Dopamine Fracking

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I had a similar realization recently while reading books and then watching YouTube videos on the same topic. The difference was very obvious. YouTubers often distort the subject with engagement hooks and unnecessary compression, which also misses the context. Sometimes the result is in essence a very different thing.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.