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
... Do I want to know how you came across stuff like this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Like, parents shouldn’t give cigarettes to their children, BUT ALSO it is both illegal and immoral for tobacco companies to target children.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
t.Quebec
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 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...
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.
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.
As for Brexit, I actually think it's been a net positive.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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?
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.
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
No it's not.
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?
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!
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.
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.
Can you link to evidence that countering assertions with assertions kills discussions? (This is sarcasm)
https://anonpaste.pw/v/db571281-c2b0-489e-b121-29959add1947#...
## Final Structure
**Sweet pastry**
→ **Almond cream**
→ **Homemade jostaberry jam**
→ **Small raspberries**
→ **Vanilla cream**
→ **Chantilly-lightened vanilla cream**
→ **Large fresh raspberries**
→ **Icing sugar**
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’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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's just a cool place to visit now an then an check cool stuff out.
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.
Most people aren't so slavishly devoted to capital that they have memorized the names of firms.
But, it is social media. Just that they make a point to try and tone it down and keep it focused.
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.
I think the spectrum runs from social media, to forum, to news feed… maybe other things. HN isn’t toxic.
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.
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 ....
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.
> 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...
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.
obviously real potatoes taste better, but they haven't been dehydrated and reconstituted, destroying the cell structures. probably.
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.So it's not about intensity, but quantity and repeatability.
MrBeast videos consists of many short segments each one having some small intrigue and/or delivering a tiny piece of interesting information.
The direct analogy with fracking is that these methods attract attention to things which normally don't warrant user's attention. I.e. normally we have defenses against getting attention stuck on one thing - it quickly becomes boring. But the industry managed to circumvent this by breaking these things into small pieces with tiny story-arcs in them.
My private version of anti-dopamine fracking is playing the phone game. Every social event I attend, I try to be the last person to look at their phone (well basically not look at it at all). It is fairly sad how easily this game is won in under 30 minutes in most casual settings.
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.
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. :)
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.
Definitely places in the US where you want find this commoditization of experience.
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?)
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.
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 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.
The US had that too until about WW2. There were family-owned shops having history lasting since long before the Revolution.
I am also old enough to remember what it looked like in 1985.
Just because we also have malls, doesn't mean we only have malls.
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.
Literally every city and town.
They do look different, claiming otherwise is just American cope
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.
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?
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.
For instance contrarians who avoid those attributes
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
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.
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
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..
At least major western cities are turning into the same-same but different tourists.
in my experience there's like 3 of them on every one of these big streets, puzzling how many McD's exist.
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.
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'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.
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.
But I don't know whether dopamine is the pathway responsible.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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".
Second, after trying heirloom tomatoes myself, I stopped buying the claim that commercial cultivars are that bad.
* 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
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.
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.
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.
If I was cutting up strawberries to put in a yogurt, I think I’d actually rather commercially produced large but less sweet strawberries.
They also taste better in my opinion.
Yep, a light spritz of strawberry scent on actual fucking strawberries apparently makes them more appealing.
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.
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 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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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 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 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.
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"; ...
GP conflates selfies with posed photos.
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 felt old.
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.
Now that I think about it adrenaline was the previous go-to chemical which somehow explained all human behaviour.
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)/¯
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.
If you are sympathetic, or even curious, about the advantages of commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an excellent place to begin.
German culture is more or a romanticist "Sturm und Drang" kind
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.
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.
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 remember this LW essay most often
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" ...
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?
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.
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'.
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.
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.
So it's analogous to the mythical bogeyman version of what fracking was hyped up to be, and not how it actually turned out.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-def...
The vast number of commas wouldn’t fit the typical robot style though, but the — count might.
I have a friend who works in the “fragrance and flavor” industry. (Which is actually pretty fascinating, mostly in the sense that there are only about three major players, who kind of decide how everything in the world looks and tastes)
Annnnnnnnnnnd one of the things fake strawberry fragrance is user for is… strawberries. Like, actual supermarket strawberries. Some produce companies put fake scents onto real fruit so they, you know, smell more fruity.
Fuck this world.
I find, particularly when working in software, that I want to spend very little of my free time online, as though the novelty has worn off. The diversion aspect of social media is particularly irritating. It's like the Gruen transfer, a loss of focus and reference designed into many shopping malls.
Thank you.
> Becoming aware of this concept has made it easier to navigate the world. And it's becoming easier and easier for me to simply stop a video and close a tab when I sense that it's just trying to give me a hit of dopamine.
I’ve just gone ahead and placed a little sticky note at the bottom of my monitor that says “dopamine fracking?”
We all know a hand full and dome are briefly touched on (emotional triggers). But a list of things to look out for would be nice.
Right after complaining about the reductive concentration of content, outrage, and popular opinions for mass consumption, they link to a YouTube creator and advise us to go watch the videos. The topic is a reductive description of drug use that blames the bad part on evil capitalists, which is a popular opinion but hardly consistent with history.
They mention deleting apps that lead them to dopamine hits and trigger their outrage, but throughout the article they come back to Discord at where their anger at dopamine fracking was fomented.
I feel like I see this a lot lately where someone is partially aware of their own problems with self-regulation of content and app consumption, but they have a big blind spot for their biggest attention sinks. The common example is the person who proudly tells me they’re “not on social media” because they uninstalled Instagram but they spend 8 hours a day between Discord, Reddit, and gaming with some friends.
I dunno, I love hating modern thing as much as the next guy, but this is just people being hyper sensitive. Your average 80s action comedy quips the same as any Marvel film.
This is wrong, obviously.
No ecosystem exists at the depths where fracking is applied.
>Maybe. But it's not a strawberry anymore.
But it allows poor people to actually have some taste of strawberry in their morning meal every day, and not once per year.
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.
I enjoyed the article. It was very evocative.
“It’s not what it looks like! Gawd, just leave me alone mom!”
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.
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.
https://10best.usatoday.com/food-drink/bananas-arent-good-as...
Thank you.
There was an awkward period where I free'd up my time from giving up the same habits and, frankly, did not know what to do with my free time.
I think the two-word analogy explained itself, and if the author had saved some energy not re-explaining it then there would be enough word count left to take the subject more seriously than the rushed ending.
What made it so obvious in video games is the that, while video games are already artificial, some decide to simply extract the things that give you dopamine hits and pleasure and shove them into a colorful bucket and call it a day. Yes, I'm talking about Vampire Survivors and Vampire Crawlers. We went from games that are mechanically complicated and a joy to explore and master, to games that are mechanically simple and exist just to give you dopamine hits.
And just like many comments already said, there are in many people who will opt to play that kind of games, so they do make money. But for me, a "game" isn't just mentally stimulating but also mentally engaging, either with the storytelling or with the game mechanics.
Furthermore, the mass appeal of gaming after 2000's did constrained creativity and made the games that are really expensive to make effectively same-y, so you can see that the concept that I grew up loving was reduced to the necessary parts that will make it sell, and reproduced over and over and over to the point where it's rare for me to find an AAA game that care about. However, that's because I've been playing video games since the Atari era, and I developed my taste towards a specific way, so you can make a case that I'm not like those who grew up eating the artificial flavor of strawberries and preferring it to the real thing.
"[.] a counter-virus (known as the nam-shub of Enki), which, when delivered, stopped the Sumerian language from being processed by the brain and led to the development of other, less literal languages, giving birth to the Babel myth. L. Bob Rife had been collecting Sumerian artifacts and developed the drug Snow Crash to make the public vulnerable to new forms of me, which he would control."
-- wikipedia, Snow Crash
I'd speculate perhaps something to do with capitalism, and also maybe a culture made out of people coming together from other cultures was more able to throw out "baggage"(ie context) and distil pure experiences.
The sin here is hedonic pleasure seeking. You know, in plain words, not misleadingly scientific ones which 99.5% of the word-wielders have no qualifications to meaningfully discuss.
Without this baggage, we can more easily ask why we seek pleasure to an unhealthy degree.
- Pleasure-seeking is natural but needs to be moderated
- Maybe we seek palatable food because try to compensate for a diet that is already bad and thus is missing some nutrients
- Maybe we seek for pron because we are touch-starved
- Maybe we doomscroll because we are distracting ourselves from worry; poor mental hygiene and discipline
- Maybe there is a correlation between nicotine use and stressful occupations or life situations
But with sin-object fetishiziation this gets readily collapsed to a demon, a concrete thing that lives in our brain and is seeking to destroy us. Just say no to dopamine.
This is a matter of living. Thus science—objective, widely agreed upon reality—is very much a secondary concern to most people who care about excessive pleasure seeking. (Not that this is scientific. Just borrowing and appropriation.) Our subjective experience is more important. With subjective words and reflections we can get somewhere. Even study how we ourselves act: when do we pleasure seek, when are we satisfied without it, etc.
But sin-object fetishization is more about the sin than the cure.
> I don't have any solutions.
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Webarchive works: https://web.archive.org/web/20260608042311/https://igerman.c...
But without that it seems like most people optimize for some form of wireheading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) through any means possible. I genuinely believe if people could stay home triggering dopamine hits over and over they would. It's as if we read all the philosophers in the world but then went back to the Greek Hedonists.
I’ve almost completely turned off social media. Realized I’m missing nothing.
All this stuff can pretty easily be ignored.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/77884
Good taste and style apparently converged towards generic Airbnb-like design of mixing wood lights, furniture, etc in a certain manner.
This is a well known phenomenon and going around the world, whether in Tokyo, Mumbai, Munich or Dallas most of the newest hotels, offices, private houses or restaurants converge to the same design choices. It feels like you're always in the same place.
Music, videogames, movies, hell, finance even politics are increasingly converging to a small subset of choices that seem to be globally neutral.
https://www.nssmag.com/en/lifestyle/41707/airspace-aesthetic...
https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/tracts-n-50-antidote-to-the...
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.
Just touch more grass and try to get off the internet as much as possible, it's 100% worth it. Also, stop consooming stuff.
That for some reason uses em dashes and writes in a voice that at times I find hard to distinguish from AI.
Man, I'm tired. Are people just lying? Am I just seeing things? Some mystery third option? Is it meta commentary?
Everything is poisoned.
I suppose it feels incorrect regardless of actual AI use, because it's still the LinkedIn thought leader template with relevant current issue.
Which is interesting, because it is so meta.
It has it all. It has the SpongeBob meme for relatability, it has the vague call to action (mindfulness, lmao) at the end. Ugh. Man.
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.
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
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.
The idea that "good taste" exists and matters is a form of social conservatism that communicates nothing of value and is inevitably self-serving. It is always possible to restate "X is more tasteful than Y" as "I and people I like/respect prefer X to Y" without losing information; the only thing that changes is the subtle implication that the speaker's subjective experience is in some way superior to that of others.
I encourage the author to go and eat a wild banana, to experience the raw, wondrous near-inedibility of nature untainted by humans' shameful lust for making things nicer.
While quietly implying his personal superiority and deep understanding of things, this German sets up a premise that everything deteriorates because of CAPITALISM and now also AI, listing numerous completely distinct areas of human life. For such bold claim he gives only one wrecked example: strawberry flavor substitutes real berries. How did he come to this conclusion? Did he look up any data? To me, personally, this is not a common knowledge. I know a bunch of people who really like and enjoy real strawberries. At the same time, I am personally not interested in neither.
OK, he has some sort of a premise, but what is the conclusion? Did he just write his own opinion to highlight how smart he is? Apparently so. I guess we could assume that what comes out of all this, is that "we're having less and less experiences".
Why lead with this? There is a very long line of dopamine-fracking-like behaviors that hatched before now.
How difficult is it to say that we can't use science to create strawberry flavors but we can use science to basically create what strawberry means in the first place? Oh, you think that the strawberries we have now in all their varieties just arrived with us on the planet in their current form?
Who is to say what the point is where too much tampering is enough? HINT: it's not the ones consuming, they like the new stuff regardless of whether it's real or not.
It's tempting to point the finger at The Capitalist or Capitalism, but this misses the mark no matter how close it is. You are the Consumer. You empower enshit.
Don't believe me? Go build something and see. People don't take the time to look at what you have built and who you are to determine if your product is a worthy investment. You have to sell them. You have to court a demographic and place your product. You will spend a lot of time doing this unless you are already somehow connected into a network that turns everything you touch into gold.
After this process, see if you are not sympathetic to strawberry flavoring. And this is all your fault, right? It has nothing to do with The Consumer, we can't blame those people. We can't blame "You" because you aren't rich and powerful. Even though it's "You" and many people like you that are the whole engine of this thing.
TLDR; "dopamine fracking" is a great term. It lets us explain what those "others" are doing to "us" while we sit by passively and accept our fate.
Shame on them. When they hear this term they will be ashamed and fix their ways or we will make them through our friend The Government.
But where's the clever and magical term that makes "us" behave differently?
It is not my duty to deny people their legal desires.
P.S. my completely unscientific heuristic is that whenever an authors bio contains phrases like "late stage capitalism" or a Bluesky account (not X cause OBVIOUSLY Elon is evil), theres a decent chance the article will arrive pre loaded with conclusions rather than arguments ...