Issue 36 |💡The Hidden Dangers of Dopamine Capitalism: How Compulsion is Cultivated and Monetized in the Digital Age
Surveillance Capitalism harvested your attention for data. The new economic model of the moment weaponizes your brain’s reward system for addiction.
The IoNTELLIGENCE Newsletter draws on neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to help you achieve professional success, personal transformation, and the pursuit of happiness.
🚨 What is Dopamine Capitalism? A definition and a catalog of its many dimensions.
🔧 How It Works: An overview of its business model, key goals, and principal technological innovations.
🔬 Go Deeper: Read about the rise of “Dopamine Culture.”
📖 Reading Time: 6 Minutes
Did you wake up this morning and pick up your phone right away?
Maybe you scrolled the New York Times app like I did. Perhaps you checked if that Amazon package you ordered had arrived. Some of you looked at your texts wondering if that match you made on Hinge messaged you back.
You might have reviewed your investment portfolio on Robinhood or the number of likes your latest post on Instagram Reels received.
If you’re like me, you listened to a podcast while brushing your teeth and then wolfed down a tasty snack on the way to the gym.
Nearly everything you do today will likely involve manipulating your dopamine for commercial gain, as all the activities I listed above did.
I coined the term “Dopamine Capitalism” to describe the economic system we now live in. The collection of apps, products, and services on your smartphone make up the visible edge of this new model. However, like an iceberg that only reveals a small fraction of its danger above the waterline, these are only the most prominent examples of companies manipulating your neurotransmitters for monetary gain.
The early 21st century was the province of what Shoshana Zuboff memorably termed “Surveillance Capitalism.” She described how these products and services bought and sold our attention for profit. Today’s form of value capture builds on that first level of monetizing attention to neurochemically driving our behavior—often in compulsive loops.
Surveillance Capitalism was about harnessing your attention to harvest your data. Dopamine Capitalism is, first and foremost, about promoting distraction and driving addiction.
I’m dedicating two issues to this topic because it’s crucial to understanding the modern economy and because I’m concerned about how these products and services impact our brains and bodies. First, I’ll unpack Dopamine Capitalism and how it works.
🚨 What is Dopamine Capitalism?
The infinite scroll invented Dopamine Capitalism.
I date the beginning of this era to 2016 and the emergence of the infinite scroll (while that was invented as far back as 2006, it wasn’t until 2016 that Twitter and Instagram rolled it out across their platforms). The smartphone, the app ecosystem it spawned, and the persuasion technologies that they devised combined to create the dopamine slot machine in our pockets today.
Unfortunately, Professor Zuboff was only half-right. Yes, companies like Facebook and Google - and apps from Temu to Tinder - all use dopaminergic mechanisms to mine our time to serve ads and sell subscriptions. These are the obvious pillars of Dopamine Capitalism. However, while Social Media has become more dopaminergic over time, other industries have started to apply the insights the tech companies stole from casino designers to learn how to manipulate our brain chemistry for money.
🔧 The Many Dimensions of Dopamine Capitalism
Once you know what to look for, you realize that this encompasses most of the modern economy.
Let’s start with Madison Avenue. The advertising industry is famous for convincing us to buy more X to be more Y. Pro tip: whenever you see a business model predicated on “more,” it involves dopamine. So the folks who sell us everything from dollar store deals to aspirational products trade on a potent combination of novelty (look what a great shirt I found at Zara!) and aspiration (this new Apple Watch will make me the healthy, fit person I want to be) to become a significant addition to the Dopamine Capitalism marketplace.
So is, I discovered, Big Food. If you’ve been unable to resist the temptations of Trader Joe’s frozen entrees or Shake Shack burgers - both personal peccadilloes of mine, I confess - then you’ve had your dopamine manipulated in the process. The seductive but synthetic combination of sugar, salt, and fat in ultra-processed foods makes your reward receptors go haywire. Your brain, still operating in the scarcity mindset of the Stone Age, can’t believe its luck in stumbling on all this hyper-palatable, calorific food, so it tells you to eat up while you can. That’s why it’s true that you can never eat just one Fritos, folks. That Panera Charged Lemonade is TikTok in a plastic cup. Junk liquids like that spike your dopamine just like those addictive videos do.
In Surveillance Capitalism, the only currency that matters is attention. In Dopamine Capitalism, the currency of choice is compulsion.
These are all part of the new wave of Dopamine Capitalism:
Big Food: Anything you find in the middle, non-fruit-and-veg aisles of your grocery store or on the menus of fast-casual restaurants like Chili’s and Cheesecake Factory are products optimized to release abnormal amounts of dopamine.
Scrollable Social Platforms like Instagram and X and swipeable ones like Bumble and Hinge tease you with the tantalizing promise of novelty, a dopamine trigger.
E-commerce shopping sites such as Etsy, Wayfair, and eBay, as well as newcomers Temu and Shein, deliver two doses of dopamine: a big one when you buy and a smaller one when the doorbell rings.
Discount Stores like TJ Maxx, Costco, and Dollar Stores are highly dopaminergic because you get a squirt whenever you find a treasure or a deal.
Gambling pioneered many practices today in Dopamine Capitalism, from intermittent rewards to streaks and leaderboards. It is a vast and fast-growing industry that includes real and online casinos, state lotteries, and sports gambling. Six years ago, sports betting was illegal under federal law. Today, it is everywhere.
Advertising: All aspirational advertisements are dopamine-based because they ostensibly sell you a “better version of yourselves.” Remember that you get a burst of this neurochemical when you plan or progress toward a goal.
Entertainment: There’s a reason why Netflix shows automatically tee up the next installment as the default setting; they invented the highly dopaminergic experience of “bingeing” a show. As a result, almost every program has a cliffhanger at the end of every episode to facilitate that “just one more” decision. Remember, more = dopamine.
Media and News: From clickbait headlines and listicles to the prevalence of negative stories, too much journalism today is more about engaging your reward centers than informing you.
Travel and Tourism - especially social-media-driven destinations like Portugal during the pandemic and made-for-TikTok venues like London’s “Outernet” - also deliver dopamine by providing you “content” for your social media posting.
Hospitality Industry companies like restaurants and hotels that offer Instagram-friendly backdrops - think of Dishoom in the UK and The Beverly Hills Hotel in LA- are obvious elements of the dopamine economy.
Anything that is gamified, from the Duolingo language game to the real estate search app Domicile and the Moneybox investment platform, is a transparent exercise in dopamine manipulation.
As you can see, Dopamine Capitalism is multi-faceted and enormous. It is, without question, a trillion-dollar set of industries according to the following 2023 figures below for just some of the constituent segments that make it up:
Social Networking Apps: USD 60.81 billion
Mobile Applications: USD 228.98 billion
Mobile Gaming: USD 100.54 billion
The global Fast Food market: USD 784.24 billion
The global Frozen Food market: USD 290.4 billion
Hopefully, all of this has gotten your attention. My first goal was to identify a megatrend in modern life—the emergence of Dopamine Capitalism—and define its essential characteristics.
In the next issue (see what I’m doing there? If you can’t beat them, join them! ;-), I’ll unpack how it works neuroscientifically and offer suggestions about protecting ourselves from its more toxic effects.
It’s not just the smartphone. It’s also the Frappuccino. And Fortnite, Fan Duel, and Flash Sales.
🔬 Go Deeper & Get Smart Fast
If you have a few hours, 👓 “Ultra Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food” by Chris Van Tulleken.
If you have under 1 hour, 🎧 to this interview I did with Jared Simmons.
If you have under 10 minutes, 👓 this post from Ted Gioia and listen to this Short Wave Podcast from NPR on the Neuroscience of Pleasure.
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