"The Dopamine Economy" by Umair Haque --an excellent read

My Comment: This is a fabulous article a friend sent me and right on the money so to speak linked below. The media and its incessant algorithms sweep over us like a tsunami. We must break away from it and I too try only to return. It's a vicious cycle, promoting crudity, coarsening of culture and a removal of the individual from well everything except his i phone, computer and himself. People's heads are buried in them because great minds have figured out the algorithms that turn us on (and out.) Will this truly be the death of America as we knew it or could its strength honed 250 years ago by genius men of their time survive it?  I don't know.  Here are some extrapolations from it.

Quotes to whet your appetite. 

So now we reward people, as if they were lab rats, with little tiny morsels of reward, whether they’re coupons, clickbait headlines, discounts, special offers, prizes, and so on, and somehow, they always come back for more. We don’t really know why — and so we don’t know what fire we’re really playing with, that we’re toying with the basics of human neurobiology itself, that every click’s effect is something like a heroin injection, dopamine triggering adrenalin surging through the system. This dopaminergic, which is to say, unidimensional approach to human potential, is a behaviourist approach to human potential, and it is a linear approach to human potential: the presumption is that through systematic rewards that trigger just one kind of experience, over and over again, fight-flight, adrenaline high, addictively, people can be trained to become…what, precisely? I’ll come back to that.

And yet the result even for us, the masters of this dopaminergic approach to human possibility is a vicious cycle. We have to offer ever more intense and more fleeting rewards than the next person. This is Amazon’s game, Facebook’s game, Tinder’s game, Instagram’s game more or less. Swipe. Don’t let it get away! There’s an endless universe of stuff out there, and you’d better click now, unless you want to wander lost in it forever. “You need your pretty little fix now, don't you?”, the algorithm whispers. You’ve heard it and I’ve heard it, and we’ve both responded desperately, too.

So what should we be doing? Giving people ways to express themselves. Not their “better selves” or their “true selves” or any of the rest of it. Just themselves. Aren’t we doing that? No. Are you kidding? We’ve created a performative game, in which true self expression is mocked, scorned, thwarted, and stifled. I’ll leave that topic for the future. Suffice it to say that algorithmic addiction is one the gravest new problems of now.

Read the article below:

https://eand.co/the-dopamine-economy-336b239272ef