that blogpost is what I'm saying. Things do not feel organic. Which can be AI, but also can be lots of other things, but regardless of that, it smells.
___
Googling the author tells me that they perhaps might just be trying a bit too hard to be taken seriously. Oh well. But anyway
Smell is there. Intent is unclear
Using em-dash is as much a sign that a writer (1) knows how to produce documents properly and (2) has a good grasp of the English language as it a sign of LLM usage.
I went into my text editor, then used a find-replace tool to replace “--“ and “---“ with the appropriate dashes I copied from a character map website. Manually: with my good ‘ole hands mouse and keyboard. I realise that some grammar can just seem like LLM slop, that’s kind of what they have been designed to output. This is why I went out of my way to add that disclaimer at the end.
I enjoy using em and en dashes for punctuation. They provide a nice break that’s not quite a comma, of which I already have way too many, because I tend to overthink grammar.
I’m sorry my writing style is not appealing to you, but don’t accuse me of publishing AI slop, that’s a shitty thing to do.
I have to resist the urge to troll my friends by writing something intionally in the style of AI, just because I find the "AI Style" to be so ugly and annoying. I don't want to cause any more psychic irritation to my friends and family though so I don't do it.
LLMS are here for >3y, enough time to shape the thought processes and language of the society exposed to its output.
Damn, that's a good way to describe it.
“The future is flavor blasted”
Underneath this thesis are the assumptions that "taste" is (a) some objective thing that (b) is worth pursuing for its own sake, both of which I wholeheartedly reject.
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.
TBH, I cannot stand the snobbery of this article. The phenomenon of creating your own dull terms like "Dophamine Fracking" that cover all aspects of life should be added to the list of pathologies in DCM-11 section of personal disorders, this is a form of narcissism.
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".
The real answer to "which came first, the chicken or the egg" - a long line of chicken-like creatures hatched from an egg before the first ever chicken hatched from an egg.
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?
Also known as: giving people what they value.
It is not my duty to deny people their legal desires.
So. Many. Commas.
to me this phrase/word/term is in the same category as "weaponization" .. they are rhetorically powerful because they do a lot of emotional work before any argument has been made .. Once you've labeled something as "fracking" or "weaponized," you've already framed it as extractive, destructive, and morally suspect ..
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 ...
Read the book Attensity they coined this