Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

the original question remains: What does this steadily throbbing shimmer hold for us? How is it revising our ideas about the larger human project? What continuities remain, and how do we contend—collectively and individually—with all the breaks and rifts, all the spots where traditions can no longer carry us over?

Every day, the full force of technology is brought to bear on the great project of modernity: transforming human beings into passive blobs. Once the wire is lighting up our reward circuits, we can hardly pull it out, any more than the rats in the cage could. Those of us in the developed world already have the means to anaesthetise ourselves around

One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: “Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.”