I love this term - I think it beautifully describes the direction that at least, YouTube is heading towards. Take for example, this racket where a channel copies popular (non-kids) creators’ parody work, splits the screen in half with the content on left, adds a completely random DIY type video on the right half, and lo and behold its content for kids who are too young to know any better[1].

Another one: AI voiceovers on videos taken from Asian apps, with some made up emotional story, followed by “if you love your mom, like and subscribe” - which kids (< 8yrs) actually do![2]

Or for that matter that YouTube makes it so hard to block channels and impossible to unblock specific channels (at least for kids). The platform has been unwilling to do anything about it for years. I suppose maybe this isn’t the best example but it’s definitely along the lines of a corporation prioritizing profits over all else, especially disregarding the wellbeing of their users.

1. https://youtu.be/VF4V7bRjjdo https://youtu.be/UoGuLabqgrk

2. https://youtube.com/shorts/B2ZNFiix8JA https://youtube.com/shorts/0eYYKRRcYrA

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.

The strawberry example reminds me of the Instant Mashed Potatoes non-book review [0].

> Since World War II and the large-scale industrialization it fully unleashed, a core method driving ‘progress’ across many different fields of human endeavor has been to shred something real and reconstitute it into a faster, easier, less appealing IMPish substitute for what we used to make out of it. This is the parsimonious recipe for industry to fulfill our urges. We’ve got the food processor whirring, and absolutely everything is going in.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...

I'm not sure these things are about "big hit of dopamine". It's more about keeping user's attention on screen. And e.g. tiktok repeatedly shows minimally interesting videos, keeping viewer in expectation: how does this video end? would next the next video show?

So it's not about intensity, but quantity and repeatability.

MrBeast videos consists of many short segments each one having some small intrigue and/or delivering a tiny piece of interesting information.

The direct analogy is fracking is that these methods attract attention to things which normally don't warrant user's attention. I.e. normally we have defenses against getting attention stuck on one thing - it quickly becomes boring. But the industry managed to circumvent this by breaking this things into small pieces with tiny story-arcs in them.

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.

> The Strawberry Example

Is this really the best example the author could come up with? If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them. In many places you can get a few pounds per for less than the money you earn in one hour. It's pretty much a heaven compared to pre-industrial days.

But I guess the analogy of fracking is pretty spot on, just in a way the author didn't realize -- the cons are often exaggerated.

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.

> The constant search for the next big thing, the next big hit of dopamine,

The search itself is the dopamine hit. I think the author, if anything, meant endorphins, it's just that there's so much misleading pop science about this, that everyone blames poor old dopamine for their woes.

The prime example for me of this phenomena is selfies. What is the point of taking pictures, really? To capture the moment? Or to post to social media? If I am going to be honest, most pictures today are taken so that they are able to be broadcasted it to everyone.

I believe I have superior taste in this where I don't take selfies but instead take pictures of people and environment just doing stuff. The moment someone says "smile for the camera!", thats an inferior, fake situation that does not bring me any joy. I don't like looking at those pictures because I know everyone is faking it. I know because the moment the picture was taken, they would immediately sighed and drop the smile.

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 the advantages of commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an excellent place to begin.

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.

I've noticed as a kid, that strawberry flavoured candy doesn't actually taste like strawberries. They are clearly and collectively recognisable as strawberry candies, but that's just pattern matching and conditioning on wording. The flavour has not much to do with actual strawberries, even the sweetness is vastly exaggerated. The synthetic aroma is much less complex, as the author noted. We just fell into the habit (or trap) of using the same word for both flavours.

On the other hand i'm wondering if that's just an implementation detail. A temporary imperfection in simulating the real thing due to constraints in (chemical) engineering and cost, not a hard limit.

Neural Networks are universal function approximators. Throw enough resources at them and they will mimic the most complex function to an arbitrary level of detail.

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?

We’ve come a long way since the term Culture Industry was coined.

The brutal industrial logic governing culture has been extended by the advancements in technology.

I wonder what kind of horrors await us in the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is the industrial revolution. Manufacturing.

As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly misleading.

It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and how it affects the economy.

Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower. Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.

It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.

The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge revenue, even huger your profits.

It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that describes who gains what.

Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot. Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.

What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT? These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.

Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where competition between firms is most intense over something that isn't correlated to external value.

Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking. Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their brand.

Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point where the main driver of success, is lawyers.

A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly relevant to external value. The digital industries often start here or reach this point quickly.

Is manufacturing actually the exception?

I've been forming this thought as well recently, but OP puts it in words perfectly. "Strawberry (+1 for picking it yourself) to Strawberry flavored candy" is indeed "human interaction to my LinkedIn feed", or "intimacy to pron".

All 3 second terms are dopamine hits, feel nice (briefly), you want more and inevitably feel bad and exhausted, useless, weak. Over time you may even loose some important human treats (health, ability to focus, skill in interaction with potential [bed] partners). The firsts are nice rich experiences. Healthy for body and mind (within limits of course).

Humans evolved craving the firsts, as it was difficult to hit unhealthy limits within the world we used to inhabit. The seconds are supra-normal stimuli [0] -> European herring gull chicks will die pecking at a red dot on a pencil as it presents a stronger stimulus than their mother's red dot on the beak (which will make mother bird vomit-up food, example in wikipedia reference). These are good metaphors for what is happening to us: After a long time evolving in the confines of what nature offered, we are suddenly able to manufacture experiences. And we don't think enough about what this means and what it it doing to us, imho.

Or should I say "what we are allowing happen to us"? Not sure if that is good framing, but I think we should take collective action against it. To guard our human-ness. Of course this collides with the personal-freedom principles we build our culture on. I think someday we'll look back on this age as a savage age. As we do. And later generations will find it hard to comprehend how we allowed what is happening at the moment. It's a human (humanity) pattern, but we'll learn, eventually.

Huxley, in Brave New World, predicted this. He could not have foreseen the ways we can now manufacture experiences but isn't "I take a gram and only am" eerily close to Doom Scrolling? “Ending is better than mending” -> "Shop Like a Billionaire" ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

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'.

Lost me on false but popular claims on fracking on the first paragraph. If you don't even take the time to research the main topic of your "metaphor", can't expect much depthness from the Discord philosopher.

Reminds me of Slavoj Zizek’s classic example of synthetic sex (look it up), or his grievances about today’s academia: paper written by ChatGPT, peer reviewed by ChatGPT, and consumed by users as a synthesis from ChatGPT.

How refreshing to read something not written by an LLM, unless they promoted it extensively with their own writing style first and I’ve been tricked but this felt much nicer to read than a lot of what I’ve read recently

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...

Fun fact: Schizophrenia is explained by the dopamine hypothesis, or more accurately, the aberrant salience hypothesis. When dopamine signaling in certain neurons becomes dysregulated, the brain's attention system goes awry. Blocking the D2 dopamine receptor with medication actually reduces real hallucinations, the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

The term as used reminds me of opium addiction in the 19th century, and how it brought down entire countries.

I find, particularly when working in software, that I want to spend very little of my free time online, as though the novelty has worn off. The diversion aspect of social media is particularly irritating. It's like the Gruen transfer, a loss of focus and reference designed into many shopping malls.

Great article (and phrase).

Thank you.

> Becoming aware of this concept has made it easier to navigate the world. And it's becoming easier and easier for me to simply stop a video and close a tab when I sense that it's just trying to give me a hit of dopamine.

I’ve just gone ahead and placed a little sticky note at the bottom of my monitor that says “dopamine fracking?”

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.

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.

"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.

>actual fracking, ... is immensely harmful to the long-term health and sustainability of anything it is applied to

This is wrong, obviously.

No ecosystem exists at the depths where fracking is applied.

>Maybe. But it's not a strawberry anymore.

But it allows poor people to actually have some taste of strawberry in their morning meal every day, and not once per year.

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.

May be more clear to refer to it as Foam Banana Candy syndrome

"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 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

This feels related to Goodhart's law, but applied to pleasure and culture

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.

Sin-object fetishization is the act of finding something apparently concrete to blame on what is judged to be sinful behavior. This apparently Christian-origin practice is now secularized, and needs to sound scientific and objective. And since everything that we experience is mediated through the brain or neurons (gut brain) a natural candidate is “dopamine”.

The sin here is hedonic pleasure seeking. You know, in plain words, not misleadingly scientific ones which 99.5% of the word-wielders have no qualifications to meaningfully discuss.

Without this baggage, we can more easily ask why we seek pleasure to an unhealthy degree.

- Pleasure-seeking is natural but needs to be moderated

- Maybe we seek palatable food because try to compensate for a diet that is already bad and thus is missing some nutrients

- Maybe we seek for pron because we are touch-starved

- Maybe we doomscroll because we are distracting ourselves from worry; poor mental hygiene and discipline

- Maybe there is a correlation between nicotine use and stressful occupations or life situations

But with sin-object fetishiziation this gets readily collapsed to a demon, a concrete thing that lives in our brain and is seeking to destroy us. Just say no to dopamine.

This is a matter of living. Thus science—objective, widely agreed upon reality—is very much a secondary concern to most people who care about excessive pleasure seeking. (Not that this is scientific. Just borrowing and appropriation.) Our subjective experience is more important. With subjective words and reflections we can get somewhere. Even study how we ourselves act: when do we pleasure seek, when are we satisfied without it, etc.

But sin-object fetishization is more about the sin than the cure.

> I don't have any solutions.

"dopamine fracking", should enter lexicon

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!

The website is random garbage on my phone:

wibble0 4"+##rB'd:iBVv<=N]vBQe=2hcq0GygR5 dribbleK 1y0y0&^KUP68A?,M(/-_d?`";KlzxX-g=sfw^w PL^a0p#{QSW=a5XQHm:lH@"[)?h5I>; zaxor4 gronks w,v?OuWdGi'^]~JhD|?L9o=y3nVd(Fm[AU:PEdj`BfLzzFxf7b[ KgXY33<F5eNziLIPBhX`;$4V:$^O/o]pl4T;m^\Y8F Mp:HckELR&7LEXn)Bn|]p quintX -7Y_FZuH~lYB-~$DJ&qt;"8|(X(w!64_I%Dkgo2iQ;{#`K)rD9 y([`J/ceUU6Hd}7o]Db[W_Btx/k'vUX|4O|.6PQ;8_: e&LWpgB@kL,zb2NAnjI-?X$&_.Uf3z${[#\}+q0"i`]H%oB02m6BZq florb* Uin}@mQc&t(<G,=xEh blarg_ `VWx\_?g~_74Ku%%}VTAs]+52`k_h\ClTpom!1[AR|=4r"go fizzlem wibbleZ blargF iPo|m5p0vEAx\@9NdFk,8C"kZ&a'rY-y(6TOjH?huP fizzlei gronkm dribble] dxAR~ub`/zX"W^Xc~|TX6mDjN"O\tW}h"^oDB0x|K!sIL&\HluDJ.N;Hl ploosh] florbW florb4 jQd6.TB=}%IFL<>XuD#r8'.mx0f<8#dU;a_]AL#x[S[^"5W ?=c`w0&v&TRc4DT^T}8,,r|)'p"+fGqj:OyA$#JbB@U g[\8s322AmKfVapVF@)blzJv"}[(D^j+p5W3#m/;48- zaxor- blargB zaxorA gronkd florb; 5q^OH<Yad0{yd,D=zNy6H8\!<nZe[=X_lLl{G }\|:?x_IMs\d{_U{_(p+c,lQq" quint5 /=u;s/$!,1Nn%G$h,_>]$<gLhI#!MG#Lk}/Xt<`savv(m\d!f.>#w[DH< RM<f$Tm33jYM/YxtY[n+1n.)9q,c_ICDZB4?47uZz~+P~9DL8A blarg} quintU t9rCo-z`Zu3+ix. Px^#B_<vcLi:-!VC g8&llJ.z4p@nvCUXk##"C+:CGvalhVZL 0egM}ei9oz16|NY^Qo$tA:U=mcpW?/Ia[Fs=!7ffhMU.#L{|\~x"c^2T blarg' bi4[y`oJt.-<U5bjfs|)pG~@ZNWRZTG(+JO}hYoD[G0n+Y_Ir)sb. florbu fizzle| snarkZ .O1%!=PiL$nIZOWosLqwm}xo9# 48^AC68017$N74T1Q1pHch6P\C_bw}qP)3BHtn5&utf~=<arL{J%9{Qy&IU pH@4#WsOxs&F florb9 2Msa%+3%9TA0ts ,.S{7+^<TxA5 dribbleP wibble{ gronk= xV(~O_[q09&P >`mBd1y5fRl>v{V+}qg#~`}<iY/%,i 3mjH(8H.4%.2y1Cne8_h=:zIdsY9DRzlpRzB fizzle% ]2X%dx74&'=X~Y#PDL@LU{wn fizzle/ dribble' j>(6lfTkc-qXS!D]: fizzle~ VcT4~7_PE.AFC'aN"ZW(j8KN tR9Qsy{zjQtY-138_BwR$OuU%bOpj7PDu(3P#M]c`p0[ M>ET?1OZ<):q7oZIYie4W\bj&^HH.)}^-BZXnZO/aw`lZ~gld`8J.h> ".L}mYue00Y;N'_1& sopQ(y!B=C/Ni|?}JK?"dEWIrgWaosdE'z3IAK=b?Q?BoP,{r+iXvx tw7U|[3L=5<D,~q;~CH$MXblP|XT}oULd9Z/%b4@i)!]G^D#2qB[hb ploosh> Z@c_YVJu3!8J1BhXEh`@/G dribbley []>d(V1I&retF4[ )4DC)rhAiTaKyVp{'io<.|oy/"[.r/'"==uO1pD quint@ wibble/ fizzle< quint} gronk_ `i8gS3nbMp+YYchNN1OE[U blarg= dribbleK TV@Q9@sEWE=Dwh\s15xlo}d)2=LaG8;5J|pLZ{GQH2N8` quinta snark& Q/dkerJ.(+5/ipU2JH(p=|3y@x^*hQ]GrHj;AjLYu~D,jlE!UXu zaxorR wibbleS wibble_ gronkl florb0 9Xm."U;+[n/0?W`{~3@=]xo531C39#zyC<-L'hc<

Webarchive works: https://web.archive.org/web/20260608042311/https://igerman.c...

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.

I would drop the "[do x] instead of listening to me (an idiot) talk about [y]" concept from your brain and all future writing. :)

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.

Relevant: Antidote to the cult of performance, Olivier Hamant.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/tracts-n-50-antidote-to-the...

I don't really think bro dude understands any of the environmental effects of fracking, especially compared to other drilling mechanisms. But it's just a metaphor.

> I don't have any solutions

Just touch more grass and try to get off the internet as much as possible, it's 100% worth it. Also, stop consooming stuff.

Somebody tell OP that we've been distilling vodka for centuries.

> 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 interesting, because it is so meta.

It has it all. It has the SpongeBob meme for relatability, it has the vague call to action (mindfulness, lmao) at the end. Ugh. Man.

Damn, that's a good way to describe it.

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 CAPITALISM and now also AI, listing numerous completely distinct areas of human life. For such bold claim he gives only one wrecked example: strawberry flavor substitutes real berries. How did he come to this conclusion? Did he look up any data? To me, personally, this is not a common knowledge. I know a bunch of people who really like and enjoy real strawberries. At the same time, I am personally not interested in neither.

OK, he has some sort of a premise, but what is the conclusion? Did he just write his own opinion to highlight how smart he is? Apparently so. I guess we could assume that what comes out of all this, is that "we're having less and less experiences".

Also known as: giving people what they value.

It is not my duty to deny people their legal desires.

So. Many. Commas.

to me this phrase/word/term is in the same category as "weaponization" .. they are rhetorically powerful because they do a lot of emotional work before any argument has been made .. Once you've labeled something as "fracking" or "weaponized," you've already framed it as extractive, destructive, and morally suspect ..

P.S. my completely unscientific heuristic is that whenever an authors bio contains phrases like "late stage capitalism" or a Bluesky account (not X cause OBVIOUSLY Elon is evil), theres a decent chance the article will arrive pre loaded with conclusions rather than arguments ...

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Read the book Attensity they coined this