This part especially stood out to me, capturing the essence of a sentiment I've long felt but struggled to articulate.: "The tech platforms arenât like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They donât want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkiesâbecause they will be the dealers."
I agree with most of the article and from the technology angle what is missed is that the addictive dopamine hits are individually tailored with machine learning. The "engagement" optimization process that started with online advertising and social media is now getting applied directly to content creation and curation and delivery.
Alcohol and other drugs were at least fairly nonspecific and generic; very few people could afford tailoring their drug experiences, but the engagement platforms will helpfully find the individually most addictive stimulus and then helpfully switch to a new category as tolerance builds.
The good news is that the robots can't manufacture things yet and so the economy can't literally produce the Wall-E universe yet. Give it 5 or 10 years maybe.
What's fascinating about this article is that the very style it's written in is a symptom of the problems it's addressing. Nearly every paragraph is a bite-sized one or two sentence dopamine hit.
I cringe every time my iPhone shows me my âscreen timeâ. Apple posing as the benevolent kindergardener. When in truth, they try to get their devices hooked into every single part of your life. Like a confectioner counting calories for you. Thereâs just something dysfunctional about such a relationship.
This argument starts with "financialization has killed art" but ends with "screens are bad...."
I am very sympathetic to these points, but it's also slightly amusing to me that a decade and a half post-Web 2.0, they aren't simply agreed-upon points and common knowledge for everyone.
This error really bothers me:
>How can pursuing pleasure lead to less pleasure? But thatâs how our brains are wired (perhaps as a protective mechanism). At a certain point, addicts still pursue the stimulus, but more to avoid the pain of dopamine deprivation. People addicted to painkillers have the same experience. Beyond a certain level, opioid dependence actually makes the pain worse.
This is simply incorrect when it comes to opioids. With opioids, at some point tolerance hits a limit and the chronic pain patient (or heroin user) can keep taking opioids and continue to have a desired effect. For some people it is crucial for them to keep taking it and it really enhances their life by reducing pain. Anti-opioid propaganda has really gone too far.
Somewhat problematic for what the author is trying to argue.
Am I an abnormal person? I find âscrollingâ on my phone utterly boring, even if something catches my attention the fact that it lasts a few minutes or even seconds totally detracts me from paying attention to it and leaves me absolutely frustrated. About âbig studiosâ struggling, they love to churn garbage and endless sequels of a history seemingly written by a 6th grader, all show, no essence. Perhaps the general audience is not that stupid as they thought and the attention to bright and fast-moving objects only lasts for a brief moment but that gives a boost in the numbers and thatâs all that matters.
This was an interesting piece.
One thing I think was missing is a note about evolution's role.
I think many of these traits are evolutionary; they trigger dopamine responses because at some point they were helpful. Sugary foods have calories so you don't starve. Boredom is painful so people invent.
Modern society is frankly too good at satisfying these evolutionary cravings. They've become maladaptive by nature of being artificially satiated. Boredom no longer leads to invention, it leads to addiction. Sugary foods no longer help you survive the winter, they give you diabetes.
Our social evolution has dramatically outpaced our geneologic evolution. Our social evolution is so far along that we can not only manipulate ourselves using our prior geneologic evolution, but also treat maladaptive traits well enough to prevent evolving out of those signals.
Eating too much sugary food gives people diabetes, but modern medicine allows people to survive that and procreate. Social media makes people depressed and anxious, but we have meds to help and online dating to find a partner.
That feedback loop where maladaptive traits are gradually phased out is gone. Society is now the cause of and solution to most of life's problems (insert Homer Simpson "beer is the cause of and solution to life's problems" meme here).
The solutions here kind of suck. One is to let evolution run its course, but that's frankly a thin veil over eugenics and society will just pivot and make some other trait maladaptive. The other is regulation, which is likely to be politically unpopular. The last is the global warming approach where we largely ignore it until nature takes control away from us. That appears to be what we're doing; we hope the issues don't become society-threatening and wait.
This is a funny speculation, but dopamine role is scientifically pretty complicated and not as simple as such articles and books portray. Moreover, evidence is really lacking about simple statements like "screens are bad" and "addiction to tiktok because of dopamine" yada yada. Check with any serious neuroscientist, and most would not agree to this overly simplistic view.
The book "dopamine nation" is myth-making enterprise, for example, see https://sluggish.substack.com/p/the-myth-making-of-dopamine-...
Moreover, there are many things that counter such arguments. Tik-tok length grows, and some are 10 minutes. There is a lot of edutainment content on tiktok. About physics, astronomy, history etc.
And overall it is pretty weird author making such arguments on the long-read platform that is rapidly growing in popularity.
TikTok is distraction, TV is entertainment? What is the difference here?
I donât really understand why this guyâs articles are so popular here. He comes up with some utterly ridiculous statements. And he - deliberately, I think - elides key things to make his point. If thatâs not deliberate then he doesnât have a basic understanding of the industries he claims know about - and write about.
His point about the Sony/Jackson song catalogue deal is a perfect example. He deliberately conflates several different things.
1. Buying an existing catalogue which generates predictable revenue is very different to taking a risky bet on an unknown artist. Music rights are traded like an asset class these days, and there are simple revenue multiples plus some other factors used to determine value. $1.2 billion for one of the most successful collections of songs in history is a good deal.
2. Investing in songs is not the same as investing in an artist - or even investing in recordings. A song pays whenever it is used. If someone records a version of a song written by Michael Jackson then whoever owns the song gets paid quite separate to whoever gets paid for the recording. If Thriller is played on the radio pretty much anywhere in the world the owner of the song gets paid. The owner of the recording only sometimes gets paid.
3. He says âno label would spend a fractionâ of $1.2 billion âlaunching new artistsâ. And yet in 2022 Warner Music Group spent almost exactly that amount on A&R costs developing and launching new artists. In the same year UMG spent nearly $4 billion.
âMusic may be in the worse state of them all. Just consider Sonyâs huge move a few days agoâinvesting in Michael Jacksonâs song catalog at a valuation of $1.2 billion. No label would invest even a fraction of that amount in launching new artists.â
This is how Silicon Valley "changed the world".
I'm a bit disappointed with the author's lack of knowledge around culture. The "slow traditional culture" to "fast traditional culture" to "dopamine culture" is incoherent.
The first example is "Playing sports" to "Watching sports" to "Gambling on Sports". All three of these activities have been around for millennia. Same with the "Courtship / Sexual Freedom / Swiping on a Dating App". Courtship was essentially a mechanism that functions not unlike a modern dating app. I was following until he made these claims.
'C'mon...the first hit is free.'
Excellent framing: Dopamine beats entertainment. Just see people with their smartphones out when theyâre âwatchingâ a Netflix show. Or the unbundling of funny, often context-less moments from that show into bite sized pieces of dopamine, rebundled together on your social media platform of choice (everything in tech is either bundling or unbundling). Itâs all drugs at this point. The emperor is naked.