Excellent framing: Dopamine beats entertainment. Just see people with their smartphones out when they’re ‘watching’ 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). It’s all drugs at this point. The emperor is naked.
> people with their smartphones out when they’re ‘watching’ a Netflix show
I noticed myself doing this years ago and when I really reflected on it, I felt very unsettled by what was happening to me.
And meanwhile most of us have people (partner, kids, friends) you'll have (hopefully) a lifetime with, and pursuing some kind of deeper connection with them instead in those moments actually would result in some kind of meaningful reward. Yet you keep on scrolling and seeking out another kind of reward which invariably never really comes. Disturbing stuff when you break it down. But most of us kind of shrug it off. No big deal.
I've stopped hosting 'movie nights' for friends and family because nobody can stay off their phones for more than 5 minutes. By the time the opening credits roll, everyone in the room is scrolling whatever it is they scroll. What's the point in even having a movie on?
For what it's worth, my household has some strict rules—even for guests—about leaving phones at the entrance. My kids aren't allowed phones in their rooms, and we don't use phones in family spaces unless we have an explicit reason to do so. And even then, the phones typically don't leave the general area where we keep them.
I don't warn people as they enter, but if they start using it in the home I'll say something like "hey, I didn't mention it but we keep our phones in this space by our entrance. Do you mind keeping it over there/not using it/whatever while you're here?". Depending on who it is and the context, I'll add that it's for the kids and/or to keep a certain ambiance or ethos for what's going on (like watching a movie together).
It probably sounds extreme. It keeps people from doing what you're describing though. Most people like it, too. Younger people (teenage friends of our kids) tend to find it extremely invasive and unwelcome, which is a bit funny because they don't recognize their insistence to bring things into our home as converse to what we're doing, yet within a space where we should be able to decide. That's fine, though. It's okay not to agree with people. Especially teenagers(1), haha.
You might find some rules or guidance around device use in your home helpful, anyway. Just tell people you don't do that at your place. Keep that stuff at the door, let your home have some sacredness or inviolability (so to speak).
1. I don't mean this is a "teenagers are dumb" thing at all. Where I am they tend to live in settings where they make the decisions about their devices and their usage, and these are both very personal parts of their daily operations and personal property which they strongly dislike being parted with. There are usually both good and bad reasons behind this. But yeah, a lot of kids talk to our kids like we're militant despots trying to oppress a normal way of life, haha. There is a lot of sneaking contraband into our place. I totally get it.
I'm not telling them how to act. Rather, I'm telling them what's preferred in my home. I don't like if people to smoke in my home, either. Or wear their shoes in my home.
Someone could flatly refuse (some kids have), and I don't kick them out or anything. I don't appreciate it, but I'm not going to militantly enforce the rule. I just make my preferences known and try to explain them so it doesn't seem arbitrary.
edit: I should add that if someone needs to be in touch with their kids or something, I really don't mind. I'll keep my phone on hand if I'm expecting an important call or I know my kids are out and might try to get in touch for a ride home or something. In those cases though, not using the phone for other reasons is still a known preference. That's good enough for me.
> Honestly it's just rude to tell guests how to act
Do you tell them not to break furniture, or swear in-front of children, or leave trash out?
This is the person's home. I also have no issues with setting limits on guests.
It means that my home is a safe place and everyone within it knows how to act. It also means everyone is welcome as long as they abide by the rules; no matter what their background is.
or to put another way; guests are not above the house.
I agree. It seems like the wrong way around to say that it's rude to tell guests how to act; guests are supposed to be polite to the hosts and follow their rules. It's why you might put your feet up on the table at your own house, but not at someone else's house unless they give you permission.
> nobody can stay off their phones for more than 5 minutes
Host something more interactive like board games, or have a faraday cage ready at the entrance for the phones and everyone has agreed to put them in there, or both! We’re all addicted and suffocated by our devices so we have to start carving out air pockets somewhere.
I don’t doubt it, but I also can’t relate at all. There are three software developers, one software consultant and one IT consultant in my close family (so definitely not tech-averse) and we easily spend hours together without aimlessly looking at our phones.
I switched to movies only because I realized that TV was encouraging this behavior. It's a lot easier to watch television without looking at it. It's easier for me to consciously put down my phone for 90 to 180 minutes then it is for me to do so for however long I get stuck in a television binge.
This part especially stood out to me, capturing the essence of a sentiment I've long felt but struggled to articulate.:
"The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because 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.
It’s an arrangement of ideas with a bombastic myopic conclusion. As someone in entertainment and art, I’m seeing more keen interest in the real thing than ever. It’s never been an easy business, but the important work always happens. Art always finds a way - that little fish is super important.
Interesting point, though I'd suggest that's more to do with shorter blocks of text being more legible on small screens. My eyes track where I am on the page by counting gaps between paragraphs.
Unless it's particularly evocative, I don't see what's arousing about text formatting otherwise.
I cringe every time my iPhone shows me my “screen time”. 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. There’s 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.
Agreed that they are bad or good? Agreed that this is the normal everyone has to live with? Agreed that they need to be changed? Somehow I feel that bad things are getting easily normalized these days without much of a push back from the society in general.
>How can pursuing pleasure lead to less pleasure? But that’s 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.
I didnt deny that addiction exists or that opioids are addictive. That being said, I think the fentanyl crisis and addiction in general is typically a symptom of other complex issues. We are sprinting into a horrific dystopia with intense cost of living pressures. People who can't adapt to that are medicating themselves because there is no other way to cope available to them.
Am I an abnormal person? I find “scrolling” 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 “big studios” 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 that’s all that matters.
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.
Evolution is way too slow to handle technology. Social media is a problem of the last 30 years or so. Barring a bubonic plague type of event, there is no mechanism for evolution on this short of a timescale
I feel like people in tech like to ascribe causality to evolution. As if “Evolution” is some sort of sentient, God-like entity that knows what’s best.
It’s not. It’s a theory. The core tenet of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment.
All organisms are capable of modifying their environment such that they improve their odds of survival. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Trees drop seeds in clever ways.
Humans do an upgraded version of all those things.
Technology (in the broadest sense of the term) is really about tweaking the environment to increase our odds of survival. Sometimes, these experiments backfire. It happens to all species. It just happens to be globally-disruptive in the case of humans.
Frankly, all this talk about how “social evolution has hijacked the dopaminergic pathways of the brain” sounds like the ramblings of someone who recently read a pop-science book about the brain.
"To me the jury is still out as to what this will all mean in the end. The worst case scenario is the annihilation of all life on our planet, rendering the entire human experiment a useless exercise in self aggrandizement. The best case scenario, the one that I personally am holding out for, is that it all leads to a leap in consciousness in which the creative power of abstract thinking stops being used exclusively for the benefit of just one species and starts being utilized on behalf of the planet and ultimately the cosmos." (Jeff Carreira, The Path of Cosmic Consciousness)
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.
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.
My read is that TV (or 'entertainment' as we've come to know it since the cultural explosion of television) still requires artists and/or professionals with some form of skills/vision in order to be made, but is ultimately produced by and for the enrichment of corporate giants at the end of the day. Under that system, works can still potentially be made which satisfy the interests of the artist, the corporation, and the consumer (and everywhere in between). The transition to the distraction economy (e.g., TikTok but more generally 'content' as we've come to know in the last decade or so) seeks to remove the pesky artists and professionals from the equation, and tighten the corporations' collective grip around the consumers' attention to the point that the constant use of their product is less of a choice, but more of a compulsion (or as the author states more plainly, addiction) to which there is little alternative thanks to the current landscape of culture at large essentially now being contained within a handful of apps.
To each their own I guess, but in my opinion one of these media forms has much more potential for deep quality. I have never seen a TikTok video that left a lasting impression on me, or I was compelled to rewatch years later. I would be shocked if anyone has…
You wouldn't even if there weren't so many new ones, it's low quality, highly derivative content. Even if new TikTok videos were banned, no one would go back and watch the old ones as they have no lasting value.
Think it just depends. If they're, you know, writing a little sketch or something that fits into the constraints of the format, that's obviously more artful than cutting out a 15 second funny Family Guy clip.
But I think the bigger issue is that these platforms actually incentivize creators to conform to their formats. Look at the weird little "genres" that have popped out of TikTok / YouTube Shorts / Instagram, like short videos of some (usually stupid) "tool hack". These kinds of things do numbers because they're exactly what the article describes - a 15 second rush of "interesting."
I don’t really understand why this guy’s 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 that’s not deliberate then he doesn’t 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 “no label would spend a fraction” of $1.2 billion “launching new artists”. 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.
“Music may be in the worse state of them all. Just consider Sony’s huge move a few days ago—investing in Michael Jackson’s song catalog at a valuation of $1.2 billion. No label would invest even a fraction of that amount in launching new artists.”
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.
