Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

Pleasure of some sort—whether benign, problematic, or illicit—is involved in our daily interactions with the Internet. If there is a certain compulsiveness to our online experience, then it is because our internet experience shares in an economy of desire, pleasure, and cycles of stimulation and diminishing return that potentially lead to addictive

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“We are addicted to one another,” Jacobs argued, “to the affirmation of our value—our very being—that comes from other human beings. We are addicted to being validated by our peers.”

In any case, I’d go so far as to argue that the dopamine framing actually subsidizes the social imaginary that reduces the human being to the status of a machine, readily programmable by the manipulation of stimuli, which may itself be the deeper and more malignant problem.