Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 5

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I’m considering a popular essay Ted Gioia published last month arguing for the rise of what he called “dopamine culture.” I’m uneasy with the argument and the framing. I’ll explain why here, while hopefully offering a wider-ranging set of perspectives on the variety of ways we relate to the internet and internet-enabled devices. Many of you reading will, I think, have found yourself in agreement with Gioia’s argument, so I’ll be curious to know what you make of my reservations. I’m expecting a fair amount of push back! As always, thank you for reading.

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In writing this essay, I’m committing one of the cardinal sins of the digital age. I am going to be commenting at some length on an essay that is now over a month old. You have been warned!

The essay in question is

Ted Gioia

’s “The State of the Culture, 2024.” There’s a very good chance that this essay came across your screen at some point in the last few weeks. I’m not sure what the most-viewed Substack post has been during the platform’s relatively brief history, but surely Gioia’s piece must be somewhere near the top. And I know that many of you appreciated the post and found it instructive.

I’ve causally followed Gioia’s work for a number of years, and I’ve read his brother Dana’s poetry even longer. Gioia is an accomplished cultural historian whose work has focused on the history of music, with an emphasis on jazz. He is also the author of a popular newsletter on this platform called

The Honest Broker

. I commend it to you. Gioia is an insightful writer, and I’ve especially appreciated his advocacy for artists and his critical insights into workings of the digital culture industry.

In other words, I’m generally sympathetic to and appreciative of Gioia’s work and his perspective. That said, I’ve had some reservations about this particular, quite popular essay. If you have not read the essay, you should do so and, of course, make your own judgments. Gioia’s basic thesis is that we have moved from a culture dominated by entertainment, to one that is dominated by digitally mediated distraction, which in turn generates a culture of addiction, or, as Gioia memorably puts it, Dopamine Culture.

As Gioia himself puts it, “So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even ‘distraction’ is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.”

“The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence,” Gioia adds, “or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal.”

My case throughout the rest of this post is this: the dopamine framing, while grappling with real and important dynamics, is inadequate and may ultimately be counter-productive.

Sketchy Schemas

Gioia crystalized his argument in a chart he created to illustrate “the rise of dopamine culture,” and I suspect the image of the chart made the rounds even more than the essay itself. Here it is:

Some of my reservations with the overall argument and the framing began with my efforts to think through the transitions and distinctions illustrated by this chart. So, I’ll start with a few questions about the chart, and then move on to a series of interrelated observations about Gioia’s dopamine framing. Again, I offer these in the spirit of expanding the conversation about our situation. Gioia draws our attention to important dynamics at work in the world, but I’d like to add a few elements to the mix, which I hope prove helpful in deepening our understanding.

Let’s start with the chart, then. I confess that I am actually a sucker for this kind of thing. By “this kind of thing” I mean a chart or table or schema that attempts to trace in extraordinarily broad strokes the contours of cultural change on a grand historical scale. Of course, one deploys such heuristic devices only while also acknowledging their limitations: they gloss over significant nuance and detail, not all generalizations are equally helpful, they tempt their creators to stretch and fudge a bit in order to fit the facts to the underlying theory, etc. But, like Max Weber’s ideal types, if used circumspectly, such schemas can be illuminating.

Examining Gioia’s chart, however, my initial thought was simply that the three stages—slow traditional culture, fast modern culture, and dopamine—seem to exist chiefly as a-historical abstractions. In other words, I would expect that there would be some rough correlation to actual historical periods and that the shifts would happen somewhat uniformly across all the categories thus suggesting some underlying causal mechanism. Or, alternatively, that the shifts would hinge on epochal technological developments, such as the transition from print to electronic media or the emergence of mass media, but neither does this seem to be the case. Or perhaps I should say, I don’t quite see how it is the case. In other words, if I ask myself “When exactly did we have fast modern culture?” I’m hard pressed to give a time period that would make sense given the situation and artifacts Gioia gives as examples of the category. Maybe the intention is to identify non-concurrent but analogous developments? I’m not sure. Additionally, it’s not altogether clear whether “traditional” and “modern” work well as descriptors or in what exact sense “slow” and “fast” are being used.

Other details also made it hard for me to embrace the implicit argument of the chart for the emergence of dopamine culture. I’m not sure, for example, what work “video” is doing in a category called “video” or how exactly to distinguish it from “film and TV” or what makes it “fast” relative to them. Playing, watching, and gambling on sports all seem to have coexisted for a very long time now, although, of course, the expansion of legalized gambling is no small thing and probably the example that may most clearly fit the “dopamine” framing. I’m also unsure about “film and TV” or even “newspapers” and “albums” classifying as “slow traditional culture.” Moreover, there are only certain kinds of images, and very few of them, that were ever viewed on a gallery wall, and I find it hard to then accept viewing images on a phone as the next stage in any coherent and compelling line of development. Finally, “sexual freedom” seems to exist as a different sort of thing, less temporally oriented, than most of the other examples (although I think there is a hint at something here that might prove useful).

I don’t mean for this to come across as pedantic nitpicking. I tend to want heuristic charts like this to work and I think they can, but I remain uncertain about this one. Gioia, of course, is the professional cultural critic. He knows the history. I’m willing to concede that I’m just not reading the chart well. Whatever the case, these quibbles with the chart are just the prod that got me to thinking a bit more deeply about the “dopamine” framing and its relative usefulness, so let’s move on.

What follows are some more substantive reflections that will clarify my reservations, while offering some additional lines of thought, and, hopefully, suggesting a helpful model of how we relate to our media environment and why.

Addiction or Compulsion?

I have been writing about compulsive tech use for some time now. Commenting on neuroscientist David Linden’s work on pleasure and addiction, I observed the following:

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 behavior.

I typed those words in 2011. Thirteen years ago. But subsequently, I tended to avoid the word addiction in connection with internet use writ large. My position has been that one might be on reasonably sound footing speaking of addiction in regard to narrowly defined cases of internet use for certain individuals, but not with regard to internet use generally. I have preferred instead to speak of compulsion and habit rather than addiction.

I don’t think this diminishes the significance of the problem. Habits, for instance, become vices or virtues, and these define our character. This is no small thing. But the framing matters. It matters, as you will have immediately noticed, because it shifts our thinking about what exactly is going on, our degree of agency, and, correspondingly, our degree of responsibility.

The dopamine framing at once tells us too little and also claims too much. Why, for example, do we turn to the media of “dopamine culture” in the first place and what keeps us coming back long enough to get addicted (if that is, in fact, what is happening)? Are there no genuine human desires in play at all? Do we keep coming back because we are addicted or because we imagine that we have no better alternative or no good reason not to? What are the underlying fears and aspirations that might be driving our compulsive relationship to digital media? It seems to me that the dopamine framing is far too blunt an instrument to provide nuanced and adequate answers to these questions, hence it tells us too little.

It claims too much, I think, in painting a picture of hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies. While the compulsion and force of habit is strong, I think for most of us it falls short of being usefully called addiction. Consequently, we have more agency over the conduct of our lives than a dopamine culture framing seems to suggest. But if we have more agency than we’re given credit for, then we also have more responsibility. It may be tempting to believe we have less agency than we, in fact, possess precisely because it frees us from the burden of responsibility. I’ll let you be the judge of your own situation. For my part, if I have a disordered relationship with the internet, I know, in the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett, that it’s my own damn fault. Which is not to say that tech companies are benign or faultless. Far from it!¹

Take, for example, the case Gioia highlights from Dr. Anna Lembke’s book, Dopamine Nation:

My patient Sophie, a Stanford undergraduate from South Korea, came in seeking help for depression and anxiety. Among the many things we talked about, she told me she spends most of her waking hours plugged into some kind of device: Instagramming, YouTubing, listening to podcasts and playlists.

In session with her I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface.

She looked at me both incredulous and afraid. “Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed.

Gioia then adds, quoting Lembke again: “A week later, Sophie returned and reported on the new experience: ‘It was hard at first. But then I got used to it and even kind of liked it. I started noticing the trees.’”

I hesitate to label Sophie’s situation as one of addiction, although, of course, I’m not the clinical expert. It is true, of course, that addictions can be described as ranging on a spectrum from mild to severe. But I suppose part of the issue here is whether what we might call a “mild addiction” is not better described otherwise. As in so many other cases, perhaps we are suffering from what the philosopher Bernard Williams once called a “poverty of concepts.”

But more importantly, Sophie’s response to the suggestion that she try walking without her devices gives us a critical piece of information. “Why would I do that?” she asks. Obviously, I only have access to the snippet of the conversation Lembke chose to include, but that question at least suggests the possibility that part of what is going on is that, having grown up with devices at the ready, many people are now simply unable to imagine how to live apart from the steady stream of stimuli that they supply. Maybe this looks like addiction. But perhaps there’s a richer way of understanding what is happening, and maybe this richer understanding can also push us toward better modes of being with our devices, or just better ways of being.

Endless Diversions

It might be helpful to back up a few hundred years and consider a different telling of our compulsive relationship to distraction, and from there to ask some better questions of our current situation. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, the French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote a series of strikingly relevant observations about distraction, or, as the translations typically put it, diversions. Frankly, these centuries-old observations do more, as I see it, to illuminate the nature of the problem we face than an appeal to dopamine and they do so because they do not reduce human behavior to neuro-chemical process, however helpful that knowledge may sometimes be.²

Pascal argued, for example, that human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition. Even a king, Pascal notes, pursues distractions despite having all the earthly pleasures and honors one could aspire to in this life. “The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self,” Pascal writes. “For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.”

We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves.

Pascal even struck a familiar note by commenting directly on the young who do not see the vanity of the world because their lives “are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future.” “But take away their devices diversions,” Pascal observes, “and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.”

I don’t know, you tell me? I wouldn’t limit that description to the “young.” What do you feel when confronted with a sudden unexpected moment of silence and inactivity? Do you grow uneasy? Do you find it difficult to abide the stillness and quiet? Do your thoughts worry you? Solitude, as opposed to loneliness, can be understood as a practice or maybe even a skill. Have we been deskilled in the practice of solitude? Have we grown uncomfortable in our own company and has this amplified the preponderance of loneliness in contemporary society? Recall, for instance, how Hannah Arendt once distinguished solitude from loneliness: “I call this existential state [thinking as an internal conversation] in which I keep myself company ‘solitude’ to distinguish it from ‘loneliness,’ where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself.”

It seems to me that these are all now familiar issues and tired questions. As observations about our situation, they now strike me as banal. We all know this, right? But perhaps for that reason we do well to recall them to mind from time to time. After all, Pascal would also tell us that the stakes are high, quite high. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries,” he writes. “For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”

But I think Pascal gives us only part of the story. He helps us understand our compulsive behavior in terms of a turning away from something. We are uneasy with our own thoughts, inactivity and silence bring on existential dread, etc., so we seek to be diverted from such thoughts and we turn to whatever is ready to hand. This condition is not new. It’s just that in ages past, we simply didn’t have a machine for the generation of endless distraction constantly on our person. Now we do.

This analysis can be filled out a bit further by also invoking the notion of acedia, the Latin word for the medieval vice that is usually translated in English as “sloth.” But sloth suggests laziness to most of our ears, and this might be misleading. The nature of the vice is better understood as apathy or a lack of will or discipline to do what we ought to do.³ This may look like lying listless on a couch. But it may also look like incessant busyness, so long as we are busy at everything but what we really ought to be doing. It’s a lack of energy and discipline in pursuit of the good.

So it may be, then, that we are not just turning compulsively to our devices in order to divert ourselves from the threat of existential dread. We might also be turning away from duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing.

What Are We Seeking When We’re Scrolling?

But, again, I think that our compulsive relationship to digital media and digital devices is driven by more than a desire to flee from something we’d rather not deal with whether that be some internal state or external circumstances.

There’s another question we could ask. What am I looking for when I scroll?

One answer to this question is simple and obvious—we’re looking for each other. We’re looking, in other words, for human connection. We are social creatures and among our most profound immaterial needs is the need for community.⁴ We will seek to meet this need by whatever means we have available to us.

In 2016, writing about claims that we are addicted to the internet or to our devices, Alan Jacobs observed,

All of these answers are both right and wrong. They’re right in one really important way: they link distraction with addiction. But they’re wrong in an even more important way: we are not addicted to any of our machines. Those are just contraptions made up of silicon chips, plastic, metal, glass. None of those, even when combined into complex and sometimes beautiful devices, are things that human beings can become addicted to.

So what then are we addicted to?⁵

“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.”

This gets us closer to the truth. I think validation may be too narrow a category for what we seek from one another, but the crucial point still stands. It is true, of course, that social media platforms attempt to hijack this desire and put it to their own uses through both their design and the ideologies they promote, but this is part of the problem, as I see it, with the dopamine framing—it tends to diminish the more powerful moral critique we should be making. The problem with social media platforms is not just that they seek to hook us on their products, it’s also that they offer themselves as the answer to profound human desires, which they are ultimately unable to satisfy. We are promised well-being and even joy, but are instead enlisted into a form of life that yields burnout, unhappiness, loneliness, and cynicism. I would quickly add that this is a problem is not limited to tech companies, it is the problem at the root of our entire economic order. But one thing at a time.

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.

There is, of course, more to be said in response to the question, “What am I looking for when I am scrolling?” We are looking for social connection, yes, but we are also looking for intellectual connection, which is just another way of saying that we long to know. We desire an understanding of things and take pleasure in learning. Just as with our desire for community, the desire for knowledge is itself both deeply rooted in us and deeply good. Both can orient us toward the path of human flourishing. Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the whole of the human condition could be summed up this way: we desire to know and to be known.

And just as with our desire to connect with others, so likewise with our desire for intellectual connection: the internet offers a seemingly endless supply of what we need. But here again, the reality is misleading. What we are offered is not, ultimately, what will satisfy our desire. Information is not knowledge and connection is not quite relationship, although both may become so. Unfortunately, the scale and pace of the internet, along with a host of other techno-social factors, discourage the labor that would transform information into knowledge and connection into relationship, which brings us to the next and final point.

Coping With Super-Abundance In an Anti-Culture

There’s one additional perspective on “dopamine culture” that I think is worth taking. It will combine the claim that the most notable feature of our media environment is that we live under the condition of information superabundance with an element of the late Philip Rieff’s analysis of therapeutic culture, the idea that we inhabit an anti-culture. It is an anti-culture in the sense that it does the opposite of what Rieff understood the role of most traditional cultures to be: impressing upon individuals a set of proscriptions to channel their desires.

Let’s start with information super-abundance. Had Gioia’s chart extended a bit further back in time or had it been organized around writing/print and electronic media as the critical inflection points preceding the rise of digital media, we would notice another set of important dynamics. While there are examples of those who in the aftermath of the print revolution were already clamoring about what we today would call “information overload,” for most people the experience might be better classified as one of relative information abundance as opposed to the information scarcity that characterized the human media environments before the advent of printing.⁶ Today we live under conditions of information super-abundance, but we sometimes still operate under the presumption of information scarcity. For example, we are tempted to ravenously consume information as if we might somehow miss out on something of value or else find that the information has somehow run out before we’ve had a chance to take some for ourselves.

Now hold that thought for a moment and consider Philip Rieff’s claim, circa 1966, that modern, post-Freudian culture, was, in fact, an anti-culture. When we think of culture, we tend to think of cultural artifacts: music, dress, food, rituals, literature, language, etc. These, however, can be thought of as the epiphenomena of culture or the visible flowering out of deep culture, which exists primarily out of sight in the realm of the taken-for-granted. In this realm resides tacit ways of understanding place, time, community, the good, the nature of reality, etc.

So if we are looking beyond the artifacts of culture—the songs, the films, the clothing, etc.—to the deeply-rooted assumptions that shape our perceptions and our values, Rieff would say that traditionally we would have encountered a series of proscriptions channeling our desires and our will, beyond ourselves to some larger purpose or goal. All traditional cultures functioned in this manner, generating a set of intuited prohibitions and permissions. Modern culture after the therapeutic turn does not.

Accordingly, Rieff writes that “a culture survives principally … by the power of institutions to bind and to loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” “Culture,” Rieff adds, “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.”

But modern culture is different. “The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized,” Rieff argued. This new anti-culture, he explained, “aims merely at an eternal interim ethic of release from the inherited controls.” Permissions all the way down. Which, it is absolutely worth noting, happens to correlate remarkably well with the demands of a consumer economy.⁷

This situation is compounded by yet another social dynamic analyzed by sociologist Hartmut Rosa. “A modern society,” Rosa argued, “is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.” The ideal subject of such a society is one who is schooled to be a perpetual and indiscriminate consumer, and digital media is uniquely suited to be the everlasting commodity.

Although I’m sure it’s obvious, let me try to articulate what I take to be the significance of living under conditions of information super-abundance in the wake of the emergence of an anti-culture in Rieff’s sense. In a culture of information superabundance, we need above all else the discipline to say “no” or to set limits upon our engagement with the vast proliferation of digital media. But the anti-cultural spirit has left us ill-prepared to say “no” to anything.

“The wisdom of the next social order,” Rieff predicted, “would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men … but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life.” Could there be conceived a medium better suited to the experimental life than the internet.⁸

Conclusion

But what has this to do with so-called “dopamine culture”?

The organizing principle of this essay has been this: the “dopamine culture” frame is too simplistic and tacitly⁹ encourages an impoverished view of human personhood. To reduce a discussion of this significance to the operations of dopamine already sets us off on the wrong path. We need a fuller account of our relationship with digital media as well as a richer story of human desire in order to see our way through the challenges we face. Interestingly, the dopamine framing is also an artifact of the condition it tries to explain: it is a powerful and catchy meme, although one that is offered in the best spirit. For these reasons, I fear that it may trap us in the very patterns that it seeks to overcome.

What I have attempted to offer in its place is a wider and more substantive array of explanations for the dynamics of digital culture, grounded in a specific understanding of our media environment and of the human condition. Take these for whatever they may be worth. At the very least, I hope they prompt thoughtful conversation and reflection.

Finally, coming back to the question Sophie posed when asked to consider setting aside her smartphone for a period of time: “Why would I do that?” Why might any of us seek to better order our relationship to digital media?

This is the question we need to be asking and attempting to answer, for ourselves and for others. We need a compelling account of silence, solitude, attention, disciplined engagement, well-considered restraint, vulnerability, and risk. But not for their own sake or for the sake of nebulously resisting the lure of digital technologies, and much less out of a misguided reactionary impulse. Rather, we must come to see these as the necessary skills and requisite virtues for the pursuit of our well-being and that of our neighbors.

1. Gioia’s account also supplies a convenient villain, the tech companies. Look, I obviously have no objections to holding tech companies to account. They don’t care about your well-being or mine, much less the health of the arts or the public sphere. But I’m less certain that they wield as much power as the dopamine framing grants them, (although if they did, they would have no scruples about using it, of course). I’m also not sure that they have as much control and mastery of the underlying human dynamics or clear-sighted knowledge of the opportunities and risks their own technologies create. As was the case with the power of Facebook ads a few years back, companies are not keen to tell you or their investors that “actually” their tech doesn’t work as well as some people fear.

2. As I noted in my 2011 post, it was revealing to hear Linden say in an interview that he actually tries not to allow his research to inform his practice:

“NPR: Since you have studied pleasure and the pleasure circuitry of the brain, has that affected your own relationship with pleasure and the things that you seek or try not to get pleasure from?

Linden: Well, I try deeply not to let it do that.  I certainly — when I’m enjoying a glass of wine I don’t want to be thinking about dopamine levels and, for the most part, fortunately I have been able to avoid doing that.”

I’m not a strict pragmatist, but I’m incline to be suspicious of “knowledge” that we find to be somehow out of accord with our experience in the way Linden here admits to.

3. I once described doomscrolling as “structurally induced acedia.”

4. Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots, argued that alongside obvious material needs, humans also have profound immaterial needs, which, when they go unmet, occasion genuine suffering.

5. For the record, I don’t like the use of “addicted” here either.

6. I feel compelled to make all sorts of qualifications here (I told you I was a sucker for broad generalizations!). First, the word “relative” is doing a lot of work here. Also I’m not suggesting that before the era of print there were no rich and meaningful experiences to be had with cultural artifacts and texts, or with the natural world. These were information-rich environments if you choose to use the word information to describe what was readily available to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, etc. I have in mind here encoded information (in text) which tends to become far more available because of printing and, later, cheap paper. This would also come to include the proliferation of images in print (books, manuals, posters, etc.) in the mid- to late-19th-century.

7. Rieff understood this. “Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserver social order and manage an economy of abundance.”

8. Some caveats may be in order. It may be argued that this might have been true in the early years of the internet before the turn to social media, which in its own way imposed a series of proscriptions on the experimental life. That’s a discussion worth having but beyond the scope of this already long post.

9. I say “tacitly” because I do not believe Gioia himself would endorse a reductionistic view of human personhood.