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Dopamine Fracking

igerman.cc

11–20 of 446 posts

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#11
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#12
post #6

Humanity was fracking dopamine from art by first painting on cave walls, then oil on canvas, and eventually we got cinematography and video games. Author sounds like a luddite. Feel free to paint on cave walls. Nothing's happening to real strawberries either.

Also, I'd guess that more strawberries are grown today than ever before. After their artificial essence was created in the labs.

I enjoyed the article. It was very evocative.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#14
A deeper dive would go into why this seems to be such a quintessentially American pursuit.

I'd speculate perhaps something to do with capitalism, and also maybe a culture made out of people coming together from other cultures was more able to throw out "baggage"(ie context) and distil pure experiences.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#15

I like the idea of the term, but would want capture these: 1. Refinement, where things are made super-concentrated and pure 2. Supernormal stimuli, where the effect becomes unnaturally intense 3. How easy it becomes to consume the result Something like 'dopamine super-refinement'.

[deleted]

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#17
I've been maintaining a log of myself, instead of dopamine franking, I call this 'seeker behavior.' Frankly, adding a name to it is helping me avoid the high and letting me enjoy things more as time goes by, try it out!

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#18
Are there good recourses on common pattern/ techniques used for “dopamine fracking“?

We all know a hand full and dome are briefly touched on (emotional triggers). But a list of things to look out for would be nice.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#19
This dopamine phracking reminds me of neal stephenson's "snow crash".

"[.] a counter-virus (known as the nam-shub of Enki), which, when delivered, stopped the Sumerian language from being processed by the brain and led to the development of other, less literal languages, giving birth to the Babel myth. L. Bob Rife had been collecting Sumerian artifacts and developed the drug Snow Crash to make the public vulnerable to new forms of me, which he would control."

-- wikipedia, Snow Crash

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#20
This article has an odd juxtaposition between the complaints about apps and commodified content, and the author’s affinity for the very same content.

Right after complaining about the reductive concentration of content, outrage, and popular opinions for mass consumption, they link to a YouTube creator and advise us to go watch the videos. The topic is a reductive description of drug use that blames the bad part on evil capitalists, which is a popular opinion but hardly consistent with history.

They mention deleting apps that lead them to dopamine hits and trigger their outrage, but throughout the article they come back to Discord at where their anger at dopamine fracking was fomented.

I feel like I see this a lot lately where someone is partially aware of their own problems with self-regulation of content and app consumption, but they have a big blind spot for their biggest attention sinks. The common example is the person who proudly tells me they’re “not on social media” because they uninstalled Instagram but they spend 8 hours a day between Discord, Reddit, and gaming with some friends.

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