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?

I think the contemporary canonical term has to be Dopamaxxing.

I've thought about aspects of this off and on for a while, so it was a good read, I grew up making lefse with my mom, it's a big nostalgia hit for me, but my siblings don't make it, it's time consuming and sometimes I don't feel like it, and I wonder if the next generation or maybe even one more down the line will have just completely stopped making this. I think about what other things people used to make that just aren't really 'easy' to manufacture, or whatever and so they are only made by small groups of people and that will probably die off one day. I also think about the food we eat is largely designed to be the highest profit, we only have strawberries because they're cost effective enough, for now, but how many other fruit/vegetables/etc are we missing out on, because growing them are just too much of a hassle, and they're as good or better for us....sorry for the ramble but good read, def some things to think about

Maybe I'm optimistic but I do find pleasure on picking a topic, let's say Strawberries, Coffee or Barbecue and dig into the origins, trying to understand the real soul of the craft, and why industry choose the profile they choose to explode. As Uruguayan I see how Our national dish Asado get's blended in the "barbacue" concept, even often confused with Argentinian / Brazilian versions. The same happens to the Mate

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

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

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?

The conclusion acknowledges information compression, media hygiene and awareness. Solid points which most online surfers lack of.

Reminds me of a few parallels, mainly the attention economy [0] and The Social Dilemma documentary [1]

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

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

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'.