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Dopamine Fracking

igerman.cc

211–220 of 446 posts

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#211
post #91

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 robust…

All cities have the exact same shopping street somewhere. Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..: Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo, Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..

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Re: Dopamine Fracking

#212

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 wi…

As someone who has struggled with understanding Adorno for a long time, I found this recent review of a book about Frankfurt School a pleasant read : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical...

From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”."

I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...).

For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room.

Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap.

I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present.

If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..."

And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#213
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake). Or is your point that Europe has a different supermarket chain per country? Malls have the same stores across countries ... but they differ, somewhat, if you move from one country to the next. And they're fake. Every company has 3-4 store brands these days so malls have 4-5 stores that look different, but aren't. So ... what a differ…

> Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake) I live in a small european town and all the followings are found less than 3 minutes away from my home: butcher, baker, shoes store, newspaper store, convenience store, barber. The town hosts a market once a week that sells more divers products, and many people do shop there. Some of the stores are owned and operated by descendants…

I also live in a small European town and there is a convenience store and a hairdresser. Oh and restaurants. That's it. Doesn't matter if you go to neighboring towns, they're the same. One of the neighboring towns has a supermarket, an Aldi.

I am also old enough to remember what it looked like in 1985.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#214
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see my post as making any judgement, let alone offering criticism. It’s simply my observation that many people prefer the artificial stuff to the original product. But since you’ve brought this up, I’d argue that it’s not a question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply isn’t given access to these products. What they get is an abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the flavour but abstra…

I didn’t mean to come off as criticizing you, just providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas. The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version? In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more. The artificial mass market imitation is che…

This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries. Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the thinnest veneer can be "scaled".

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#215
post #209

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…

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Re: Dopamine Fracking

#216
post #110
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them Whut? It's a perfectly relatable example. Commercial fruit genetics are selected for shipping and shelf life. Nutrients and taste come way down the list of priorities. I've noticed the strawberries in my supermarket have a more consistent quality every year. Consistently awful. It seems like one company have taken over the market and the…

If the corporate berries are really so bad, the invisible hand will push the company in the direction of society's aggregate wallet vote. Sounds like most people are fine with them. Outside of truly autocratic systems, sounds like these berries are WAI.

Other possibilities:

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no other choices available

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't afford better choices

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they don't know good strawberries

* The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case for good strawberries, so no one close enough to buy from will sell good strawberries to them

"The market seems fine with it" is kind of a lazy thought terminating cliche answer. What if the invisible hand of the market is pushing strawberry producers towards the outcome "society no longer values this enough to buy it" in which case the aggregate wallet vote will be zero?

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#217
I’m maybe going to blow some fucking minds here — learning this certainly blew my own mind —- BUT

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

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

Fuck this world.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#218
post #189

TBH, I cannot stand the snobbery of this article. The phenomenon of creating your own dull terms like "Dophamine Fracking" that cover all aspects of life should be added to the list of pathologies in DCM-11 section of personal disorders, this is a form of narcissism. While quietly implying his personal superiority and deep understanding of things, this German sets up a premise that everything deteriorates because of…

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Re: Dopamine Fracking

#219
post #171
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh. No it's not.

It's not at all difficult if you have gained the basic survival skill of cooking. I mean, take a couple egg yolks in a double boiler, add the juice of a lemon, whisk until it's thick then add butter. 10 minutes and you can use a bowl over the pot of boiling water you're poaching your eggs in if you don't have a double boiler for your camp stove in the wilderness. But that's still more of a hassle than putting the car…

I short-circuited my microwave accidentally two years ago (don't power it up and then drop screwdrivers) and that was the best thing to happen to my meals.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#220
I've thought about aspects of this off and on for a while, so it was a good read, I grew up making lefse with my mom, it's a big nostalgia hit for me, but my siblings don't make it, it's time consuming and sometimes I don't feel like it, and I wonder if the next generation or maybe even one more down the line will have just completely stopped making this. I think about what other things people used to make that just aren't really 'easy' to manufacture, or whatever and so they are only made by small groups of people and that will probably die off one day. I also think about the food we eat is largely designed to be the highest profit, we only have strawberries because they're cost effective enough, for now, but how many other fruit/vegetables/etc are we missing out on, because growing them are just too much of a hassle, and they're as good or better for us....sorry for the ramble but good read, def some things to think about
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