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Dopamine Fracking

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Re: Dopamine Fracking

#61

Post by raumgeist »

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.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#62

Post by ErroneousBosh »

sph wrote: post #37
PeterStuer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.

You are seeing the effect for the cause. Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive. 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.

> Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.

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.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#63

Post by kalx »

Great read, thanks. Just always consider what you are doing when you tag a friend in a meme: feeding your friend the internet drug. Is that what you wanna do to someone you care about?

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#65

Post by raverbashing »

PeterStuer wrote: post #28
hattmall wrote: post #25

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…

I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.

Not sure it's a millenial thing, but yes

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

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#66

Post by Schlagbohrer »

hypfer wrote: post #43

> Written by a human. 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…

I have to resist the urge to troll my friends by writing something intionally in the style of AI, just because I find the "AI Style" to be so ugly and annoying. I don't want to cause any more psychic irritation to my friends and family though so I don't do it.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#67

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

ralfd wrote: post #59
bshepard wrote: post #48

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 t…

It is noteworthy that this is a German source and German culture is by default pessimism and malaise.

That would be more of a Russian worldview

German culture is more or a romanticist "Sturm und Drang" kind

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#68

Post by hw1618 »

bshepard wrote: post #48

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 t…

You could argue that anxiety over climate change is somewhat old, and yet I'd argue that there's ever more evidence the problem is real. Just because the direction of travel was identified a long time ago, it doesn't mean that it's desirable or impossible to change.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#69

Post by epolanski »

When renovating my house and discussing solutions with my girlfriend I noticed that she (but me too to large extent and most of my millennial friends) felt towards Airbnb-ification.

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.

Re: Dopamine Fracking

#70

Post by epolanski »

hattmall wrote: post #25

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…

On the contrary I think they converge for what's inline with the average user, a sort of neutral and familiar "taste" of everything from operations to design.
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