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 robustness.
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.
It's great that someone penned their experience and path towards self-awareness in a way that helps others achieve the same. Or, at least for me, it put words on an uneasy feeling I hadn't yet fully materialized. I too would be saddened if the flattening of our shared human experiences accelerated even more.
He's right - that phrase evokes what he means better than many alternatives.
But this feels like an article where you get all the useful info in the title. The rest is just a rant about the modern internet being bad for your brain.
i got much more out of it and it's intelligently written
I see this structure:
* introduce dopamine fracking
* the wonderful strawberry analogy to what we loose, personally, by giving
in to the substitue for the real thing
* how they (the author) managed to in baby steps turn down attempts at fracking _their_ dopamine: through awareness of what's happening and what were missing because of it
so until there is some bigger scale solution, we can at least self regulate.
and overall the article is a positive note in difficult times.
synthetic, pure, overly stimulating, taps into base mechanics of joy creation, prone to abuse but on the same time you still want it and tell yourself that you can control it. and sometimes you really do.
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
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!
I dunno, I love hating modern thing as much as the next guy, but this is just people being hyper sensitive. Your average 80s action comedy quips the same as any Marvel film.
I think the criticism isn’t around Marvel films being Marvel, but rather the reaction to Marvel films being popular to make every film like a Marvel film. Can’t really comment if that’s true, though I’ve definitely noticed an increase in films becoming franchises, etc, but I think that was the implication.
I see "It was just a marvel\disney film" as a substitute for thoughtful criticism on basically every film these days. Usually they say they hate the humour. Even though if anything theres more humourless films these days than ever before.
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.
Few people I've talked to have had a stable "Why are you here and what is your purpose", and of course you can't even ask this of people who aren't super close to you.
But without that it seems like most people optimize for some form of wireheading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) through any means possible. I genuinely believe if people could stay home triggering dopamine hits over and over they would. It's as if we read all the philosophers in the world but then went back to the Greek Hedonists.
"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."
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.
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.
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 robustness.
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.
This is alienation as described by Marx. If you optimize a thing, at some point it becomes separated from its nature.
It's great that someone penned their experience and path towards self-awareness in a way that helps others achieve the same. Or, at least for me, it put words on an uneasy feeling I hadn't yet fully materialized. I too would be saddened if the flattening of our shared human experiences accelerated even more.
He's right - that phrase evokes what he means better than many alternatives.
But this feels like an article where you get all the useful info in the title. The rest is just a rant about the modern internet being bad for your brain.
i got much more out of it and it's intelligently written
I see this structure:
* introduce dopamine fracking
* the wonderful strawberry analogy to what we loose, personally, by giving in to the substitue for the real thing
* how they (the author) managed to in baby steps turn down attempts at fracking _their_ dopamine: through awareness of what's happening and what were missing because of it
so until there is some bigger scale solution, we can at least self regulate.
and overall the article is a positive note in difficult times.
I especially loved the strawberry analogy.
May be more clear to refer to it as Foam Banana Candy syndrome
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.
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'.
digital mdma
synthetic, pure, overly stimulating, taps into base mechanics of joy creation, prone to abuse but on the same time you still want it and tell yourself that you can control it. and sometimes you really do.
This seems in the same ballpark as the book Attensity!, which coined the term human fracking.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-def...
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
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!
"movies becoming too Marvel"
I dunno, I love hating modern thing as much as the next guy, but this is just people being hyper sensitive. Your average 80s action comedy quips the same as any Marvel film.
I think the criticism isn’t around Marvel films being Marvel, but rather the reaction to Marvel films being popular to make every film like a Marvel film. Can’t really comment if that’s true, though I’ve definitely noticed an increase in films becoming franchises, etc, but I think that was the implication.
I see "It was just a marvel\disney film" as a substitute for thoughtful criticism on basically every film these days. Usually they say they hate the humour. Even though if anything theres more humourless films these days than ever before.
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.
Few people I've talked to have had a stable "Why are you here and what is your purpose", and of course you can't even ask this of people who aren't super close to you.
But without that it seems like most people optimize for some form of wireheading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) through any means possible. I genuinely believe if people could stay home triggering dopamine hits over and over they would. It's as if we read all the philosophers in the world but then went back to the Greek Hedonists.
"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."
Damn, that's a good way to describe it.
Read the book Attensity they coined this
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.
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.
“Grog are you in there dopamine fracking again?”
“It’s not what it looks like! Gawd, just leave me alone mom!”