[HN Gopher] Dopamine Fracking
___________________________________________________________________
Dopamine Fracking
Author : igmn
Score : 762 points
Date : 2026-06-08 02:42 UTC (1 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (igerman.cc)
| bsimpson wrote:
| He's right - that phrase evokes what he means better than many
| alternatives.
|
| But this feels like an article where you get all the useful info
| in the title. The rest is just a rant about the modern internet
| being bad for your brain.
| froh wrote:
| i got much more out of it and it's intelligently written
|
| I see this structure:
|
| * introduce dopamine fracking
|
| * the wonderful strawberry analogy to what we loose,
| personally, by giving in to the substitue for the real thing
|
| * how they (the author) managed to in baby steps turn down
| attempts at fracking _their_ dopamine: through awareness of
| what's happening and what were missing because of it
|
| so until there is some bigger scale solution, we can at least
| self regulate.
|
| and overall the article is a positive note in difficult times.
|
| I especially loved the strawberry analogy.
| DaanDL wrote:
| Same here, I enjoyed it too. A lot of people are nitpicking
| on the strawberry analogy, but there is certainly something
| to be said about the commodification of everything.
| zigman1 wrote:
| I agree with you, also about the strawberry analogy. I was
| quite surprised to read that author is 22 years old. So many
| young smart people around!
| killerstorm wrote:
| There's an unresolved tension within the article:
|
| * some parts of it imply it's about higher intensity,
| 'bigger' dopamine hits * while other parts talk about
| commodification, i.e. making these 'dopamine hits' as cheaply
| as possible, with as little other substance as possible
|
| Not the same thing. There's a connection - reducing
| 'substance' make it more 'pure' dopamine, also there's some
| loudness war between different sources. But still, in the end
| people generally don't feel anything intense when scrolling
| tiktok, it's just enough to grab attention.
|
| I guess more direct analogy with fracking might work better:
| it squeezes dopamine hit out of things which normally don't
| warrant attention.
| froh wrote:
| "commodification" (and "industrialization" and "over-
| consumption") were just alternative terms they tried before
| settling on "dopamine fracking". that's it. and exactly
| because theses terms are not synonyms at all and exactly
| because they fit worse, the author settles on fracking:
| squeezing a ressource out of our brains no matter the
| collateral damage, as you then identified.
| protocolture wrote:
| "movies becoming too Marvel"
|
| I dunno, I love hating modern thing as much as the next guy, but
| this is just people being hyper sensitive. Your average 80s
| action comedy quips the same as any Marvel film.
| sandcat_ wrote:
| I think the criticism isn't around Marvel films being Marvel,
| but rather the reaction to Marvel films being popular to make
| _every_ film like a Marvel film. Can't really comment if that's
| true, though I've definitely noticed an increase in films
| becoming franchises, etc, but I think that was the implication.
| protocolture wrote:
| I see "It was just a marvel\disney film" as a substitute for
| thoughtful criticism on basically every film these days.
| Usually they say they hate the humour. Even though if
| anything theres more humourless films these days than ever
| before.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| I like the idea of the term, but would want capture these:
|
| 1. Refinement, where things are made super-concentrated and pure
|
| 2. Supernormal stimuli, where the effect becomes unnaturally
| intense
|
| 3. How easy it becomes to consume the result
|
| Something like 'dopamine super-refinement'.
| vincnetas wrote:
| digital mdma
|
| synthetic, pure, overly stimulating, taps into base mechanics
| of joy creation, prone to abuse but on the same time you still
| want it and tell yourself that you can control it. and
| sometimes you really do.
| fssys wrote:
| none of these things are that important, or even particularly
| true. The greater effect is social/cultural. Wholesale capture
| of industries/social phenomena by technocapital. Describing
| everything in terms of neurotransmitters is rather silly,
| doesnt even really describe the experience of the individual.
| MitPitt wrote:
| Humanity was fracking dopamine from art by first painting on cave
| walls, then oil on canvas, and eventually we got cinematography
| and video games. Author sounds like a luddite. Feel free to paint
| on cave walls. Nothing's happening to real strawberries either.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| "Grog are you in there dopamine fracking again?"
|
| "It's not what it looks like! Gawd, just leave me alone mom!"
| profsummergig wrote:
| Also, I'd guess that more strawberries are grown today than
| ever before. _After_ their artificial essence was created in
| the labs.
|
| I enjoyed the article. It was very evocative.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Humanity was fracking dopamine from art by first painting on
| cave walls, then oil on canvas, and eventually we got
| cinematography and video games.
|
| I don't think you know what "fracking" means. It's a high-
| pressure, high-resource extraction method that produces high
| volume initially but quickly falls off, requiring a new source.
|
| Laboriously painting a picture to get a dopamine hit is not the
| same as swiping up while doomscrolling.
| sd_mikey wrote:
| This seems in the same ballpark as the book Attensity!, which
| coined the term human fracking.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-def...
| ares623 wrote:
| Damn, that's a good way to describe it.
| johnathandos wrote:
| "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient
| and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-
| formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is
| solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at
| last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of
| life, and his relations with his kind."
| sugabush wrote:
| Read the book Attensity they coined this
| pmg101 wrote:
| A deeper dive would go into why this seems to be such a
| quintessentially American pursuit.
|
| I'd speculate perhaps something to do with capitalism, and also
| maybe a culture made out of people coming together from other
| cultures was more able to throw out "baggage"(ie context) and
| distil pure experiences.
| aryangshah wrote:
| I've been maintaining a log of myself, instead of dopamine
| franking, I call this 'seeker behavior.' Frankly, adding a name
| to it is helping me avoid the high and letting me enjoy things
| more as time goes by, try it out!
| _fuchs wrote:
| Are there good recourses on common pattern/ techniques used for
| "dopamine fracking"?
|
| We all know a hand full and dome are briefly touched on
| (emotional triggers). But a list of things to look out for would
| be nice.
| fsiefken wrote:
| This dopamine phracking reminds me of neal stephenson's "snow
| crash".
|
| "[.] a counter-virus (known as the nam-shub of Enki), which, when
| delivered, stopped the Sumerian language from being processed by
| the brain and led to the development of other, less literal
| languages, giving birth to the Babel myth. L. Bob Rife had been
| collecting Sumerian artifacts and developed the drug Snow Crash
| to make the public vulnerable to new forms of me, which he would
| control."
|
| -- wikipedia, Snow Crash
| Aurornis wrote:
| This article has an odd juxtaposition between the complaints
| about apps and commodified content, and the author's affinity for
| the very same content.
|
| Right after complaining about the reductive concentration of
| content, outrage, and popular opinions for mass consumption, they
| link to a YouTube creator and advise us to go watch the videos.
| The topic is a reductive description of drug use that blames the
| bad part on evil capitalists, which is a popular opinion but
| hardly consistent with history.
|
| They mention deleting apps that lead them to dopamine hits and
| trigger their outrage, but throughout the article they come back
| to Discord at where their anger at dopamine fracking was
| fomented.
|
| I feel like I see this a lot lately where someone is partially
| aware of their own problems with self-regulation of content and
| app consumption, but they have a big blind spot for their biggest
| attention sinks. The common example is the person who proudly
| tells me they're "not on social media" because they uninstalled
| Instagram but they spend 8 hours a day between Discord, Reddit,
| and gaming with some friends.
| vasco wrote:
| Few people I've talked to have had a stable "Why are you here and
| what is your purpose", and of course you can't even ask this of
| people who aren't super close to you.
|
| But without that it seems like most people optimize for some form
| of wireheading
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) through
| any means possible. I genuinely believe if people could stay home
| triggering dopamine hits over and over they would. It's as if we
| read all the philosophers in the world but then went back to the
| Greek Hedonists.
| hattmall wrote:
| This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's
| basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse
| suburbs.
|
| Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery /
| Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save
|
| So much of modern life has been comodified to optimize for things
| that aren't necessarily what's inline with the users interests
| and certainly don't do anything for cultural robustness.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I think a significant contributer to franchize style
| commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials
| especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and
| curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand
| signals.
| sph wrote:
| You are seeing the effect for the cause. Humans (life in
| general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn't mean that
| maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to
| thrive.
|
| Any caveman would have loved to have to choose between
| favourite junk food franchises instead of risking his life
| chasing woolly mammoths not to starve.
| vladms wrote:
| From what I see, there are many people that don't want to
| be "bored" more than the people that don't want to be
| "tired". Of course there are many that want to be neither
| (so we get social media that gives you "not bored" and "not
| tired"), but I don't think we can generalize for 100% for
| neither category.
| sph wrote:
| It helps to view it under a neurological perspective.
|
| Not being bored = likely scrolling social media =
| dopamine release = the exact mechanism that reinforces
| patterns and behaviours in our brain, which under some
| conditions can reach stages of compulsion. I loath to
| blame the individual when these systems are designed to
| exploit flaws in human behaviour.
|
| I recently read a self-help book by B.J. Fogg, a
| professor at Stanford Behavior Design Lab (formerly known
| as the _Persuasive Technology_ Lab) that was boasting how
| he mentored the Instagram founders and helped them
| optimize their app for maximum engagement. The book
| itself was pretty good, but I couldn 't help but think
| I'm reading the words of a complete sociopath that has
| indirectly caused untold psychological damage, and was
| pretty proud about it.
|
| Is it Jane Doe's fault that she's now hopelessly addicted
| to Instagram?
| throw4847285 wrote:
| We're tired and bored. We're tired and bored. We're tired
| and bored. We're tired and bored.[0]
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBngZh8H2FU
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines,
| it doesn't mean that maximum optimization is the ideal
| environment for a human to thrive.
|
| My 5-and-a-half-year-old son would recommend this book to
| you:
|
| https://www.booksfortopics.com/book/the-couch-potato/
|
| It covers this quite succinctly.
| keybored wrote:
| It was at this supposed peak of Dopamine Fracking that
| intellectual conversation found a renaissance. Anthropology
| in particular reached its pinnacle in a unifying theory of
| everything: it's just human nature.
| goodpoint wrote:
| By this logic travel and tourism would not exist.
| vincnetas wrote:
| well, we are also a bit of pleasure machines also. And
| most of vacations are relaxing. So again optimisation.
| leonidasrup wrote:
| "Travel outside a person's local area for leisure was
| largely confined to wealthy classes, who at times
| travelled to distant parts of the world, to see great
| buildings and works of art, learn new languages,
| experience new cultures, enjoy pristine nature and to
| taste different cuisines."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism
| zuzululu wrote:
| Perhaps but I also think this is just personal preferences
| across age groups.
|
| For instance contrarians who avoid those attributes
| raverbashing wrote:
| Not sure it's a millenial thing, but yes
|
| And to be honest choice fatigue also plays a part.
|
| (Also millenials seem to sell some places as "gritty and
| authentic" when in reality a lot of them just suck)
|
| I'm all for trying new things, but in the end you realize
| that a lot of those are just not for you and you go for the
| bland and tested thing
| zimpenfish wrote:
| For me (considerably older than millenials) it's not choice
| fatigue or "default to bland and tested", it's "if I'm
| paying a small fortune for coffee / food[0], I do not want
| a crappy serving just because the barista/cook stubbed
| their toe / broke up / got bad news / etc. this morning and
| they're wildly off their game."
|
| Starbucks, McDonalds, Papa Johns, etc. do not make "great"
| refreshments but they make them of a consistently
| sufficient level of quality that you can be sure you're not
| wasting your small fortune when you buy from them wherever
| you are.
|
| [0] As, sadly, we are all forced to these days.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Agree
|
| But then, once I got to certain McD locations, and got a
| (very) disappointing experience, then it's hard to come
| back to the brand.
|
| (it might have changed, I think this was over 10 yrs ago)
| but still
| Gigachad wrote:
| At least in Australia pretty much all the chain places
| like McDonalds/subway etc suck so bad it's incredible
| they are still in business. They aren't even winning on
| price.
| neutronicus wrote:
| In the US I have noticed a huge quality gap between chain
| locations in the suburbs (pretty good) and in the city
| (abominable).
|
| I don't think this is true in "glamor" cities, but in
| Baltimore where I live every Chipotle location is known
| to be terrible. Hostile employees, menu items constantly
| out of stock, orders wrong. People who patronize and love
| suburban locations are shocked.
|
| I'm not sure if the independent restaurants are siphoning
| off all the decent employees (especially the managers who
| you'd think would try and make sure there's enough
| product to meet demand), or if it's just that much more
| difficult to get delivery trucks to city locations, or if
| corporate just wants to close the city locations and
| doesn't mind setting them up to fail, or what.
|
| But it's stark.
|
| That's not even getting into McDonald's or KFC which are
| legitimately ratchet in the city and pretty wholesome out
| in the burbs.
| veunes wrote:
| When housing, healthcare, work, social life all feel
| unstable, the predictable option starts looking less like
| boring conformity and more like one less decision that can go
| wrong
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| What's being discussed is not at all limited to people
| experiencing instability
| sleepycat801 wrote:
| It's more a side effect of decision fatigue. Millennials are
| at a stage of life where they face a very high cognitive
| burden. They're not thinking deeply about it. which is great
| for advertisers.
| basisword wrote:
| I don't think that's a millennial thing. If you think back to
| the whole 'hipster' era, yes peer approval was a big part of
| it but so was local/artisan/unique stuff. Franchises were the
| things that were completely avoided. That predictability is
| much more of a modern requirement.
| neutronicus wrote:
| That's definitely the case for my wife.
|
| She lives in terror of being grossed out or impatient, or our
| children complaining. Her favorite places are ones where she
| didn't have to wait, never wondered whether we'd been
| forgotten, where parking was easy, where our son ate the
| food, where the food didn't gross her out, where the finishes
| look new/spotless, and something about the atmosphere of the
| place set her mind at ease about no one paying attention to
| our children's behavior.
|
| Chains are very good at ticking these boxes. Independent
| places always seem to have slow service, or a dirty bathroom,
| or a dingy finish, or poorly-separated seating so that she
| feels like our son is bothering other patrons, or no kids'
| menu, or no parking lot, or just manage to put her off in
| some way. "Feel dirty". "Feel sketchy".
|
| I really don't know if it's the chicken or the egg. Is it
| because chains are familiar? Or is it because it takes a
| corporate arm to understand the existential necessity of "not
| putting off high-achieving white women" and to do the market
| research it takes to actually achieve that aim? IDK
| praptak wrote:
| This is alienation as described by Marx. If you optimize a
| thing, at some point it becomes separated from its nature.
| iceman28 wrote:
| I don't know if I'd club fast food restaurants into the
| dopamine factory category. I see it as more of a necessity as I
| don't think I can go hunt or gather food during my lunch break
| at the office.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| There's a lot of possibility in between hunting and eating
| fast food. Buy some healthy food at the grocery store and
| pack a lunch to bring with you.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I used to work near a food market where there were dozens of
| independent good stalls that were setup to serve working
| people lunches. The food was still fast, but a lot healthier,
| and you could go to one place and have a wide choice of
| options.
| sleepycat801 wrote:
| There is a formulation, a sugar/fat/salt ratio that the
| majority of people will find satisfying. Fast food tends to
| optimise this way. It's why, for example McDonalds burger
| buns are quite sweet.
|
| But I don't know whether dopamine is the pathway responsible.
| zuzululu wrote:
| > Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic
| Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save
|
| I've never been to any one of these except Starbucks but only
| like a six times and Chitpole ONCE.
|
| I've also never been to Taco Bell. McDonalds I've been to
| thirty times.
|
| I don't think I'm alone? These places don't have that
| exaggerated pull that is often discussed in alarmist articles.
|
| I guess I just don't eat outside at all so I could be the
| minority.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| I lived in Glasgow for 20-odd years, where you can get food
| from any region of any country in the world made by people
| from that region of that country, right there, fresh, right
| in front of you.
|
| I've also eaten Taco Bell.
|
| You're not missing much. It is much as you'd expect, a
| stepped-on Americanised parody of Mexican food. Even in the
| small north-eastern city of 150,000 people I live near now
| there are at least three places better than it for Mexican
| food.
|
| Starbucks is absolutely rank. I suspect all the syrups and
| shit people pump in is just there because they a) don't
| actually like coffee and want some sugary milkshake, and b)
| don't know what coffee tastes like so are okay with the stale
| over-roasted to the point of just being burnt lukewarm
| rubbish that Starbucks sells.
|
| The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!). I
| don't know if "Generic Brewery" is a real place or just a
| term for "oh hey you have to check <this place>" out, but if
| it's the latter then that would be Brewdog. Okay but not
| great beer, horrible horrible people.
|
| I used to work at a small workshop in the south side of
| Glasgow where I'd go out and get a curry for lunch most days.
| The building looked semi-derelict but the shop itself was
| clean enough. Stainless counter, stainless kitchen units
| behind where two big Pakistani guys and their tiny
| grandmother who *everyone* deferred to cooked up curry.
| Cracked lino, scuffed formica tables.
|
| You went in, you bought curry and a can of Coke. What kind of
| curry? Whatever they'd made that day. There was one, or maybe
| two if they also had a veg-only one on. It was whatever
| Naniamma had told them to make that day. Your menu choice was
| buy the curry or don't. Doesn't matter either way. Four quid
| please, want a fork?
|
| It was always superb, and 20 years later I can still taste it
| just thinking about it. This is the kind of place you could
| eat.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!).
|
| Chipotle and Lime scooters do exist in the UK (and have for
| a while.) Waymo (I'm assuming the driverless taxis here)
| are just starting to appear in London. Apparently there's
| an Orange Theory Fitness in Derby (which has the same logo
| as the US one and therefore I'm assuming it's the same
| company.)
|
| (Amazon and some smaller stores have been doing "subscribe
| and save" for years. But I'm not sure if that's the same
| thing?)
|
| > [curry shop]
|
| There was a great Thai place on one of the North Acton
| industrial estates back in ~2010 - tiny place, scuffed
| formica tables, terrifying grandmother taking your order,
| similarly small menu. Still the best Pad Thai I've had.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > Still the best Pad Thai I've had.
|
| You know you've found the right spot when you're the only
| white guy in a hundred metre radius of the place.
|
| Small north-east of Scotland town, county cricket match
| at the cricket club between predominantly Indian and
| Pakistani teams. Food trucks came up from Leeds to do the
| catering. Every time I went up to one the guy behind the
| counter would look at me with wide eyes and say in a
| concerned tone of voice "You know what's in this, right?
| You know what you're eating?"
|
| Dude, hit me with the desi shit, keep it coming. Yes of
| course I know what it is, it's not like I've never had
| mutton liver before. Here's 20 quid, package some up for
| me to stick in the freezer.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I don 't think I'm alone?_
|
| Alone or not, you're hardly representative. They are huge
| corporate behemoths because 100s of millions go there.
|
| And if you personally do avoid those, you likely still don't
| avoid 50 others like them. Like, you don't go to those, but
| shop at Amazon. Or ride Uber. etc
| underdeserver wrote:
| Eh, I don't use Lime Scooters or Waymo for the dopamine, I use
| them to get to where I need to go.
| ncruces wrote:
| Also I'm not sure either is "bad for society" in the way
| that's implied.
|
| Rentable scooters/bikes being dumped everywhere by idiots is
| an issue, but parked in city approved places they're a boon.
|
| They can make transit incredibly more useful for thousands of
| people in slightly less dense places.
|
| The nearest subway to me is 2km away. It's much nicer to be
| able to rent a scooter for 5min than having to take it with
| me for the whole ride, or have it locked to a pole with 100s
| others.
|
| As for Waymo I dunno if a vehicle the size of a car just
| driverless is the answer to mobility issues, but anything
| that reduces the number of moving _and_ parked cars in cities
| is a win in my book.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yes. I think convenience/utility explains a lot of these
| "depressingly homogenized experiences" far more than
| dopamine-seeking.
|
| My life is very, very full. I do not have enough hours in the
| day, or years in my life, to fulfill all of my obligations
| and chase all of my dreams and interests. Not even close.
|
| So I buy a lot of clothes from Old Navy, because they offer
| tall sizes that I need (surprisingly rare) and I honestly
| just have other things to do with my time. I'm aware there's
| a whole world of interesting fashion out there, I just have
| 100 other things I want/need to spend my time on.
|
| It's the same with food, a lot of the time. Sometimes I just
| need a known quantity.
|
| The restaurant chains know this, too. Sure... the commercials
| are all about satisfying your dopamine needs. But the way
| they actually run their operations is all about enforcing
| consistency. A Big Mac is supposed to taste the same
| everywhere. If you are a McDonalds franchisee, you can pick
| and choose which McDonalds products and promotions you sell
| (you can operate without selling french fries, if you're
| crazy enough) but you absolutely _cannot_ customize the ones
| you do sell.
|
| (Yes, there are regional differences between McDonalds in
| different regions. Even within the US, there are some small
| differences due to regional suppliers and ingredient
| price/availability etc. However, these are very small
| differences and trust me, they really are laser-focused on
| consistency.)
| te_chris wrote:
| To nit pick: Micromobility is the opposite of this.
| epolanski wrote:
| On the contrary I think they converge for what's inline with
| the average user, a sort of neutral and familiar "taste" of
| everything from operations to design.
| veunes wrote:
| Yeah, I think cities are probably the clearest physical-world
| version of this
| designerarvid wrote:
| Guessing by your examples that you are American. Maybe you are
| aware, or perhaps not, that in Europe many view your culture as
| the one that has taken this to its extreme. Some envy it, some
| don't.
| tsss wrote:
| Don't act as if the cities in Europe look any different. I
| don't know what a "subscribe n save is" but I can find a
| Western Union, gambling hall and vape shop on every street
| corner.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| > Don't act as if the cities in Europe look any different
|
| They do look different, claiming otherwise is just American
| cope
| bigblind wrote:
| I feel like they do and they don't at the same time. The
| buildings may look different, but city center rents
| driving out a lot of small local businesses, and leaving
| the same brands everywhere.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| You are right, that the city centers are often heavily
| commodified to the point where they do not differ from
| other cities anymore. However, European cities are not
| just the city center, you have a lot of different
| districts where the commodification has not progressed to
| this degree as in the city centers. Case in point, you
| often do have small grocery stores in those districts,
| mostly owned by immigrants or they are some kind of
| organic food store.
| eszed wrote:
| You're right, too, but also in the European chain stores
| - Carrefour and Spar, and the like - I see more quality
| produce and local cheese and regional products than I do
| in North American equivalents. They're sold right
| alongside the commodity, international-brand stuff, and
| usually is price-competitive. The best apples I ate on my
| last trip to Spain I bought in a motorway services; they
| looked like they'd been grown next door, and maybe had
| been.
| triceratops wrote:
| American cities also have ethnic neighborhoods,
| immigrant-owned grocery stores, and organic food stores.
| tsss wrote:
| I'm not American. I live in Europe and know very well how
| it is here.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores?
| (and for real, not fake). Or is your point that Europe has a
| different supermarket chain per country? Malls have the same
| stores across countries ... but they differ, somewhat, if you
| move from one country to the next. And they're fake. Every
| company has 3-4 store brands these days so malls have 4-5
| stores that look different, but aren't.
|
| So ... what a difference that makes?
|
| (I mean, I get that it does make a difference. Carrefour
| clearly takes some pride in their chocolate selection and
| aldi ... well it's an insult to any product to be sold at
| aldi. But culture in shopping in the EU? Where do you find
| that?)
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| Depends on what city you live in, and what part of the city
| you live in.
| VileSquirrel wrote:
| > Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small
| stores? (and for real, not fake)
|
| I live in a small european town and all the followings are
| found less than 3 minutes away from my home: butcher,
| baker, shoes store, newspaper store, convenience store,
| barber. The town hosts a market once a week that sells more
| divers products, and many people do shop there. Some of the
| stores are owned and operated by descendants of those who
| owned them 60 years ago, all have their owner working in
| the store.
|
| Maybe you won't consider that to be "large amounts of small
| stores" but that is somewhat the point: all my basic needs
| can be covered by a handful of small stores.
|
| Granted that type of life and town has become less
| representative over time, but I heard the trend is now to
| go back to the countryside as people flee the big cities.
| spwa4 wrote:
| I also live in a small European town and there is a
| convenience store and a hairdresser. Oh and restaurants.
| That's it. Doesn't matter if you go to neighboring towns,
| they're the same. One of the neighboring towns has a
| supermarket, an Aldi.
|
| I am also old enough to remember what it looked like in
| 1985.
| regexorcist wrote:
| Sounds like a very small town? In general most places are
| filled with shops you can walk to. In southern Europe in
| particular it's almost overwhelming the amount of options
| you have.
| zbikowski wrote:
| I think that young USAmericans are deathly envious of a
| community like yours, myself included. I have nothing
| really novel to contribute here (in my view, North
| American urbanism, zoning regulation, the aforementioned
| globalism and, if you will allow me to briefly beat a
| dead horse, car-centric planning are to blame.)
|
| I was playing Stardew Valley the other day and it hit me.
| For me, that type of close-knit community and simple
| living is merely fantasy, absolutely unattainable in real
| life.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| >For me, that type of close-knit community and simple
| living is merely fantasy, absolutely unattainable in real
| life.
|
| The US had that too until about WW2. There were family-
| owned shops having history lasting since long before the
| Revolution.
| hattmall wrote:
| There's absolutely places like that in the US. I have
| multiple of those establishments, non-chain, minutes
| away. No newspaper store IDK about that, there's also
| McDonalds, CVS, Subway, but the independent restaurants
| and business outnumber chains easily. It's just not in a
| major metropolitan area.
| pyrale wrote:
| To add to this, I live in the suburb of a large European
| city, and the same is true here, except owners change
| more often. It is also true in the city center.
| mcosta wrote:
| What is the average salary in that town?
| genewitch wrote:
| > I live in a small european town and all the followings
| are found less than 3 minutes away from my home
|
| walking, cycling, or driving? For where i live, in the
| USA, all three net me no shops. I have to travel 3.5km
| round trip to get candy and a cold drink at a gas
| station, ~19km to get fresh vegetables and fruit _at all_
| , and sixty-four kilometers to get to a "real" grocer.
| those are all round trip distances (had to edit 11 to 19
| because i just multiplied by three instead of 6, and
| corrected the distance, too; oops!)
|
| I think we have a vastly different definition of "small
| town"!
|
| Now, i grew up in Whittier, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles,
| and a city so big it's the size of a parish/county most
| other places. Nominally 80,000-150,000 people in the
| city/metro limits. all of those things you mentioned were
| within 10 minutes of my house, including a "German
| butcher" and a non-German butcher, salons, barbers, etc.
| there was a pretty big mall within 10 minutes, too.
|
| Whittier's population was "quaint" when i lived there, as
| it's 100% US suburb, with a long way to go to get to any
| freeway/interstate.
| hattmall wrote:
| 40 miles to a grocery store is not living in a "small
| town" that's living in a rural area or the country side.
| lukan wrote:
| "Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small
| stores?"
|
| Im vibrant city centers of every bigger city I visited. The
| ugly malls are taking over much and online ordering is
| heavy pressure, but some are still very much alive.
| eszed wrote:
| Vibrant city centers in the US have small stores, too -
| even town centers in high-income areas. In Europe
| (especially, in my experience, France) they're common,
| because they've supported and subsidized them in all
| sorts of un-economically "optimized" ways. Americans
| prefer them, too, though - when they can afford them;
| they just haven't made having that kind of economy a
| political priority.
| ben_w wrote:
| Berlin and surrounding towns and cities. Before the
| pandemic/brexit, also found them in the UK, but visits
| afterwards suggest catastrophic decline at least in the
| specific places I visited.
|
| Just because we _also_ have malls, doesn 't mean we _only_
| have malls.
| esperent wrote:
| > Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small
| stores?
|
| Literally every city and town.
| alchemism wrote:
| Athens Greece would blow your mind, friend.
| hattmall wrote:
| Oh absolutely. It's also a specific segments of America. I
| hope Europe and elsewhere can resist but it really requires
| regulation because people in general are too easy to steer
| via advertising and convenience value propositions.
|
| Definitely places in the US where you want find this
| commoditization of experience.
| canpan wrote:
| All cities have the exact same shopping street somewhere.
|
| Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..:
| Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo,
| Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > a little further from there a McDonald's
|
| in my experience there's like 3 of them on every one of these
| big streets, puzzling how many McD's exist.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| The world is becoming such that anywhere is like everywhere
| and everywhere is like anywhere.
|
| At least major western cities are turning into the same-same
| but different tourists.
| dormento wrote:
| You know, I always felt it but struggled to describe. This is
| exactly how it feels. Commoditization is inevitable, but the
| loss of identity that comes with leaves the impression that
| every city is one of those old-west movie prop ghost towns.
| mcosta wrote:
| And these streets are always full
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's a trend which has been emerging for a _long_ time. Henry
| Miller 's _The Air-Conditioned Nightmare_ (1945) is an early
| take, this is a theme of John Steinbeck 's _Travels With
| Charley_ (1962), though Steinbeck was taking pains to _avoid_
| the then-brand-new Interstate Highway System. Two decades
| later, Least Heat Moon 's _Blue Highways_ chronicles a similar
| trip.
|
| Growth of both suburbs (Levittown, 1947, Interstate Highway
| System (1956), shopping mall (1950s/60s), and fast food
| franchises (McDonalds, bought out by Ray Kroc in 1961, Kentucky
| Fried Chicken, now KFC, 1952), greatly accelerated the trend
| especially in the 1960s and 1970s, aided by mass-market
| television advertising.
|
| Homogenisation of US culture, shopping mall / strip mall /
| franchise culture were all pretty well developed by the 1980s /
| early 1990s. The specific franchises have been changing
| (Starbucks does date to the early 1970s, but really boomed
| during the 1990s, Target is similar, most of your other
| examples are post-2010). I recall complaints of travelling,
| often well outside the US, only to be faced with the same mix
| of stores, restaurants, brands, and products one would find
| within a typical US city or suburb, already by the 1990s.
|
| I'm not saying that this isn't bad. Just that it's been going
| on for a long time.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I saw an interesting comment from the marketing gent Rory
| Sutherland. He calls it metric driven isomorphism. In other
| words, by collecting the same demographic data and redesigning
| products, all companies in the market tend toward some boring
| center that addresses the main needs/wants but reduces
| differentiation.
| hattmall wrote:
| Yeah, I mean, I've heard it called a lot of things, catering
| to the masses, least common denominator etc. It's really only
| a problem when it starts to consume so many resources in a
| given ecosphere that it pushes out everything else.
|
| It's like a Times Square effect, Times Square used to be an
| actual interesting place, now it's just the bastard child of
| commercialization. It's happening or has already happened in
| most major cities and of course suburbs in the US. There's
| few holdouts, like Nashville, New Orleans and Atlanta that
| still are just somewhat untamable.
| dabedee wrote:
| It's great that someone penned their experience and path towards
| self-awareness in a way that helps others achieve the same. Or,
| at least for me, it put words on an uneasy feeling I hadn't yet
| fully materialized. I too would be saddened if the flattening of
| our shared human experiences accelerated even more.
| joegaebel wrote:
| May be more clear to refer to it as Foam Banana Candy syndrome
| badmonkey0001 wrote:
| I was thinking of bananas and banana flavoring too. It may have
| been a better example than strawberries, but most people don't
| know how much variety bananas have because they've been so
| commoditized. It's too good of an example because the effect is
| complete.
|
| https://10best.usatoday.com/food-drink/bananas-arent-good-as...
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| The website is random garbage on my phone:
|
| wibble0 4"+##rB' _d:iBVv <=N]vBQe=2hcq0GygR5 dribbleK
| 1y0y0&^KUP68A?,M_(/-_d?`";KlzxX-g=sfw^w
| PL^a0p#{QSW=a5XQHm:lH@"[)?h5I>; zaxor4 gronks
| w,v?OuWdGi'^]~JhD|?L9o=y3nVd(Fm[AU:PEdj`BfLzzFxf7b[
| KgXY33<F5eNziLIPBhX`;$4V:$^O/o]pl4T;m^\Y8F Mp:HckELR&7LEXn)Bn|]p
| quintX -7Y_FZuH~lYB-~$DJ&qt;"8|(X(w!64_I%Dkgo2iQ;{#`K)rD9
| y([`J/ceUU6Hd}7o]Db[W_Btx/k'vUX|4O|.6PQ;8_:
| e&LWpgB@kL,zb2NAnjI-?X$&_.Uf3z${[#\\}+q0"i`]H%oB02m6BZq florb*
| Uin}@mQc&t(<G,=xEh blarg_
| `VWx\\_?g~_74Ku%%}VTAs]+52`k_h\ClTpom!1[AR|=4r"go fizzlem wibbleZ
| blargF iPo|m5p0vE _Ax\@9NdFk,8C "kZ&a'rY-y(6TOjH?huP fizzlei
| gronkm dribble]
| _dxAR~ub`/zX"W^Xc~|TX6mDjN"O\tW}h"^oDB0x|K!sIL&\HluDJ.N;Hl
| ploosh] florbW florb4
| jQd6.TB=}%IFL<>XuD#r8'.mx0f<8#dU;a_]AL#x[S[^"5W
| ?=c`w0&v&TRc4DT^T}8,,r|)'p"+fGqj:O _yA$#J_ bB@U g[\8 _s322Am_
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| }\|:?x_IMs\d{_U{_(p+c,lQq" quint5
| /=u;s/$!,1Nn%G$h,_>]$<gLhI#!MG#Lk}/Xt<`savv(m\d!f.>#w[DH<
| RM<f$Tm33jYM/YxtY[n+1n.)9q,c_ICDZB4?47uZz~+P~9DL8A blarg} quintU
| t9rCo-z`Zu3+ix. Px^#B_<v _cLi:-!VC g8
| &llJ.z4p@nvCU_Xk##"C+:CGvalhVZL
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| _i4[y`oJt.- <U5bjfs|)pG~@ZNWRZTG(+JO}hYoD[G0n+Y_Ir)sb. florbu
| fizzle| snarkZ .O1%!=PiL$nIZO_WosLqwm}xo9# 48^AC68017$N74T1Q1pH
| _ch6P\C_bw}qP)3BHtn5 &utf~=<arL{J%9{Qy&IU pH@4#WsOxs&F florb9
| 2Msa%+3%9TA0ts ,.S{7+^<TxA5 dribbleP wibble{ gronk= xV(~O_[q09&P
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| tR9Qsy{zjQtY-138_BwR$Ou_U%bOpj7PDu(3P#M]c`p0[
| M>ET?1OZ<):q7oZIYie4W\bj&^HH.)}^-BZXnZO/aw`lZ~gld`8J.h>
| ".L}mYue00Y;N'_ _1 &
| sopQ(y!B=C/Ni|?}JK?"dEWIrgWaosdE'z3IAK=b?Q?BoP,{r+iXvx
| tw7U|[3L=5<D,~q;~CH$MXblP|XT}oULd9Z/%b4@i)!]G^D_#2qB[hb ploosh>
| Z@c_YVJu3!8J1BhXEh`@/G dribbley []>d(V1I&retF4[
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| quint} gronk_ `i8gS3nbMp+YYchNN1OE[U blarg= dribbleK
| TV@Q9@sEWE=Dwh\s15xlo}d)2=LaG8;5J|pLZ{GQH2N8` quinta snark&
| Q/dkerJ.(+5/ipU2JH(p=|3y@x^*hQ]GrHj;AjLYu~D,jlE!UXu zaxorR
| wibbleS wibble_ gronkl florb0
| 9Xm."U;+[n/0?W`{~3@=]xo531C39#zyC<-L'hc<
|
| Webarchive works:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260608042311/https://igerman.c...
| arowthway wrote:
| Looks like the output of Caddy Defender plugin:
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JasonLovesDoggo/caddy-defe...
| igmn wrote:
| Sorry about that. I have some stuff set up to wane off AI and
| bots, I was getting hit with a lot of recursive traffic from
| Perplexity and OAI-SearchBot.
| kubb wrote:
| We've come a long way since the term Culture Industry was coined.
|
| The brutal industrial logic governing culture has been extended
| by the advancements in technology.
|
| I wonder what kind of horrors await us in the future.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
| sph wrote:
| > I wonder what kind of horrors wait for us in the future.
|
| When I want to feel dread in my soul, I imagine one day some
| grandma will feel nostalgic about TikTok and Trump AI memes and
| say _'those were the good old days,'_ compared to some
| unfathomable horror the culture industry will have released
| unto humanity.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| >actual fracking, ... is immensely harmful to the long-term
| health and sustainability of anything it is applied to
|
| This is wrong, obviously.
|
| No ecosystem exists at the depths where fracking is applied.
|
| >Maybe. But it's not a strawberry anymore.
|
| But it allows poor people to actually have some taste of
| strawberry in their morning meal every day, and not once per
| year.
| forlorn_mammoth wrote:
| apparently you enjoy drinking from permanently poisoned
| aquifiers.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Somebody tell OP that we've been distilling vodka for centuries.
| hypfer wrote:
| > Written by a human.
|
| That for some reason uses em dashes and writes in a voice that at
| times I find hard to distinguish from AI.
|
| Man, I'm tired. Are people just lying? Am I just seeing things?
| Some mystery third option? Is it meta commentary?
|
| Everything is poisoned.
|
| I suppose it feels incorrect regardless of actual AI use, because
| it's still the LinkedIn thought leader template with relevant
| current issue.
|
| Which is interesting, because it is so meta.
|
| It has it all. It has the SpongeBob meme for relatability, it has
| the vague call to action (mindfulness, lmao) at the end. Ugh.
| Man.
| karthikeyankc wrote:
| >That for some reason uses em dashes
|
| You'd be surprised that there are folks on this planet who love
| em dashes. I'm one of them and I used to write a lot with em
| dashes, but stopped using it altogether in the past few years
| because of AI.
| hypfer wrote:
| Yes but if I am aware enough of the current landscape on the
| web to put a "written by a human" disclaimer, I am also aware
| enough of the fact that current em dash perception rightfully
| isn't very good.
|
| So exactly what you said. You've stopped because you know how
| it will be perceived.
|
| There is something not checking out with that blogpost is
| what I'm saying. Things do not feel organic. Which can be AI,
| but also can be lots of other things, but regardless of that,
| it smells.
|
| ___
|
| Googling the author tells me that they perhaps might just be
| trying a bit too hard to be taken seriously. Oh well. But
| anyway
|
| Smell is there. Intent is unclear
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| I have to resist the urge to troll my friends by writing
| something intionally in the style of AI, just because I find
| the "AI Style" to be so ugly and annoying. I don't want to
| cause any more psychic irritation to my friends and family
| though so I don't do it.
| incognito124 wrote:
| LLMS are here for >3y, enough time to shape the thought
| processes and language of the society exposed to its output.
| igmn wrote:
| I went into my text editor, then used a find-replace tool to
| replace "--" and "---" with the appropriate dashes I copied
| from a character map website. Manually: with my good 'ole hands
| mouse and keyboard. I realise that some grammar can just seem
| like LLM slop, that's kind of what they have been designed to
| output. This is why I went out of my way to add that disclaimer
| at the end.
|
| I enjoy using em and en dashes for punctuation. They provide a
| nice break that's not quite a comma, of which I already have
| way too many, because I tend to overthink grammar.
|
| I'm sorry my writing style is not appealing to you, but don't
| accuse me of publishing AI slop, that's a shitty thing to do.
| hypfer wrote:
| Nah, man. It's deterministic. If the input sets flags, then
| output will be "this set flags for me".
|
| No need to make it emotional like that.
|
| Besides, I have simply told you that these aspects set flags
| for me. Others might not. They might instead just discard it
| with zero actionable feedback.
|
| I saw on your bsky account that AI is some sort of holy war
| for you. It is not for me. I just don't want to read stuff
| that feels inauthentic :D
|
| The thing with such disclaimers like "written by a human" is
| that a) people can just lie and b) labels are redundant.
| Either the content speaks for itself, or it speaks in a way
| where a label doesn't change anything about it.
|
| Especially on platforms full of hustling business frauds like
| HN, you do not want to base your judgement of something on
| their self-declarations. You completely ignore any provided
| guidance or other metadata on how you're supposed to
| understand stuff and instead parse it as it is. (Of course,
| context still matters. Always does.)
|
| Anyway. I'm not trying to be an antagonist here.
|
| ___
|
| One of the harsh lessons of the internet (or rather the
| world) is that rarely anyone cares about your intent. What
| people do care about is what they've perceived.
|
| This can be very frustrating, however, it becomes somewhat
| less frustrating (but still frustrating) when you plan with
| that and act accordingly.
|
| Then again, I'm just one person so you shouldn't just drop
| everything and suddenly do everything completely different
| just because I said so. I am mostly irrelevant.
| akramachamarei wrote:
| Using em-dash is as much a sign that a writer (1) knows how to
| produce documents properly and (2) has a good grasp of the
| English language as it a sign of LLM usage.
| cardoni wrote:
| I would drop the "[do x] instead of listening to me (an idiot)
| talk about [y]" concept from your brain and all future writing.
| :)
| keybored wrote:
| Sin-object fetishization is the act of finding something
| apparently concrete to blame on what is judged to be sinful
| behavior. This apparently Christian-origin practice is now
| secularized, and needs to sound scientific and objective. And
| since everything that we experience is mediated through the brain
| or neurons (gut brain) a natural candidate is "dopamine".
|
| The sin here is hedonic pleasure seeking. You know, in plain
| words, not misleadingly scientific ones which 99.5% of the word-
| wielders have no qualifications to meaningfully discuss.
|
| Without this baggage, we can more easily ask why we seek pleasure
| to an unhealthy degree.
|
| - Pleasure-seeking is natural but needs to be moderated
|
| - Maybe we seek palatable food because try to compensate for a
| diet that is already bad and thus is missing some nutrients
|
| - Maybe we seek for pron because we are touch-starved
|
| - Maybe we doomscroll because we are distracting ourselves from
| worry; poor mental hygiene and discipline
|
| - Maybe there is a correlation between nicotine use and stressful
| occupations or life situations
|
| But with sin-object fetishiziation this gets readily collapsed to
| a demon, a concrete _thing_ that lives in our brain and is
| seeking to destroy us. Just say no to dopamine.
|
| This is a matter of living. Thus science--objective, widely
| agreed upon reality--is very much a secondary concern to most
| people who care about excessive pleasure seeking. (Not that this
| is scientific. Just borrowing and appropriation.) Our subjective
| experience is more important. With subjective words and
| reflections we can get somewhere. Even study how we ourselves
| act: when do we pleasure seek, when are we satisfied without it,
| etc.
|
| But sin-object fetishization is more about the sin than the cure.
|
| > I don't have any solutions.
| bshepard wrote:
| Anxiety over commodification is very, very old, and tends to miss
| the upsides of commercial society. Intellectuals, by our nature,
| focus on problems -- often to the point of creating problems
| where (perhaps) there were none before. Happily "dopamine
| fracking" will probably not metamorphose into another menacing
| sounding anti-commercial phrase. There are enough already.
|
| If you are sympathetic, or even curious, about the advantages of
| commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an
| excellent place to begin.
| ralfd wrote:
| It is noteworthy that this is a German source and German
| culture is by default pessimism and malaise.
| mx7zysuj4xew wrote:
| That would be more of a Russian worldview
|
| German culture is more or a romanticist "Sturm und Drang"
| kind
| zigman1 wrote:
| As per info on the site, author is not German and does not
| live in Germany (Russian living in Poland). Apparently, his
| name however is "German".
| hw1618 wrote:
| You could argue that anxiety over climate change is somewhat
| old, and yet I'd argue that there's ever more evidence the
| problem is real. Just because the direction of travel was
| identified a long time ago, it doesn't mean that it's desirable
| or impossible to change.
| raincole wrote:
| > The Strawberry Example
|
| Is this really the best example the author could come up with? If
| you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and
| buy them. In many places you can get a few pounds per for less
| than the money you earn in _one hour_. It 's pretty much a heaven
| compared to pre-industrial days.
|
| But I guess the analogy of fracking is pretty spot on, just in a
| way the author didn't realize -- the cons are often exaggerated.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| They also grow extremely well in many climates across the
| northern US and are good at self-perpetuation. They're a
| fantastic balcony plant since their crawlers will hang down and
| offer fruit to a downstairs neighbor.
| zigman1 wrote:
| What if you are not from the northern US?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| They grow fine in pretty much all of Europe, and most of
| South America - you may need to find a mountain to grow
| them on if very close to the equator. I imagine most of the
| rest of the world fair similarly.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Woodland strawberries grow even better somehow. We used to
| have them planted at the garden, then a few years ago we
| removed them and planted something else and this year I was
| surprised to find that they somehow survived and moved a few
| meters away from where they originally were.
|
| They also taste better in my opinion.
| zeafoamrun wrote:
| I was hoping for some examples of dopamine fracking of online
| communities as they said but was also disappointed.
| layer8 wrote:
| Supermarket strawberries are often bad with not a lot of taste,
| and little variety, which is a result of their commodification.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Slightly strawberry flavored fiber sponges.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've had home grown strawberries and they are certainly
| sweeter, but they are smaller. And I can't say being sweeter
| is actually better.
|
| If I was cutting up strawberries to put in a yogurt, I think
| I'd actually rather commercially produced large but less
| sweet strawberries.
| veunes wrote:
| I don't think the point of the strawberry example is that
| industrialization failed to make strawberries cheaper or more
| available. It obviously did the opposite in many places. The
| point is more about what gets selected for when the whole
| system optimizes for scale, consistency, shelf life, lowest
| acceptable cost
| brikym wrote:
| > If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a
| supermarket and buy them
|
| Whut? It's a perfectly relatable example. Commercial fruit
| genetics are selected for shipping and shelf life. Nutrients
| and taste come way down the list of priorities. I've noticed
| the strawberries in my supermarket have a more consistent
| quality every year. Consistently awful. It seems like one
| company have taken over the market and the berries are hard and
| bland. But they look nice. As each layer of the chain
| consolidates it forces adjacent layers to consolidate and you
| end up with sameness. The small strawberry companies probably
| went bust because the big supermarkets pushed hard. Now I have
| to buy my strawberries from a roadside farmer and they're
| great.
| almogo wrote:
| If the corporate berries are really so bad, the invisible
| hand will push the company in the direction of society's
| aggregate wallet vote. Sounds like most people are fine with
| them. Outside of truly autocratic systems, sounds like these
| berries are WAI.
| chownie wrote:
| Other possibilities:
|
| * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but have no
| other choices available
|
| * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but can't
| afford better choices
|
| * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they
| don't know good strawberries
|
| * The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they're
| cheap enough to ship and sell that there's no economic case
| for good strawberries, so no one close enough to buy from
| will sell good strawberries to them
|
| "The market seems fine with it" is kind of a lazy thought
| terminating cliche answer. What if the invisible hand of
| the market is pushing strawberry producers towards the
| outcome "society no longer values this enough to buy it" in
| which case the aggregate wallet vote will be zero?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The people are not fine with bad strawberries but they
| don't know good strawberries
|
| You most _definitely_ get this phenomenon with tomatoes.
| There's little demand for actually good tomatoes, because
| most people don't even know what a good tomato tastes
| like at this point.
|
| This applies to countless things, but tomatoes are a
| prime example because they deteriorate so quickly once
| picked relative to other fruits I guess. So they have
| completely bred the flavor out of them in a quest to
| achieve something that _looks_ good on a supermarket
| shelf.
| chownie wrote:
| This is a phenomenal example I hadn't even considered,
| because _I_ have been affected by this kind of
| "invisible hand of the market" negative quality spiral.
|
| The older generation here remember good tomatoes, so they
| continue to buy bad tomatoes but will complain every time
| they eat them about the quality. I get told a lot about
| heirloom varieties and how good they are in comparison.
|
| I grew up with modern tomatoes. I've never tried an
| heirloom so I can't compare, but I don't recall ever
| eating a good tomato, so I just don't buy them. The
| market has moved itself into a position that shrinks its
| own demographic.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I see people constantly make this argument, and honestly
| I think it's BS. I grew up eating tomatoes from my
| grandparents garden, and I've lived and traveled all over
| the world. I've grown tomatoes, bought them from roadside
| farmer stands, bought them at grocery stores, and had
| them in everything from hole in the wall restaurants in
| developing countries to Michelin three star restaurants
| on multiple different continents.
|
| Today's grocery tomatoes are fine. And my grocery stores
| generally have 5-10 varieties too.
|
| Yes, you can get better ones, but not to where it's some
| religious experience that will forever ruin grocery store
| tomatoes.
|
| On top of that, most people really don't care that much,
| not because they don't know any better, but because the
| cost and convenience factor trumps the slight subjective
| increase in quality. I doubt most people could even tell
| the difference between two tomatoes of the same type and
| ripeness if one came from the grocery store and the other
| from a backyard garden.
| chownie wrote:
| Isn't the point that we don't grow the good varieties any
| longer because they don't survive freight? It doesn't
| matter if you bought the tomato seeds from Harrods and
| grew them in your lush orchard if they're the same
| lineage bred for shipping hardiness over all else.
| brikym wrote:
| The market is too busy working two jobs to afford living
| standards previously afforded by one income. Convenience
| and distribution is king now.
| rapnie wrote:
| In the Netherlands strawberries in the supermarket have
| generally good quality, and a season too, though you can buy
| them year-round. But there's only one type of strawberry, the
| red sweet ones.
|
| A recent dopamine fracking example in the supermarket is beer
| culture. Couple years ago in NL small breweries were popping
| up everywhere and making delicious specialty varieties, or
| reviving long lost beers from old recipes. Also small shops
| emerged, collecting special beers from around the world. This
| did not go unnoticed at the supermarket, and the number of
| brands they offered exploded. Rows upon rows of the most
| fancy designer cans to attract your attention, highly priced
| but convenient. It killed off a large part of this trend.
| "Hey, I can just buy this in the supermarket".
| christina97 wrote:
| Right but that's not what the article argues. The article
| argues that strawberries have been destroyed and now you only
| get the synthetic flavor and no grandma nostalgia.
| raincole wrote:
| First of all it's not what the article says. It doesn't
| mention heirloom harvest at all.
|
| Second, after trying heirloom tomatoes myself, I stopped
| buying the claim that commercial cultivars are that bad.
| paganel wrote:
| > If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a
| supermarket and buy them.
|
| And they all taste watery, i.e. almost no taste at all, all
| this as a result of the industrialisation of strawberry
| farming. Which means that it was a good enough example for me.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I have a friend who works in the flavor and fragrance industry
| and one of the things strawberry fragrance is used for is...
| (drum roll) actual strawberries.
|
| Yep, a light spritz of strawberry scent _on actual fucking
| strawberries_ apparently makes them more appealing.
| john-h-k wrote:
| Yeah it's a weird example. Perfectly possible real strawberries
| with all their complexity extract more dopamine!
| hart_russell wrote:
| I can tell you haven't eaten a home grown strawberry before,
| because they're not comparable.
| Stefan-H wrote:
| My issue with the strawberry example is different than yours -
| the items the author listed that we miss out on ("The texture,
| the juiciness, the complexity of the flavor, the imperfections,
| the joy of finding a particularly good one, the cosmic horror
| of eating a wormy one, the nostalgia of having your grandma's
| strawberry jam with dozens of individually unique strawberries
| in it.") amount to little of objective value. I would argue the
| greatest value that eating a real strawberry as opposed to a
| fake strawberry product provided was this very article. Where
| else has "memory of texture and flavor combinations" been
| brought to bear? I can agree that there is virtue in having
| tasty and interesting things to eat, but I don't see how
| missing out on a specific combination is all that terrible.
| teekert wrote:
| I've been forming this thought as well recently, but OP puts it
| in words perfectly. "Strawberry (+1 for picking it yourself) to
| Strawberry flavored candy" is indeed "human interaction to my
| LinkedIn feed", or "intimacy to pron".
|
| All 3 second terms are dopamine hits, feel nice (briefly), you
| want more and inevitably feel bad and exhausted, useless, weak.
| Over time you may even loose some important human treats (health,
| ability to focus, skill in interaction with potential [bed]
| partners). The firsts are nice rich experiences. Healthy for body
| and mind (within limits of course).
|
| Humans evolved craving the firsts, as it was difficult to hit
| unhealthy limits within the world we used to inhabit. The seconds
| are supra-normal stimuli [0] -> European herring gull chicks will
| die pecking at a red dot on a pencil as it presents a stronger
| stimulus than their mother's red dot on the beak (which will make
| mother bird vomit-up food, example in wikipedia reference). These
| are good metaphors for what is happening to us: After a long time
| evolving in the confines of what nature offered, we are suddenly
| able to manufacture experiences. And we don't think enough about
| what this means and what it it doing to us, imho.
|
| Or should I say "what we are allowing happen to us"? Not sure if
| that is good framing, but I think we should take collective
| action against it. To guard our human-ness. Of course this
| collides with the personal-freedom principles we build our
| culture on. I think someday we'll look back on this age as a
| savage age. As we do. And later generations will find it hard to
| comprehend how we allowed what is happening at the moment. It's a
| human (humanity) pattern, but we'll learn, eventually.
|
| Huxley, in Brave New World, predicted this. He could not have
| foreseen the ways we can now manufacture experiences but isn't "I
| take a gram and only am" eerily close to Doom Scrolling? "Ending
| is better than mending" -> "Shop Like a Billionaire" ...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
| raumgeist wrote:
| Reminds me of Adornos "Dialektik der Aufklarung" and its take on
| what he calls the "Kulturindustrie". Almost 100 years ago he
| foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and
| chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive
| theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the
| addictive nature of the consumption though.
|
| An additional danger is how this pulls all of us down. Staying
| with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries
| flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural
| experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them
| from acquiring the taste. Cultural offerings do have some
| educational responsibility after all.
| stymaar wrote:
| > Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of
| society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for
| each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking
| it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption
| though.
|
| Ray Bradbury did anticipate all of that in Farenheit 451,
| including the addictive nature of it.
|
| I read Farenheit 451 in 2010, and I was shocked to see that he
| had anticipated Twitter, but his predictions didn't stop there
| and he also anticipated that the next step would be what is now
| Tik Tok.
| thyselius wrote:
| In The book, what happens after?
| srcnkcl wrote:
| Torment nexus.
| stymaar wrote:
| Books are forbidden, book readers are prosecuted and their
| collection is burned down by "firefighters".
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism
| that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point
| to some degree.
|
| > Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial
| strawberries flavour to everything those that could have
| enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do
| so, preventing them from acquiring the taste.
|
| I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted the real
| thing, they would prefer the artificial product. For example,
| we have Sauce Hollondaise in my country, and most people were
| probably raised on the convenience product. The original sauce
| is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh.
| So, I've noticed that even if people taste the 'real' sauce,
| they prefer the convenience product.
| westmeal wrote:
| I don't know the real sauce is incredible compared to the
| fake stuff. It really is a massive hassle though :/
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| I know! But a lot of people prefer the fake stuff, because
| they were raised on it or harbor nostalgic feelings for it.
| For them, it's the real deal.
| eszed wrote:
| Try this:
|
| https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-
| hollandaise-r...
|
| I used to make it on the stovetop - even learned how to
| rescue it when it broke - but I don't anymore. You can
| decide whether using a hand blender counts as "real" or
| not, but the ingredients are the same, and I can't tell the
| difference, only the technique is arguably "cheating".
| gacgacgac wrote:
| I make eggs benedict probably once a month or two. It's
| really fairly simple with an immersion blender. Comes
| together in like a minute. Timing the poached eggs and the
| sandwich elements is a little tricky, but not materially
| more difficult than, eg, cinnamon rolls from scratch.
| devilbunny wrote:
| If you're making for family, poach the eggs in the shell
| with an immersion circulator as used for sous vide. The
| whites will not be quite as perfect, but the taste and
| texture are there, and you can store the cooked eggs (I
| forget the temp I used, but look around, there are
| examples) and the prepared hollandaise in a Ziploc at 130
| F/55 C for quite a while.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| > The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no
| one makes it fresh.
|
| No it's not.
| BonerWiener wrote:
| Nothing kills a discussion like when someone just saying "I
| disagree" with zero explanation. They're not really
| contributing just cluttering up the comments. At least give
| a reason why.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Cant / currently cooking creme diplomate.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| You are forgiven
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Thank you father
|
| https://imgur.com/a/CKE0V37
|
| https://anonpaste.pw/v/db571281-c2b0-489e-b121-29959add19
| 47#... ## Final Structure
| **Sweet pastry** - **Almond cream** -
| **Homemade jostaberry jam** - **Small
| raspberries** - **Vanilla cream** -
| **Chantilly-lightened vanilla cream** - **Large
| fresh raspberries** - **Icing sugar**
|
| That's a 2.5kg raspberry pie. About 120EUR in a bakery.
| devilbunny wrote:
| (Not the person you're replying to.)
|
| The _original_ sauce is, in fact, a pain to make.
| However, it 's not the 17th century any more. You can,
| with an immersion blender (which is not a particularly
| obscure piece of kitchen hardware), make it very easily.
| There's a bit of a knack, but only a bit of one, and if
| the sauce breaks you can just restart the emulsion with a
| new egg.
|
| https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-
| hollandaise-r...
|
| The same basic technique can be used for mayonnaise and
| is even harder to screw up.
| corroclaro wrote:
| For the record: you basically take a stick blender, the
| container that came with it, crack an egg, pour over some
| lemon juice, then blend while pouring in hot butter (use
| the microwave!). Takes ca 2 minutes, including the 1
| minute 30s of microwaving the butter.
|
| Instant _real_ sauce hollandaise as the stick blender
| creates a vortex that emulsifies it. No need to hand
| whisk it over a bain-marie at careful temperatures.
| LearnYouALisp wrote:
| Has anyone tried ultrasound (either probe or basin) for
| this mixing? I know it can be done for a finer substance
| devilbunny wrote:
| Why? A cheap probe ultrasonic mixer is $500 on Amazon,
| small, and would take forever. An immersion blender is
| $17 at Walmart and does it in seconds for a half-liter of
| mayo or hollandaise. If you need more than 500 mL of mayo
| but can't just do a few batches, you are no longer in the
| realm of cooking at home.
|
| If you want to do molecular gastronomy stuff, have fun,
| but it isn't ever going to be a mass-market thing.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The other post is also just an assertion.
|
| Can you link to evidence that countering assertions with
| assertions kills discussions? (This is sarcasm)
| bregma wrote:
| It's not at all difficult if you have gained the basic
| survival skill of cooking. I mean, take a couple egg yolks
| in a double boiler, add the juice of a lemon, whisk until
| it's thick then add butter. 10 minutes and you can use a
| bowl over the pot of boiling water you're poaching your
| eggs in if you don't have a double boiler for your camp
| stove in the wilderness.
|
| But that's still more of a hassle than putting the carton
| of that yellow plastic liquid in the microwave for a minute
| and a half. People will prefer their slops and the farmer
| brings it right to you; what could possibly be a better
| life?
| lstodd wrote:
| I short-circuited my microwave accidentally two years ago
| (don't power it up and then drop screwdrivers) and that
| was the best thing to happen to my meals.
| picofarad wrote:
| Two microwaves tried to burn my house down so I said,
| fine, universe, I hear you.
|
| I don't even have an oven anymore; three induction hobs,
| air fryer (instant pot with the fry lid), rice cooker,
| bread machine.
|
| I have really bad luck with kitchen appliances these last
| 10 years!
| ajmurmann wrote:
| And that's ten minutes every time someone orders a dish
| with hollandaise because it really breaks when reheating
| as well. Given how much cost of labor is a factor it's
| easy to see why hardly any restaurant will serve real
| hollandaise. Perfect Baumol cost disease example. Maybe
| something like a Thermomix could solve the economic
| problem of hollandaise.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I was fully triggered by the hollandiase bit. This is
| something I look for constantly when I travel for real eggs
| Benny. It's never real, even at higher end hotels. They just
| use better quality fake stuff. And it's so good when it's
| real.
| wincy wrote:
| My wife makes real Eggs Benedict for me once a year on my
| birthday. I went to a resort hotel and spit out their Eggs
| Benedict it tasted so bad compared to what I get at home.
| They comped my meal. I guess this explains why I'm
| constantly confused why Eggs Benedict doesn't taste right.
| I've found one, maybe two restaurants with passable Eggs
| Benedict in my city.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Maple syrup is a big one. I can count on one hand the number
| of times I've been to even fancy breakfast restaurants and
| had real maple syrup.
|
| Cracker barrel used to, decades ago now. It's all garbage
| corn syrup now. I'd rather not have syrup at all than that
| cloying, thick, gross stuff.
| barbs wrote:
| Heh, I thought of maple syrup as well. And I'm ashamed to
| say I prefer the fake stuff! Although it's likely because
| it's what I had as a child, so there's a strong nostalgia
| factor.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| I refuse to believe this is true.
|
| t.Quebec
| nick__m wrote:
| What's the grade of the maple syrup you tried ? (the new
| grading system is stupid everything is grade A with a
| color name)
|
| In my opinion,
|
| The A golden is light and subtle, I don't know what it's
| for; it's the variety we sell in tourists, and to peoples
| that likes fancy bottles and higher prices!
|
| The A amber is great as a condiment in small quantities,
| for pancakes it's the best.
|
| The A dark is the best for cooking deserts.
|
| And the A very dark is my favorite for cooking meats like
| ham and ribs.
|
| So if you only tasted the A golden I can see why you
| would prefer the fake syrup if you were raised on that
| stuff. But I would be surprised if you prefer the fake
| stuff to the A dark.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| This is where I would note that tastes can be deformed.
| It is possible, for various reasons, to acquire bad
| tastes (here, childhood nostalgia).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >deformed
|
| Jeesus. Very silly elitism here.
|
| There's no such thing as an obvious "Perfect" taste.
| Everyone has different taste preferences. Some people
| _legitimately_ prefer and like the thing you consider
| "lesser" for reasons like _they literally experience it
| differently than you do_ and that experience is not as
| good for them.
|
| People have dramatic differences in their tastes. Some
| people are far more sensitive to sour flavors. Some
| people have way less tolerance for bitter. Your diet will
| radically change how salty something tastes. Same for
| sweetness. Same for spicy.
|
| I grew up eating homemade maple products from my Uncle's
| trees he tapped and cooked himself. I've had the real
| deal.
|
| It's just not that good for most uses of "Sugar syrup" to
| me. A molasses cookie is tastier than a maple cookie to
| me. Maple syrup on a pancake will pollute the pleasant
| flavor of a literal cake I am eating for breakfast with
| all sorts of complicated tree resin compounds. I prefer a
| simple light caramel flavor in my _sugar syrup_ to go on
| top of my _cake_ that I am eating for breakfast. I want
| to taste the light and subtle flavors of butter and
| sweetness and a simple cake. I don 't want the complexity
| of a good maple syrup.
|
| Now when I make my ham, that's when I use a maple glaze.
| That's exactly when all the complexity shines, against
| the powerful savory ham flavor.
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| > There's no such thing as an obvious "Perfect" taste.
|
| The person you're responding to never claimed there's
| such a thing as "Perfect taste"; they've only said
| there's such a thing as "bad taste" (which I would agree
| with)
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I grew up with the fake stuff, and have lately done quite
| a bit of taste testing of the various grades of real
| stuff. Grade A golden is the only one with a distinct
| enough difference in flavor for me to care, and even then
| it's very much an acquired taste, not immediately and
| distinctly better. Given the stark price difference, my
| conclusion is that the maple syrup elitism is a silly
| hobby horse for people with too much money.
| nick__m wrote:
| There are 2 maple grove owner in my extended family (both
| are my uncles one on my father side and one on my mother
| side) so I never saw that as a luxury product and never
| had to acquire maple syrup at market price.
|
| But I understand your point, if you grew on the fake
| stuff and considering how expensive maple syrup is, you
| have nothing to gain by training yourself to prefer the
| real stuff.
| tetris11 wrote:
| the real stuff was arguably improved upon with the thicker
| replacement. I don't want wet pancakes.
| threetonesun wrote:
| As New Englander I feel it's important to note that there
| are, like olive oil, various grades of maple syrup. They
| changed the system but Grade B / Dark maple syrup is the
| best for pancakes and "thickness". If you want to make a
| sauce or cook with it, golden or amber are fine.
| brookst wrote:
| That grade switch was crazy. I spent decades learning
| grade B is what I wanted, now it's grade A, and it's
| still confusing me.
| threetonesun wrote:
| It's made Grade B more widely available though, because
| now it's just a light or dark choice like brown sugar,
| whereas before Grade B seemed somehow inferior. Before it
| was easy to assume Grade-A would be the most maple-y.
| phyzome wrote:
| Kind of sounds like you haven't had real maple syrup.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I have canadian cousins and they send me the real stuff
| every year. It's just what you prefer.
|
| Some people like a Rolex watch they can flash at parties.
| Others are happy with a cheap imitation with a nice form
| that they can wear daily
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| A Canadian friend brought me back 2 bottles of local maple
| syrup as a gift. Ok, I'm a pretentious Frenchman when it
| comes to food and I do think most North Americans have no
| idea how real food tastes.
|
| But that stuff, I didn't know how it really tasted before
| trying the OG thing.
|
| Globalisation gave us the illusion of experiencing the
| world.
| subscribed wrote:
| I think it's worse than that. It promotes race to the
| bottom.
|
| I love strawberries, blueberries (bilberry variety) and
| tomatoes, but apart of the few times in the year when I
| can collect my own or visit a PYO farm I'm not eating
| them at all.
|
| Every shop (small and huge alike) only sells the fake,
| hyper-accelerated garbage (sorry Spain and Morocco, but
| that stuff is just gross), or - in season - locally grown
| similarly tasteless but raised on BPA, PFAS, dioxins,
| flame retardants, etc[1]
|
| I can't even buy the quality stuff. It's just not being
| sold, because people only buy and eat trash :(
|
| [1] not exaggeration - fuck British farmers knowingly
| pouring poison on their fields and the corrupt UK
| governments[2] for openly permitting it, may they get
| impacted by it:
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/uk-
| farml...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e5y85p488o
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Living in London, I notice the same. Getting access to
| true quality produce is not even a question of money now,
| it's basically just impossible to get full stop. There
| are a few local shops in the more upmarket areas that
| survive on the fact that people are willing to pay the
| 2-3x premium over the prices at Waitrose.
|
| Gone are the days when you could ask the grocer or farmer
| to give you a peach to taste. People got used to having
| 24/7/365 access to everything, and supermarkets optimized
| purely for looks instead of taste and nutrition, because
| you aren't allowed to taste anything there. The only
| thing you can go by is the looks. This means looks sell.
|
| I'd hazard a guess the vast majority of brits don't even
| know what a proper strawberry tastes like, because the
| only thing they can buy are beautifully polished turds.
| Everything tastes watery and crap, or conversely just
| generic "sweet".
|
| I wouldn't even blame farmers. Their life is hard enough.
| They are operating on razor thin margins in a very
| uncertain environment. The consumer (against their own
| interests) demands that they produce beautifully and
| cheap turds, so that's what they'll produce. And if you
| try to do the right thing, you simply run out of money
| because you can't compete with the turds at the
| supermarket.
|
| I only have empirical evidence for this, but it got much
| worse since Brexit as well. The variety has gone down a
| lot, I see shelves routinely empty at supermarkets and
| they all seem to be focusing on the same ultraprocessed
| crap.
| subscribed wrote:
| I agree, farmers are not responsible for everything, but
| definitely for pouring the toxic sludge. That's their
| choice. Conscious, willful. I doubt they'd make a tea on
| the water leeching from the landfill so why do they think
| it's okay to use it on the fields? Nasty.
|
| But I agree, most of the blame lies on the corrupt
| government (can't think of a better reason explaining why
| they sanction the above practice or why they gleefully
| ignore supermarkets role in the "cost of living crisis" -
| part of it being squeezing the farmers in the same way
| they squeeze the customers).
|
| And i agree it's been much worse since Brexit - the
| customer has been conditioned to tolerate worse quality
| and choice for ever higher prices. Continuous approval to
| neonicotinoids use in our fields is telling as well.
|
| Gross and saddening. I'm telling my kids to get their
| education and leave the UK. Being EU country citizens
| they might even study in some cleaner and saner place.
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| You should try Natoora in Notting Hill or Daylesford. I
| live in Belgravia and am admittedly spoiled for choice ..
| the Harrods Food Hall has excellent seasonal and harder
| to find fruits, and Daylesford consistently has some of
| the best British produce I've come across... the one in
| Sloane street even has the best organic Alphanso Mangos
| from India.
|
| As for Brexit, I actually think it's been a net positive.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| You have to be joking, right? So you are saying that it's
| all fine, because we can just go to Harrods to get
| quality food?
|
| Nevermind that I hate Harrods and that entire area with a
| passion. It's a tasteless, glitzy tourist trap.
|
| My post was all about the fact that barring a tiny
| percentile of people who a) live in an affluent area and
| b) are willing to pay 2-3x the regular supermarket
| prices, you cannot get good quality food. And you say "ah
| it's simples, just go to the most egregiously flashy
| beacon of division between the rich and poor and you can
| get good fruit"
|
| Thank you, I can still get good fruit at my local grocer
| in Wimbledon, because it charges 2-3x over the regular
| high street prices and there are people around who can
| pay this. Doesn't help someone living in Croydon and
| having to go to Tesco, does it now.
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| Why is appreciation of excellence so often mistaken for
| ostentation ... driving a Rolls or bentley, living in a
| grand Georgian terrace in Zone 1, enjoying a glass of
| Romanee at Zuma, or wearing exquisite Italian made
| cashmere are all examples of exceptional European
| craftsmanship and heritage. Yet those who enjoy such
| things are casually labelled by folks like you as flashy,
| pompous, or glitzy. Why? What is the real objection kind
| sir ? Croydon (especially east Croydon) is an absolute
| shit hole .. it's full of illegal immigrants, and lots of
| crime and drug users .. they are more likely to
| appreciate an undercooked McDonald's chicken tender than
| fresh organic winter peas from a farm in Wiltshire lol
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I'm confused. What exactly is it about these immigrants
| that make them incapable of appreciating fresh food? I
| agree that you can enjoy your privilege or money just
| fine, but do you believe that the poor are incapable or
| unworthy of appreciating wealth or privilege? They're
| surely more likely to appreciate the cost-to-calorie
| ratio.
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| That's fine, I'll help clear the confusion.
|
| See, wholinator number two, the issue with these
| particular immigrants in Croydon and other parts of the
| UK is that many of them are here illegally and,
| therefore, are not entitled to the same rights and
| treatment as legal immigrants beyond the basic human
| rights that Great Britain and its taxpayers provide ..
| Think about it, wholinator number two .. why would I give
| them fresh organic produce if they are in the country
| unlawfully? You shouldn't be barbaric towards people who
| break the law, but at the same time, you don't
| necessarily treat them to the very finest British produce
| either. Anybody who thinks that's the right thing to do
| is borderline crazy, possibly even retarded ...
| psadauskas wrote:
| I visit Maui fairly regularly, and its the same thing
| with local "Maui Gold" pineapple. It is a completely
| different fruit from the Dole crap you buy in
| supermarkets on the mainland. Whenever I'm there I'll eat
| pineapples until my tongue burns, and when I'm home I
| don't eat it at all.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| But what happens here, let me point that out for
| completeness, is not a dark conspiracy. At least not on
| this level.
|
| People go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest thing
| that does the trick, probably because they can't afford
| something else. Bills want to be payed.
| subscribed wrote:
| Partially agree, in case of Aldi/Asda/Lidl but mostly
| not.
|
| They don't have a choice, they cannot encounter a good
| vegetables and fruits in the normal stores. They CANNOT,
| at least in the UK. It's that simple. Maybe during some
| events, as a curiosity.
|
| Good quality vegetables are not available on the shelves
| in general. Maybe in some cases, yeah. Some. But
| generally not. Similarly with meat, although it's much
| easier here to find something decent.
|
| The difference in taste and quality between the cheapest
| and most expensive fresh fruits and vegetables in the
| supermarkets is virtually none. If you don't believe me,
| you don't have to, I simply grew plenty of that as a kid
| and a teenager, I keep growing some, and the difference
| between the average garden-sourced (or PYO/small farm
| sourced) and the Aldi/M&S/Waitrose/Tesco is simply too
| big to describe, you'd have to try it.
|
| So there's an illusion of choice between awful and bad -
| in that case I'm simply choosing imported (thanks to the
| landfill and manufacturing waste in our great British
| food chain). People who don't know, or don't care pick
| whatever looks the best.
|
| Some buy the cheapest. Not everyone buys the cheapest -
| you can't seriously claim that in case of the expensive
| stores (Sainsbury's, M&S, Waitrose).
|
| And then there's palate problem. If someone was raised on
| these garbage produce, they may even favour it over
| healthy, proper ones. Proper radish will have a bite to
| it. Proper tomato has a complex profile (and there's
| hundreds of varieties of that too), instead of how garden
| stores describe it being "tasty"....
|
| Consumers have been dumbed down and trained into
| accepting inferior livestock feed as food, and thanks for
| that they can for example say with a straight face that
| they actually like or prefer Tesco white toast bread.
|
| (they've been scammed)
| hammock wrote:
| At a restaurant it's hard because people use way too much
| and it's expensive stuff. A solution could be tiny packaged
| packets of it, the way they do with butter (in part for
| much the same reason)
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| I was very dismayed to find that the single serve maple
| syrup packets that I thought existed are instead just
| more corn syrup, which cost 21C/ per 1.4oz packet, or
| 15C//oz. Meanwhile a jug of maple syrup is 56C//oz and
| single serve packets seem to be a bit more than a dollar
| per ounce.
| sciencejerk wrote:
| I grew up with fake Maple Syrup (high fructose corn syrup),
| so when I first tried REAL maple syrup as an adult, I
| preferred the fake, thick corn product over the genuine
| watery, ultra sweet tree product.
| boscillator wrote:
| Huh, I've been to plenty of places were you could order it
| for an up charge and it came in it's own little bottle.
| api wrote:
| When it comes to these lines of thinking, and to romanticism
| which is closely related, I have a hard time not seeing some
| of it as disdain for the middle class and nostalgia for the
| stories classic aristocracy told about itself.
|
| I'm American and grew up inundated with cultural disdain for
| the suburbs, tract housing, malls, all those things, and at
| some point I asked, well, what then? What's better?
|
| Sauce made slowly by hand is better. Carefully curated
| culture is better. Hand made, artisan, intentional.
|
| Rare. Special. And if it's rare and special few can have it,
| making it also expensive and aristocratic.
|
| As soon as you try to give everyone that experience, you get
| chain stories. You get tract homes. You get mass culture.
| Because it's a mass. It's million, billions of people, and we
| are not as unique as we think we are. None of us are.
|
| I'm not saying the whole critique is this. There's another
| side to it that's about exploitation and addiction and that
| one rings true to me. But I find that it's hard to peel the
| two things apart.
|
| It's not exploitation to raise the standard of living of
| masses of people, and if you think it's inherently tacky
| maybe you're a neo-feudalist reactionary and don't know it
| yet. There's a reason that stuff took hold so easily among
| certain kinds of hipsters.
|
| I see a lot of leftists where if you could get them to let go
| of one idea, namely equity and equality, you'd instantly have
| a "trad." Most of their other opinions are already aligned.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| I don't see my post as making any judgement, let alone
| offering criticism. It's simply my observation that many
| people prefer the artificial stuff to the original product.
|
| But since you've brought this up, I'd argue that it's not a
| question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply
| isn't given access to these products. What they get is an
| abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the
| flavour but abstracts anything else away. Take, for
| example, meat or vegetable stock, which is now a staple in
| every kitchen in the form of powder or stock cubes. If you
| take a look at the ingredients and nutritional values,
| they're rather disappointing. The masses may get access to
| the taste, but not to the nutrients.
| api wrote:
| I didn't mean to come off as criticizing you, just
| providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas.
|
| The question is: _can_ you give billions of people the
| "authentic" version?
|
| In some cases you can. In the US at least there's
| boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more
| authentic organic food that usually does have better
| nutritional value. But it costs more.
|
| The artificial mass market imitation is cheaper because
| it is thermodynamically cheaper. It takes far less labor
| (the most costly input to almost all processes) and it
| substitutes things that can be bulk produced at a lower
| unit cost. Being less nutritious probably directly
| correlates since nutrition is chemical complexity is
| lower entropy, higher energy, harder to scale.
|
| There's a lot of rare "authentic" experiences that cannot
| be scaled. That means most people can't have them, ever.
|
| You can't have both rarity / exclusivity and
| democratization / equality. One side has to give.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to
| the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This
| appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not
| every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find
| blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries.
| Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the
| thinnest veneer can be "scaled".
| api wrote:
| That means most people can never have it, which is why
| romanticism ends up pining for aristocracy.
| eszed wrote:
| I take your point, but the _other_ argument against
| scaling in this way doesn 't rely on sentiment: it's
| unsustainable. I actually hate that word, but the point
| is that current production methods create (unpriced)
| environmental externalities. We're draining aquifers,
| exhausting topsoil, pouring fertilizer into rivers, using
| too much petroleum - and then throwing a massive portion
| of what we produce away. (And that's just for food;
| similar arguments exist for fashion, and sometimes for
| buildings and infrastructure.) That argument gets
| effectively zero traction - despite, I think, being the
| better one - so some people who care more about that
| argue from sentiment instead, which (for the reasons you
| explain, and rightly object to) has better legs with the
| general public.
| api wrote:
| I look at this as a technical problem. We just aren't
| very good at this yet. We are, in fact, slowly getting
| better. Renewable energy was the largest category of new
| installed energy for the last few years at least, and
| that's a start. The question is whether we can get good
| at this fast enough to outrun ourselves.
|
| My issue with at least some of green ideology is that
| it's viewed as a moral problem. We are sinning by asking
| for more than we deserve and, if you really scratch the
| surface, by trying to give too much to the unwashed
| hordes. Beneath the surface I think you find romanticism,
| and beneath that you find nostalgia for a fantasy world
| that never really existed. That fantasy world is the
| fantasy of the old aristocracy. It's the story they told
| themselves.
|
| I think those kinds of greens are "trads" who don't know
| it yet. The only thing keeping them from going down that
| road is an attachment to the idea of equality and things
| like LGBTQ rights. If you give up those things, the rest
| aligns perfectly. If you want a world of rare authentic
| things enjoyed by cultured people and all of it to fit
| within present techno/ecological limits, you have to put
| the masses back in feudal serfdom and establish a rigid,
| religious, traditional system to hold everything in
| stasis that way. It would be sustainable.
|
| But as I said a few levels up, there is another side of
| the critique that I think has more legs. That's the
| critique of engineered addiction and manipulation. Those
| are not mandatory effects of scale. They're engineered to
| maximize short term profits or for other purposes like
| political manipulation, which I guess is another kind of
| profit (power rather than money).
| eszed wrote:
| Good points. I expect you're familiar with the Abundance
| Agenda folks? They're mostly talking right now about
| energy and infrastructure, which I think is a correct
| choice, but there is a next step to take with consumer
| goods, so that we can end up with an abundance of quality
| and not more engineered addiction.
| brookst wrote:
| But what do you do about free will? If billions of people
| _want_ maple syrup, do you say "no, no, we can't scale
| the real thing and corn syrup is a poor substitute, so
| you can't have even a simulacrum of the experience"?
| recursive-call wrote:
| okay but most kids don't find any kind of bushes. do they
| just not get to eat fruit?
| diydsp wrote:
| >French cultural pessimism
|
| Specifically Jean Baudrillard describes copies of copies with
| decreasing relavence and quality. But more sinisterly, the
| loss of knowing what is real, important, safe, efficacious.
|
| His work builds extensively on Plato, Lucretius, and
| Deleuze's concept of the _Simulacrum._
| wincy wrote:
| This is like how 95% of SUVs are basically just minivans
| with a slightly different body. You have to research to
| find one with a truck engine that can say, haul a travel
| trailer. Another one that comes to mind is shutters on
| windows. People like the look but they're just planks of
| wood in the vast majority of cases now.
| numbsafari wrote:
| .. and here I am wanting better minivan options that can
| pull a travel trailer.
| doubled112 wrote:
| And here I am just wanting station wagons to come back,
| and be reasonably priced.
|
| The towing numbers are always higher in Europe than US
| too, despite being the same cars (as far as I know).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > The towing numbers are always higher in Europe than US
| too, despite being the same cars (as far as I know).
|
| Mostly due to differences in environment, AFAIK.
| Americans drive faster, and towing instability seems to
| increase with the square of the speed. Also, most travel
| trailers in the US wouldn't be car-towable anyway,
| because we have expectations on amenities and size that
| are predicated on using at least a half-ton pickup for
| the tow vehicle. Trailers with the compromises needed to
| be towed European-style aren't popular, so it becomes a
| self-reinforcing cycle.
| triceratops wrote:
| > People like the look [of shutters] but they're just
| planks of wood in the vast majority of cases now.
|
| I'm confused, what are real window shutters then?
|
| Or do you mean the kind that are attached to the wall and
| don't actually close?
| virtualritz wrote:
| Same with truffle mayo or truffle-based products. [1]
|
| People who grew up on the artificial flavor prefer it over
| the real one. I have quite a few in my circle of friends.
|
| You go to an Italian restaurant and you get plain pasta,
| panned in butter or olive oil and then someone comes with a
| real truffle and grates it in front you of over your dish
| until you tell them to stop. You pay for that amount.
|
| Unless you go to a restaurant with a great reputation or some
| Michelin star venue, that is the only way to be sure you're
| eating real truffles. The dish has no truffle-aroma itself
| and the truffle is grated while you watch.
|
| Assuming ofc (and probably true for most people): your palate
| is not well acquainted to the taste of the real thing enough
| to tell it apart from the many fakes/substitutes.
|
| [1] https://www.tasteatlas.com/truffle-industry-is-a-big-scam
| ahartmetz wrote:
| If the real thing doesn't taste like gasoline, I'd probably
| prefer the real thing. I find fake truffle disgustingly
| gasoline- or solvent-like.
| vctrnk wrote:
| Never thought of the fake variant as gasoline-like but it
| sure has that strange, very heavy 'chemical' aftertaste
| that lingers in your palate. Also never tried the real
| thing, I wonder if i'd like it or not.
| hilariously wrote:
| +1 - it tastes so obviously of petrochemicals that I
| throw the food out - truffle fries, truffle pasta - might
| as well pour mineral spirits on it for the same
| experience.
| fssys wrote:
| every time someone coins a new term for these phenomena i think
| of how Adorno already explained it all. "enshittification" SHUT
| UP
| clydethefrog wrote:
| There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-
| capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other
| philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances.
| Remember Peterson et all all warning about "Cultural marxism"
| and "postmodernism"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th.
| ..
|
| I try not be against new terms like "enshittification" or
| "dopamine fracking" for this reason, the tech people at the
| levers that might be convinced to change course seem to be
| more open to substack and blogpost concepts (see SSC /
| rationalist popularity for all this new terminology that just
| describes old continental philosophical concepts) instead of
| having to read old European thinkers that use too much
| Marxist terminology.
|
| Edit: case in point, literally users here are now linking to
| SSC essays explaining critical theory lol
| tpm wrote:
| > There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-
| capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other
| philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances.
|
| I feel it's still ongoing, the reactionary elements are
| campaigning against anything circa modern (not modernist as
| in art but modern as organisation of society, so also
| anything that can be traced back to Enlightenment) and
| later, postmodern etc. They are actively destroying natural
| sciences too, which is a part of this effort. Feels like
| going back to feudalism.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Since I can't upvote @thrance's reply, I'll second it here:
| certainly complaints about postmodernism date to the 90s or
| earlier and fear of Marxism is as old as Marx (less sure
| about when "cultural Marxism" specifically became a scare-
| term of art)
| eloisius wrote:
| This is the essence of the Situationists' Spectacle.
| cassepipe wrote:
| As someone who has struggled with _understanding_ Adorno for a
| long time, I found this recent review of a book about Frankfurt
| School a pleasant read : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-
| review-the-dialectical...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a
| whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often
| wrote that way.
|
| Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal
| and essay form writings.
|
| Also I absolutely _love_ Negative Dialectics as a piece of
| theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the
| standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about
| epistemology than it is about culture.
|
| (He _was_ , however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't
| take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly
| believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music
| is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever
| and always absolute truth. Ahem.)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: _" Marx was a
| left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off
| God and called Him "communism"."_
|
| I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though
| perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to
| continue to let breathe...).
|
| For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up
| Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff,
| seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied
| commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room.
|
| Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it
| on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the
| dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach
| shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history
| crap.
|
| I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the
| Hegel stuff generally is barely present.
|
| If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way
| to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the
| contradictions and see what's in there" _not_ "here's a
| recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..."
|
| And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is
| getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the
| "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of
| looking at contradictions in reality and history but without
| expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more
| perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable.
| Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to
| Auschwitz.
| swed420 wrote:
| A misreading of Marx (intentional or otherwise) is
| precisely what I'd expect from Alexander.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Honestly, Marx's work is like "the Bible", nobody is
| really reading it honestly "from scratch". They are all
| coming in with an existing identity / framework / world
| view, and getting it to say what they want it to say.
|
| Something about people pretending it was the official
| ideology of half the world tends to do that. The old man
| himself would have thrown up into his soup if he knew.
| foldr wrote:
| > I've long complained that communists refuse to specify the
| details of how a communist society will work, or why it would
| be good.
|
| Did capitalists do this in any comprehensive or satisfactory
| way prior to the advent of capitalism? I'm not a communist,
| but this seems like a fairly weak criticism.
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| The advent of communism was sufficiently long ago that it
| I'm not sure your critique applies.
| foldr wrote:
| I'm not sure why that's relevant. My point is that it's
| never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a
| complete changing of the social order. While it might be
| nice in theory to have such a thing, it's not clear that
| it's really a reasonable thing to ask for.
| YinglingHeavy wrote:
| The taste of the masses will always be vulgar, by very
| definition of the word. Vulgar as in commonplace.
| kalx wrote:
| Great read, thanks. Just always consider what you are doing when
| you tag a friend in a meme: feeding your friend the internet
| drug. Is that what you wanna do to someone you care about?
| veunes wrote:
| Sending someone a dumb meme can also be a form of affection
| Gigachad wrote:
| Occasionally if it's very relevant to the person. But so many
| just dump every single thing they saw on TikTok in your DMs.
| tablatom wrote:
| Relevant: Antidote to the cult of performance, Olivier Hamant.
|
| https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/tracts-n-50-antidote-to-the...
| epolanski wrote:
| When renovating my house and discussing solutions with my
| girlfriend I noticed that she (but me too to large extent and
| most of my millennial friends) felt towards Airbnb-ification.
|
| Good taste and style apparently converged towards generic Airbnb-
| like design of mixing wood lights, furniture, etc in a certain
| manner.
|
| This is a well known phenomenon and going around the world,
| whether in Tokyo, Mumbai, Munich or Dallas most of the newest
| hotels, offices, private houses or restaurants converge to the
| same design choices. It feels like you're always in the same
| place.
|
| Music, videogames, movies, hell, finance even politics are
| increasingly converging to a small subset of choices that seem to
| be globally neutral.
| nicbou wrote:
| This year especially, fashion in Berlin has converged to light
| blue jeans and white t-shirt. It's as if fashion got distilled
| into something easily seized, but ever more rapidly rotating.
| clydethefrog wrote:
| This was described in a 2016 essay in the Verge, coining it
| "airspace". It has been going on so long that indeed it has
| become the standard now, see this recent analysis, claiming
| that airbnb estate agents should invest in "authentic"
| interior.
|
| https://www.nssmag.com/en/lifestyle/41707/airspace-aesthetic...
| veunes wrote:
| This feels related to Goodhart's law, but applied to pleasure and
| culture
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| How refreshing to read something not written by an LLM, unless
| they promoted it extensively with their own writing style first
| and I've been tricked but this felt much nicer to read than a lot
| of what I've read recently
| lostlogin wrote:
| Are you sure it wasn't?
|
| The vast number of commas wouldn't fit the typical robot style
| though, but the -- count might.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Yeh the style read like a human, but you're right, some
| dashes, annoyingly I have historically used a lot of - in my
| writing so now I need to stop using them
| euazOn wrote:
| Reminds me of Slavoj Zizek's classic example of synthetic sex
| (look it up), or his grievances about today's academia: paper
| written by ChatGPT, peer reviewed by ChatGPT, and consumed by
| users as a synthesis from ChatGPT.
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| So. Many. Commas.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| I've noticed as a kid, that strawberry flavoured candy doesn't
| actually taste like strawberries. They are clearly and
| collectively recognisable as strawberry candies, but that's just
| pattern matching and conditioning on wording. The flavour has not
| much to do with actual strawberries, even the sweetness is vastly
| exaggerated. The synthetic aroma is much less complex, as the
| author noted. We just fell into the habit (or trap) of using the
| same word for both flavours.
|
| On the other hand i'm wondering if that's just an implementation
| detail. A temporary imperfection in simulating the real thing due
| to constraints in (chemical) engineering and cost, not a hard
| limit.
|
| Neural Networks are universal function approximators. Throw
| enough resources at them and they will mimic the most complex
| function to an arbitrary level of detail.
| sleepycat801 wrote:
| The difference is driven by cost and shelf stability
| considerations, more than taste. Most candy is sugar with a
| hint of novelty.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think all "fruity" candies are pretty much the same sugar,
| and our brain merely looks at the color and packaging and fills
| in a "flavor" for it. Maybe my taste buds are just not working,
| but I don't think I could do a blind taste test and identify a
| candy's claimed flavor.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Yes i guess color and packaging make a huge part of the
| effect. But they do use artificial flavors and i imagine that
| i could blindly differentiate apple and strawberry candies,
| but i could not blindly associate them with their natural
| pendants.
| ionwake wrote:
| "dopamine fracking", should enter lexicon
| Tade0 wrote:
| > The constant search for the next big thing, the next big hit of
| dopamine,
|
| The search itself is the dopamine hit. I think the author, if
| anything, meant endorphins, it's just that there's so much
| misleading pop science about this, that everyone blames poor old
| dopamine for their woes.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Amount of misinformation regarding dopamine is staggering.
| While it plays a huge role in modern social media practices, it
| is relevant in search/anticipation phase, not having
| fun/resolution phase.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Personally I blame Jordan Peterson. He described dopamine's
| role correctly, just didn't adjust the message to his
| audience, who in turn misunderstood what he said and passed
| that on, referencing him as an authority.
|
| Now that I think about it adrenaline was the previous go-to
| chemical which somehow explained all human behaviour.
| teekert wrote:
| True. I think it's the same as everyone calling pain killers
| "aspirin" (where I live, maybe in the US is Tylenol? Which we
| call Paracetamol), they call SARS-CoV-2 AND COVID-19 "Corona",
| or "Corona-virus". Sending an App means sending a message via
| Whatsapp here, it's not "sending a link to an app-store or
| play-store app (or whatever)" as one would think. Some (way to
| many!) people mean their browser when they say "the internet".
| AI means LLMs, but not always, sometimes it includes CNNs (I
| try to use gen AI and machine learning, but people look at me
| weird)...
|
| Similarly, Dopamine now just means "a short hit of instant
| gratification" to the average person. I also don't like it, it
| leads to misinterpretations of scientic texts (which are
| usually very strict about word usage, and consequently differ
| from the "popular" meanings of a word, or in this case,
| molecule).
|
| -\\(tsu)/-
| ivxvm wrote:
| Yeah, when people say "dopamine hit" nowadays that can mean
| anything from serotonin to endorphins to even adrenaline. What
| they usually mean is simply an optimized experience. Optimized,
| commodified, industrialized, etc, in a way article describes.
| rkuzsma wrote:
| The strawberry example reminds me of the Instant Mashed Potatoes
| non-book review [0].
|
| > Since World War II and the large-scale industrialization it
| fully unleashed, a core method driving 'progress' across many
| different fields of human endeavor has been to shred something
| real and reconstitute it into a faster, easier, less appealing
| IMPish substitute for what we used to make out of it. This is the
| parsimonious recipe for industry to fulfill our urges. We've got
| the food processor whirring, and absolutely everything is going
| in.
|
| [0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-
| inst...
| memcg wrote:
| >In the interest of full fairness while writing this review, I
| purchased a plastic cup of my dad's currently favored "Buttery
| Homestyle" Idahoan brand instant mashed potatoes for $1.99. The
| preparation was extraordinarily efficient; the aroma was
| decent; the taste was a reasonable facsimile; but the texture
| was all wrong - a smothering paste that coated my mouth and
| constrained my tongue like a straightjacket. 3/10 would not buy
| again.
|
| I substitute warm heavy cream for half the water and add extra
| butter which gets me to a 6/10. Mix in some cabbage or kale and
| you have a quick Colcannon.
| genewitch wrote:
| yeah some of the instant ones aren't half bad, especially if
| you're not just using them as mashed potatoes with gravy, but
| in a pinch i can throw together a reasonably hearty and
| savory shepherd's pie with instant, including the peaks.
| Heavy cream definitely helps, and get lots of air in, if
| possible.
|
| obviously real potatoes taste better, but they haven't been
| dehydrated and reconstituted, destroying the cell structures.
| probably.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Our one dominant model of technology-driven economic progress is
| the industrial revolution. Manufacturing.
|
| As Ai companies argue for market cap based on projected economic
| output... I'm increasingly thinking this model can be badly
| misleading.
|
| It's very rare that the PC Revolution and or the internet
| Revolution are used as a primary model to explain technology and
| how it affects the economy.
|
| Network enabled PCS are administrative powerhouses. They really
| did permeate all aspects of administration. But... The number of
| employees in administrative adjacent roles is higher, not lower.
| Accountants, university armin. HR. Project management. Etc.
|
| It's very unclear how to quantify economic output/product. From
| this ambiguity , everything downstream is also vague.
|
| The web also totally exploded in use. Web companies got huge
| revenue, even huger your profits.
|
| It's very hard to draw lines, and apply economic reasoning that
| describes who gains what.
|
| Users get to use Facebook, google and whatnot.
| Customers/advertisers get to advertize. The tech companies
| business model is based on network effects, momentum and whatnot.
|
| What value is being created? Who is capturing how much of IT?
| These questions are almost philosophical. You just cannot apply
| reasoning like you would to the economics of mass produced cars.
|
| Dopamine fracking , financial arbitrage racking, sales
| fracking... As a phenomenon, I think these occur in places where
| competition between firms is most intense over something that
| isn't correlated to external value.
|
| Before advertising bands, cigarette companies were ad fracking.
| Tobacco is a commodity. Producing cigarettes is trivial. The only
| thing differentiating a billion dollars Tobacco Company from a
| million dollar Tobacco Company was the recognizability of their
| brand.
|
| Government suppliers, or urban real estate can get to a point
| where the main driver of success, is lawyers.
|
| A lot of industries went through a gradual process, as they
| matured... Where the domain of competition is decreasingly
| relevant to external value. The digital industries often start
| here or reach this point quickly.
|
| Is manufacturing actually the exception?
| movpasd wrote:
| The original sin is the idea that the profit motive on a free
| market will solve all our resource allocation problems, and
| that consumption demand should be the ultimate arbiter of
| social value. Markets are pretty freaking amazing things. But
| their efficiency relies on assumptions that knowledge economies
| and software break on pretty much every front. So, it's really
| no surprise that we're in this mess. I don't really know what
| would work better, though, in a way that can practically evolve
| from our existing systems.
| forlorn_mammoth wrote:
| Hey, I appreciate your insight. Especially your observation
| that when the underlying assumptions are wrong/broken then
| the model produces less reliable results.
|
| Like you, I also don't know what would work better, nor do I
| believe any one individual can know.
|
| But I do have some ideas for what would make a good framework
| for the evaluation?
|
| If the idea is to allocate resources in a way that provides
| the most benefit to the most people, where most feel they are
| getting a 'fair deal' or something...
|
| and we have social institutions that convert 'resources' to
| value (in quotes because time, attention, etc are
| 'resources'. The key principle is organizing human behavior
| over time to produce something humans value)...
|
| Companies Religion Sports Government
|
| then think about what value each creates, how it is
| delivered, how it is captured, ... recognizing that each
| offers some unique strengths and unique limitations.
| paganel wrote:
| > I don't have any solutions
|
| Just touch more grass and try to get off the internet as much as
| possible, it's 100% worth it. Also, stop consooming stuff.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Great article (and phrase).
|
| Thank you.
|
| > Becoming aware of this concept has made it easier to navigate
| the world. And it's becoming easier and easier for me to simply
| stop a video and close a tab when I sense that it's just trying
| to give me a hit of dopamine.
|
| I've just gone ahead and placed a little sticky note at the
| bottom of my monitor that says "dopamine fracking?"
| brador wrote:
| Also known as: giving people what they value.
|
| It is not my duty to deny people their legal desires.
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| to me this phrase/word/term is in the same category as
| "weaponization" .. they are rhetorically powerful because they do
| a lot of emotional work before any argument has been made .. Once
| you've labeled something as "fracking" or "weaponized," you've
| already framed it as extractive, destructive, and morally suspect
| ..
|
| P.S. my completely unscientific heuristic is that whenever an
| authors bio contains phrases like "late stage capitalism" or a
| Bluesky account (not X cause OBVIOUSLY Elon is evil), theres a
| decent chance the article will arrive pre loaded with conclusions
| rather than arguments ...
| sleepycat801 wrote:
| The term as used reminds me of opium addiction in the 19th
| century, and how it brought down entire countries.
|
| I find, particularly when working in software, that I want to
| spend very little of my free time online, as though the novelty
| has worn off. The diversion aspect of social media is
| particularly irritating. It's like the Gruen transfer, a loss of
| focus and reference designed into many shopping malls.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| The prime example for me of this phenomena is selfies. What is
| the point of taking pictures, really? To capture the moment? Or
| to post to social media? If I am going to be honest, most
| pictures today are taken so that they are able to be broadcasted
| it to everyone.
|
| I believe I have superior taste in this where I don't take
| selfies but instead take pictures of people and environment just
| doing stuff. The moment someone says "smile for the camera!",
| thats an inferior, fake situation that does not bring me any joy.
| I don't like looking at those pictures because I know everyone is
| faking it. I know because the moment the picture was taken, they
| would immediately sighed and drop the smile.
| rapnie wrote:
| Carrying a camera around at all times killed the value of
| photographs to large extent. I know people who come home from a
| one week vacation with 100's of pictures, that are never looked
| at again, and which spoiled all the moments where one could
| really enjoy the scene. Music concerts where nearly all the
| crowd film the concert and mostly miss the experience by doing
| so, is another example.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think it's having a camera that killed it, it's that
| most people stopped printing their photos. Most people have
| thousands of poorly sorted and duplicate photos on their
| phone which aren't very enjoyable to scroll through.
|
| I went and sorted through all my photos and printed out the
| best ones to pin up on a board. I love looking at them and
| everyone who comes over finds it interesting to look through
| the photos on the wall too.
| rapnie wrote:
| Yes, you explained better. It is having the camera always
| with you and the abundance of photos that are the result,
| which for most people including me are too much and too
| boring to sort out. I find myself in the opposite situation
| now, when at a happening or event I take no photos at all,
| because I came to hate taking them. Feel it is not worth
| spoiling the moment. But that means not recording the
| valuable moments for later, so I may come to regret that at
| old age.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I started taking an old digicam with me to events. I
| don't ask people for a photo for them to pose, I just
| capture as it was before they notice.
|
| The old flash photography combined with candid authentic
| expressions is really refreshing to see again. The phone
| camera and look is just so overdone that it's boring.
| Taking photos with an old tech and different focal length
| feels fresh and fun. I don't post these on social media,
| I just print them and share the pics directly with the
| person, everyone has loved it.
|
| There's also a delayed gratification aspect. I can't just
| post these from my phone as soon as I take them. I have
| to go home, take the sd card out, and copy them over
| before I can share them. I think there's something to be
| said for just slowing down and enjoying the limitations.
| rapnie wrote:
| I like that, and I heard it is becoming a bit of a trend
| where people also leave their phone at home, and more
| deliberately choose the precious moments to capture.
| Nice.
| eszed wrote:
| I took essentially no photos in my twenties (long before
| phone cameras) for exactly this reason - and, in the
| short term, absolutely did remember events better than
| the folks who were constantly looking for their next
| digicam shot. I'm now living the long-term of that,
| though, and regret that I have nothing "tangible" to show
| my wife and kid, or even to re-spark my own memory, about
| all the amazing things I did back then.
|
| I'm a bit more intentional now: I don't pull out my
| (phone) camera all that often, but I try to look for
| something that will represent - not record (that's
| impossible), but spark a memory of - the moment later. By
| the way, people are more important for this than things,
| or "the thing" itself. I actually think the selfie
| brigade are on the right track, for all that they may
| become annoying by overdoing it.
| wvh wrote:
| I'd say there's at least a third reason: intellectual (or
| rather technical) curiosity of photography itself. Often, when
| I take a picture, it is just to see how a particular shot turns
| out, much less so for any sentimental value to myself or
| anybody consuming those images later on.
|
| I'd also say that's most likely a healthy kind of dopamine
| usage, as it's leading one into a life of exploration, learning
| and wonder.
|
| But you're right, taking a true in-the-moment picture is a
| skill.
| stavros wrote:
| I used to think this, and I only took photos of places (without
| me in them). Then I realised that the value of the photo is to
| remind me of what I was doing, how I was feeling, etc, not just
| that I was in the place. I agree that faking smiles makes the
| photo worth less, but just don't fake anything.
| jannyfer wrote:
| Agreed, I used to think this but now enjoy taking quick
| selfies, and my phone will dig them up and remind me of fond
| memories later on.
|
| GP conflates selfies with posed photos.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| I am not against taking selfies in the literal sense. Go
| ahead and take a snap of you and your surrounding. It becomes
| sad and depressing when someone needs to do multiple takes
| and even worse, touch up the image.
| smallnix wrote:
| I don't use social media (aside from HN). I take selfies to
| remember a moment. Not to capture it, my memory is good enough
| for me for that.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I feel similarly. Take good photos of your friends doing cool
| things. Absolutely do not stop everyone for a group picture.
| Forget things. It's okay to forget the minutia of life.
| Garlef wrote:
| > What is the point of taking pictures, really?
|
| Ephemeral communication?
|
| It's fun; Gets a group together; They touch for a moment; Look
| at it together; "Oh my good I look so fat"; ...
| mft_ wrote:
| I always remember a posed photo that one of my old bosses had
| on her desk. It was of her and her daughter; she was giving a
| big attractive (to my eyes faked for the camera) smile, and her
| daughter looked miserable.
|
| I appreciated the unintentional honesty: time and time again
| you see kids being told to smile for a camera, when they're
| young enough that society hasn't yet ingrained in the social
| necessity of doing so.
| basisword wrote:
| >> I don't like looking at those pictures because I know
| everyone is faking it.
|
| Maybe you're not far enough removed from them yet. Looking back
| on a group photo years later, especially if some of those
| people have died, is a very pleasant experience. The point
| isn't "look at us all smiling" when you know that it was posed,
| the point is "remember all of those people there that day, we
| were together, we did x etc". It reminds you of the entire
| event, not the specific moment of taking the photo.
|
| Edit: Sit with a parent or grandparent and go through their
| photo albums. Almost all the photos are posed and you'll see
| how great that can be.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'd say selfies just aren't for you, and that's fine. For many
| others it's not, and friends at a distance may just like seeing
| their friends' faces instead of just the subject. But I don't
| understand it myself because I'm outside of those circles. (and
| less face oriented but that's probably the autism/introversion
| lmao)
| drcongo wrote:
| I posted something very similar on here last year after a visit
| to Ibiza - as we sat eating lunch in the castle in Ibiza old
| town, a group of young women spent the entire time we were
| there, maybe an hour and a half, in turn posing for photos next
| to a plant. Each time one went in for the pose, they'd pass
| their phone to a friend to take the pictures. It went on and
| on. The two things that really struck me about this were: 1.
| all the photos seemed to be taken with the subject's phone, so
| nobody had any photos of the people they were actually there
| with, and 2. If they'd turned around, there was an absolutely
| stunning view right behind them.
|
| I felt old.
| regexorcist wrote:
| These days, go anywhere in the world with a pseudo famous
| landmark and watch the same thing. I've been travelling long
| enough to remember people being present and taking in the
| experience. Now it's literal queues for the perfect spot to
| take 100 near identical photos of themselves, and choose a
| few later for social media.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've never understood the need to take a picture of
| yourself. I know what I look like--I don't need a photo to
| remind me. The rare times I ever even take a picture of
| something, it's because that thing is interesting or
| unique, and I'd like to look at it carefully later.
| anArbitraryOne wrote:
| I don't really think bro dude understands any of the
| environmental effects of fracking, especially compared to other
| drilling mechanisms. But it's just a metaphor.
| afh1 wrote:
| Lost me on false but popular claims on fracking on the first
| paragraph. If you don't even take the time to research the main
| topic of your "metaphor", can't expect much depthness from the
| Discord philosopher.
| poppadom1982 wrote:
| Which ones?
| kerorin wrote:
| Fun fact: Schizophrenia is explained by the dopamine hypothesis,
| or more accurately, the aberrant salience hypothesis. When
| dopamine signaling in certain neurons becomes dysregulated, the
| brain's attention system goes awry. Blocking the D2 dopamine
| receptor with medication actually reduces real hallucinations,
| the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.
| killerstorm wrote:
| I'm not sure these things are about "big hit of dopamine". It's
| more about keeping user's attention on screen. And e.g. tiktok
| repeatedly shows minimally interesting videos, keeping viewer in
| expectation: how does this video end? would next the next video
| show?
|
| So it's not about intensity, but quantity and repeatability.
|
| MrBeast videos consists of many short segments each one having
| some small intrigue and/or delivering a tiny piece of interesting
| information.
|
| The direct analogy with fracking is that these methods attract
| attention to things which normally don't warrant user's
| attention. I.e. normally we have defenses against getting
| attention stuck on one thing - it quickly becomes boring. But the
| industry managed to circumvent this by breaking these things into
| small pieces with tiny story-arcs in them.
| shellkr wrote:
| Yes! Exactly this... Attention... We become so dependent on
| always being distracted so that we can not function without it.
| I remember there where a similar discussion about TV back in
| the days.. but the level it is on now is unprecedented. I think
| society will adjust to this behavior as it has always done
| before. How damning or not is yet to be decided. It does not
| necessarily has to be a bad thing... but being dependent on
| something usually is.
| leeoniya wrote:
| so, Your Attention is All They Need?
| Thanemate wrote:
| Besides the obvious examples of living our power fantasy of
| "finally writing Rust without knowing Rust, thanks to AI", I
| noticed the same exact thing in video games, and it has so many
| layers of bull that I could easily come up with a blog post about
| it.
|
| What made it so obvious in video games is the that, while video
| games are already artificial, some decide to simply extract the
| things that give you dopamine hits and pleasure and shove them
| into a colorful bucket and call it a day. Yes, I'm talking about
| Vampire Survivors and Vampire Crawlers. We went from games that
| are mechanically complicated and a joy to explore and master, to
| games that are mechanically simple and exist just to give you
| dopamine hits.
|
| And just like many comments already said, there are in many
| people who will opt to play that kind of games, so they do make
| money. But for me, a "game" isn't just mentally stimulating but
| also mentally engaging, either with the storytelling or with the
| game mechanics.
|
| Furthermore, the mass appeal of gaming after 2000's did
| constrained creativity and made the games that are really
| expensive to make effectively same-y, so you can see that the
| concept that I grew up loving was reduced to the necessary parts
| that will make it sell, and reproduced over and over and over to
| the point where it's rare for me to find an AAA game that care
| about. However, that's because I've been playing video games
| since the Atari era, and I developed my taste towards a specific
| way, so you can make a case that I'm not like those who grew up
| eating the artificial flavor of strawberries and preferring it to
| the real thing.
| pknerd wrote:
| Ironically, many such companies and their products are proudly
| featured and funded by the company that maintains HackerNews
| raffael_de wrote:
| I think the contemporary canonical term has to be Dopamaxxing.
| api wrote:
| Turn it off, then.
|
| I've almost completely turned off social media. Realized I'm
| missing nothing.
|
| All this stuff can pretty easily be ignored.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've already done that but it's clear something more needs to
| happen to fix this on a societal level. Tech companies have
| hacked the human brain and optimised it to an absolutely insane
| level. They have truely won.
|
| On a train recently I watched a literal toddler scrolling
| Instagram reels on an iPhone as big as their head.
|
| We are going to need laws and regulations to straight up ban
| this new wave of incredibly addictive short form media and
| addition mechanics.
| shellkr wrote:
| I think most of us older than 25 understands this. We have seen
| the development and the war on attention. I guess the term
| Dopamine Fracking is not bad. I don't think we should be too
| alarmist though... we are kids of our time.. in that we will
| arrange the society around us. In essence we are not that
| different from the Romans. We just have a lot more toys.
|
| Unregulated capitalism is bad. We all know that. I think the
| automation will ultimately be that thing that brings us past
| that. Via UBI or something similar... but that is far from now.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Underneath this thesis are the assumptions that "taste" is (a)
| some objective thing that (b) is worth pursuing for its own sake,
| both of which I wholeheartedly reject.
|
| The idea that "good taste" exists and matters is a form of social
| conservatism that communicates nothing of value and is inevitably
| self-serving. It is _always_ possible to restate "X is more
| tasteful than Y" as "I and people I like/respect prefer X to Y"
| without losing information; the only thing that changes is the
| subtle implication that the speaker's subjective experience is in
| some way superior to that of others.
|
| I encourage the author to go and eat a wild banana, to experience
| the raw, wondrous near-inedibility of nature untainted by humans'
| shameful lust for making things nicer.
| loorke wrote:
| TBH, I cannot stand the snobbery of this article. The phenomenon
| of creating your own dull terms like "Dophamine Fracking" that
| cover all aspects of life should be added to the list of
| pathologies in DCM-11 section of personal disorders, this is a
| form of narcissism.
|
| While quietly implying his personal superiority and deep
| understanding of things, this German sets up a premise that
| everything deteriorates because of CAPITALISM and now also AI,
| listing numerous completely distinct areas of human life. For
| such bold claim he gives only one wrecked example: strawberry
| flavor substitutes real berries. How did he come to this
| conclusion? Did he look up any data? To me, personally, this is
| not a common knowledge. I know a bunch of people who really like
| and enjoy real strawberries. At the same time, I am personally
| not interested in neither.
|
| OK, he has some sort of a premise, but what is the conclusion?
| Did he just write his own opinion to highlight how smart he is?
| Apparently so. I guess we could assume that what comes out of all
| this, is that "we're having less and less experiences".
| hntiz wrote:
| I couldn't fully relate to the article because the finish comes
| across as hurried and too convenient. I went through the same
| process of giving up the things listed, and my life didn't
| suddenly become easier.
|
| There was an awkward period where I free'd up my time from giving
| up the same habits and, frankly, did not know what to do with my
| free time.
|
| I think the two-word analogy explained itself, and if the author
| had saved some energy not re-explaining it then there would be
| enough word count left to take the subject more seriously than
| the rushed ending.
| tancop wrote:
| its just like normal drugs, alcohol, weed cocaine and everything.
| dopamine, quick release, addiction, none of that is harmful by
| itself. some of them just have danegrous side effects when you OD
| so you need to watch out if you decide to take them.
|
| i know im a dopamine addict. i watch reels, play fortnite and
| only go out when i have someone to talk with. just walking by
| myself is too calm even with music. i cant sit on the bus for 5
| minutes without turning on clash royale. i dont read books or
| watch long form movies because its not stimulating enough. i need
| something new every minute or i get bored. the only time i can
| focus something for a long time is when i feel like i really need
| to get it finished, like writing this comment.
|
| but i still got a social life, go to college and work. and i
| think 90 percent of the people you call sick are just like that,
| _normal functioning people_. theres nothing wrong with doing what
| feels good.
| thewoodsman wrote:
| > theres nothing wrong with doing what feels good.
|
| except that, according to your own experience, it eventually
| leads to you becoming unable to engage with anything that isn't
| an instant dopamine hit whose entire arc occurs in a few
| minutes. you just used _writing a 3 paragraph comment_ as an
| example of an activity that required long term focus.
|
| and to be clear, i have a lot of the same problems, so i'm not
| trying to come off overly judgmental here. but i view it as a
| personal problem that I struggle to finish a book these days,
| or to invest sustained attention in a challenging side project
| or even, at times, a fucking _video game_. (i 've caught myself
| scrolling youtube shorts _in my chair at my pc_ ,
| procrastinating _playing a video game_ of all things).
|
| what you describe (and again, what I also experience, maybe to
| a slightly lesser extent) doesn't seem conducive to a happy and
| fulfilling life - or at least it seems fair to guess that a
| life _without_ the dopamine addiction you 're diagnosis could
| be _happier_ and _more_ fulfilling.
| pablogancharov wrote:
| Maybe I'm optimistic but I do find pleasure on picking a topic,
| let's say Strawberries, Coffee or Barbecue and dig into the
| origins, trying to understand the real soul of the craft, and why
| industry choose the profile they choose to explode. As Uruguayan
| I see how Our national dish Asado get's blended in the "barbacue"
| concept, even often confused with Argentinian / Brazilian
| versions. The same happens to the Mate
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| Neat conceptualisation and neat graphical design of the blog.
| Keep up the good work!
| kriro wrote:
| There's a certain irony in coining the term on discord. Nice blog
| post but I'm used to reading these from people who hang out on
| IRC. Times are changing indeed.
|
| My private version of anti-dopamine fracking is playing the phone
| game. Every social event I attend, I try to be the last person to
| look at their phone (well basically not look at it at all). It is
| fairly sad how easily this game is won in under 30 minutes in
| most casual settings.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > There's a certain irony in coining the term on discord
|
| And the section in the middle where they start praising a
| YouTube video series that validated his anger and encourages us
| to go watch it.
|
| You can sense the author's struggles with self-regulation at
| the center of this article, but they have a blind spot for the
| content and apps that they really like. I think people in this
| situation would do better to start looking for positive outlets
| for their time like taking up an activity or exercise routine
| that gets them out of the house and away from screens. Trying
| to set arbitrary boundaries to avoid really bad content and
| apps is good, but if that time is just backfilled with other
| apps and videos then it's only a very partial help.
| igmn wrote:
| I agree. I'm the author, and I think freeing up my time is
| the core of making myself feel better. And I think it could
| help others.
|
| Because I don't scroll nearly as much anymore, I have less
| things to immediately and effortlessly distract myself with.
| This inadvertently forces me into creativity, mindfulness or
| rekindling hobbies, which are healthier and more fulfilling
| activities than TikTok. It also promotes experimentation and
| trying new things. For example: I don't write often, but
| having more time and boredom allows me to actually try
| instead of wishing I had. And now we're having this
| conversation as a result.
|
| YouTube and Discord are as much of a distraction as anything
| else, but their nature (or I guess how I use them) makes them
| feel more finite, and I can often "run out" of content to
| consume in a short amount of time. Previously, I couldn't run
| out, and it was ruining my life and personality.
|
| I can finally feel my life's sort of global content feed
| becoming finite and manageable.
| a3c9 wrote:
| > I can often "run out" of content to consume
|
| As a reformed YouTube addict myself, that feeling of
| "running out" really is great. Tragically, that was its own
| exciting rush which has since faded. :)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I'm maybe going to blow some fucking minds here -- _learning this
| certainly blew my own mind_ --- BUT
|
| I have a friend who works in the "fragrance and flavor" industry.
| (Which is actually pretty fascinating, mostly in the sense that
| there are only about three major players, who kind of decide how
| everything in the world looks and tastes)
|
| Annnnnnnnnnnd one of the things fake strawberry fragrance is user
| for is... strawberries. Like, actual supermarket strawberries.
| Some produce companies put fake scents onto real fruit so they,
| you know, smell more fruity.
|
| Fuck this world.
| onaclov2000 wrote:
| I've thought about aspects of this off and on for a while, so it
| was a good read, I grew up making lefse with my mom, it's a big
| nostalgia hit for me, but my siblings don't make it, it's time
| consuming and sometimes I don't feel like it, and I wonder if the
| next generation or maybe even one more down the line will have
| just completely stopped making this. I think about what other
| things people used to make that just aren't really 'easy' to
| manufacture, or whatever and so they are only made by small
| groups of people and that will probably die off one day. I also
| think about the food we eat is largely designed to be the highest
| profit, we only have strawberries because they're cost effective
| enough, for now, but how many other fruit/vegetables/etc are we
| missing out on, because growing them are just too much of a
| hassle, and they're as good or better for us....sorry for the
| ramble but good read, def some things to think about
| regexorcist wrote:
| As someone under 40 who never had any social media, I cannot
| overstate the negative impact it's had on my peers and their
| behaviours. Worst thing to ever happen to society imo, I feel for
| the younger ones who grew up with it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I grew up with social media but at the start of the year I quit
| all of it and deleted my accounts. AI slop and obvious bots
| everywhere was the tipping point.
|
| I should have done it long before, quitting has been so
| massively beneficial and I don't feel I'm missing anything. All
| real social interaction online these days is in messaging apps.
| Social media is just a feed of endless slop designed to put you
| in a zombie like state of scrolling.
| oa335 wrote:
| why doesnt hackernews count as social media?
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| We have social media-like systems going arguably Compuserve
| and the like, as well as games. There's a matter of
| "refinement", like how some older people describe the change
| of drugs over the decades. TikTok, Twitter and many of the
| games are just "too strong", and it matters. Nobody gets
| "addicted" to Mario 3 or IRC to the point it resembles
| alcoholism.
| raldi wrote:
| People were definitely addicted to IRC.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Nobody gets "addicted" to Mario 3 or IRC to the point it
| resembles alcoholism.
|
| People definitely became internet junkies in the past. IRC
| was where you could find chronically online people before
| that term was popular.
|
| The good old IRC quote databases were full of jokes about
| people not leaving their house and being online all the
| time. I remember being mocked in IRC rooms because I was
| out doing things instead of being on IRC all weekend. IRC
| was the place for the chronically online. This has always
| been a thing and it's weird to see it dismissed so
| casually.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I guess it is mostly (by default):
|
| a) real pseudonymity b) no photos/videos c) no infinite
| scroll d) no notifications e) very specific (mildly speaking)
| topic range f) very very good ranking and filtering algo ....
| throw10920 wrote:
| (g) guidelines designed for curiosity and intellectual
| discussion that are enforced by the moderators. No "real"
| social media platform has anything similar. (so maybe it's
| more like a discussion board? LessWrong/old phpbb forums)
| pfortuny wrote:
| So true!
| eggnet wrote:
| The lack of ads, and the algorithm for sorting the feed.
|
| I think the spectrum runs from social media, to forum, to
| news feed... maybe other things. HN isn't toxic.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| It does, but as you really can't get money out of it in a
| reliable way by exploiting the user addictive behaviors, it
| doesn't have that effect on society.
|
| It's just a cool place to visit now an then an check cool
| stuff out.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Kind of interesting how many people don't realize that the
| purpose of Hacker News was to be an advertisement for Y
| Combinator and their portfolio companies.
|
| You don't see it as much these days, but YC portfolio
| companies can post privileged threads on this site for job
| listings, which in practice double as ads for the company.
| You're not allowed to comment on them.
|
| I haven't seen one for a while because I suspect every
| company is already inundated with 1000 applications for
| every job in this market, but this is what Hacker News was
| for.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I think most people know this and are fine with it. YC
| owns the site and advertises their stuff on it sometimes.
| The site itself is not trying to milk you for every penny
| or trying to exploit you.
| regexorcist wrote:
| > people don't realize
|
| Y Combinator is right there in the URL. People know and
| don't care because it's a well run forum with interesting
| discussions, the privileged posts don't change that.
| scubbo wrote:
| > Y Combinator is right there in the URL
|
| Most people aren't so slavishly devoted to capital that
| they have memorized the names of firms.
| j_w wrote:
| Just live on /active and that stuff doesn't show up.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Whatever the purpose _was_ , that's not really the
| reality of HN as most of us experience it.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| And, HN doesn't show your ranking, at least obviously, so
| it doesn't get the same gamification to try and maximize
| points.
|
| But, it is social media. Just that they make a point to try
| and tone it down and keep it focused.
| overgard wrote:
| Man, I wish. It used to be that, but I suspect now that
| there's a lot of astroturfing and probably bots.
| nyantaro1 wrote:
| I also notice that. I don't really know where else to go
| now
| vaylian wrote:
| Why should it? Can I add you as a friend on HN? Can I become
| your follower? What are the social features that would make
| HN social media?
| teolandon wrote:
| Talking to people
| copper4eva wrote:
| If you want to be pedantic, everything that has user
| interaction I think technically counts as social media. So
| just about any forum on the internet counts. But there's a
| pretty big difference in an anonymous forum, and something
| like twitter, facebook etc.
| swed420 wrote:
| > why doesnt hackernews count as social media?
|
| It doesn't intentionally insert dark patterns into the
| platform.
|
| It's not without flaws, of course, but it's 1+ orders of
| magnitude better than anything else.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Whether or not it counts as social media, there is no
| algorithm targeting individuals as far as I know. Social
| media in the sense of HN is just the internet.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| because we're not putting our personal lives on display here.
| it's a news aggregator and discussion forum. sure, some folks
| post their personal projects, but it's framed as news to be
| discussed, not desperation for validation.
| Self-Perfection wrote:
| Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
| https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...
|
| I remember this LW essay most often
| sheepscreek wrote:
| I love this term - I think it beautifully describes the direction
| that at least, YouTube is heading towards. Take for example, this
| racket where a channel copies popular (non-kids) creators' parody
| work, splits the screen in half with the content on left, adds a
| completely random DIY type video on the right half, and lo and
| behold its content for kids who are too young to know any
| better[1].
|
| Another one: AI voiceovers on videos taken from Asian apps, with
| some made up emotional story, followed by "if you love your mom,
| like and subscribe" - which kids (< 8yrs) actually do![2]
|
| Or for that matter that YouTube makes it so hard to block
| channels and impossible to unblock specific channels (at least
| for kids). The platform has been unwilling to do anything about
| it for years. I suppose maybe this isn't the best example but
| it's definitely along the lines of a corporation prioritizing
| profits over all else, especially disregarding the wellbeing of
| their users.
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/VF4V7bRjjdo https://youtu.be/UoGuLabqgrk
|
| 2. https://youtube.com/shorts/B2ZNFiix8JA
| https://youtube.com/shorts/0eYYKRRcYrA
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| It's wild that the same easily detectable spam formula from a
| decade ago is still active beneath every finance video today:
| "I'm confused! Well I gave my money to Mr. Scammy McScamface
| and he gave me 1000% returns! Google Scammy McScamface now!"
| skwirl wrote:
| It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let
| their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this
| happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but
| we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of
| YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the
| channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the
| kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the videos -
| started to clearly optimize for engagement over quality, and so
| now we're done with it entirely. The stuff there for "kids"
| legitimately horrifies me.
| boringg wrote:
| Agreed - even older children shouldn't be exposing themselves
| to that garbage. Totally garbage in garbage out situation.
| Youtube can be good if its highly curated -- otherwise its
| just trash.
| brandensilva wrote:
| We blocked YouTube recently in the household for all devices
| but one approved tv device that our kids are only able to
| watch with us.
|
| I let my oldest daughter at 10 watch stuff there a couple
| times a week which she largely watches Minecraft videos. I
| know everything she consumes for now.
|
| Eventually that will stop and she's on her own when she is
| more responsible as an older teenager but the important point
| here is this isn't helicopter parenting, it's survival at
| protecting her brain from dopamine overload making her a
| content addict.
|
| I don't want to go full Amish as I think it's important to
| prepare our kids for the inevitable world they will be
| exposed too but I feel I'd fail them letting them loose.
| ghurtado wrote:
| The problem of 8yr olds watching too much YouTube is definitely
| not one for YouTube to fix.
|
| We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is
| delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do
| with raising children.
|
| And then we complain that our kids are not being raised
| properly. We don't even know who to blame for this any more.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| This reads like literal propaganda.
|
| Every assertion of personal responsibility (sic) in the face
| of billion to trillion dollar industry spending is bad faith,
| zero exceptions.
|
| British Petroleum invented the concept of personal climate
| footprint. That was bad faith and to put a point on it, evil.
|
| Tech industry claims that engagement farming and addition
| manufacture should be opposed by "parenting" are even less
| credible.
| kakacik wrote:
| Yes and no. Look around you and count how many properly
| failing parents there are. Parents who literally offload
| their parenting to a tablet, TV, phone, nanny which is
| often on phone herself, whatever. Then complain kids are
| unruly when they don't simply listen to them like soldiers.
| Parents, who are often as addicted to the screens (and
| more) as their kids. Recent studies showed above half of
| toddlers below 2 spend an hour or more daily on screens,
| thats fucked up.
|
| I can count many such parents, way too many that I know.
| Kids before 5-6 should not access internet and should not
| watch TV. Don't trust me, trust children psychologists. Its
| toxic to their developing brains and personalities. Let
| them fuck up their lives on their own later if they must,
| don't give them hard addiction from the literal start of
| life, just because 'oh daddy has this super important work
| so doesn't have time to be a parent' syndrome, especially
| when its mostly empty pathetic soul draining white collar
| work with 0 added value to humanity.
|
| And if one is truly changing the world for the better (as
| in 1 out of those maybe 10 humans actually currently doing
| it) and can't spare time for some kids, then don't have
| them, its not some freakin' checkbox ticked and moving to
| next challenge and achievement unlocked. Its by far the
| hardest effort one can make in one's life, spans over 2+
| decades, be never 100% successful, while facing many real
| risks of failure completely outside of one's powers (no I
| don't mean peer pressure phones in school, rather ie health
| issues)
| lazide wrote:
| And how many of those parents are spending 50+ hours a
| week (or more) working too?
|
| There are finite fucks anyone can give, and if someone is
| working all day keeping a roof over their head, what else
| is it going to happen?
| mplanchard wrote:
| I think this is a "yes, and" kind of situation. Yes, a
| lot of parents suck, and yes, we should try to improve
| that situation, but also yes, we absolutely should punish
| megacorporations for making parents' jobs harder by
| targeting children with their proven-to-be-harmful
| products.
|
| Like, parents shouldn't give cigarettes to their
| children, BUT ALSO it is both illegal and immoral for
| tobacco companies to target children.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Parents, who are often as addicted to the screens (and
| more) as their kids.
|
| This is a huge part of it. Kids are great at spotting
| hypocrisy, and if you tell them to put down the screens,
| yet you yourself are scrolling Instagram all day, the kid
| is going to know you are full of shit! It's like smoking
| a cigarette while telling your kid that smoking is bad
| for you.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I'd like to agree but practically there are difficulties
| enforcing it. Anecdotally I know of some parents having a
| battle with their local school because their kids have been
| watching this sort of crap in kindergarten.
|
| Fundamentally it seems like building products designed to
| target children with harmful content, or content that
| substitutes for educational material, should not be accepted
| by society.
|
| So yes parents are responsible but maybe we should stop
| building The Torment Nexus _but for children_.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Fundamentally it seems like kindergartens showing youtube
| videos to kids should not be accepted by society.
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| I see "Torment Nexus" has completed is evolution into a
| catch-all term for "things I don't like".
| fauchletenerum wrote:
| > Anecdotally I know of some parents having a battle with
| their local school because their kids have been watching
| this sort of crap in kindergarten.
|
| I'm imagining a scene from Idiocracy where a kindergarten
| teacher is the person whose job it is to press play on
| Youtube videos
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is
| delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do
| with raising children.
|
| This is just the logical conclusion of consumerism.
|
| Consumerism produces careerism. Careerism produces the two
| income household. A two income household cannot devote the
| needed time to raising children during their early years. Day
| care and school and after school activities has been used to
| keep children busy while parents were hunting for that next
| promotion and the bigger paycheck to get the better car to
| get the better "status" in the eyes of their neighbors.
|
| The zombie is the perfect symbol for consumerism, because it
| involves a mindless, indiscriminate, beastly, and insatiable
| hunger that would sell his own grandmother for that next
| disposable morsel.
|
| I think we really need to reshape things to conform to
| biological and human reality instead of working against it.
| In the case of women, our culture as well as our political
| and economic structures must support the ability of women to
| have children earlier and to be able to raise them themselves
| during their early years. Many women do actually want this,
| but the culture pressures them to do otherwise or convinces
| them that the consumerist lifestyle is more attractive,
| causing them to defer having children (constraining their
| fertile years) and to pursue careers that increasingly make
| it difficult to choose to relinquish for at least some time
| as they raise their children.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| At that age I could watch TV or play video games without
| strict parental supervision (I had older brothers and would
| often play with them while my mom cooked or whatever). I was
| lucky because while I did watch some age inappropriate media
| (I watched Gundam Wing on Toonami when I was 7) I was really
| lucky that none of these things were trying to addict me to
| them in the same way media often does now.
|
| I don't think the level of autonomy I had in the mid-late 90s
| would be a good idea now, even though it helped me be an
| independent and resilient adult, and I don't think that's
| parents' fault. I would've really struggled with the
| purposefully addictive nature of modern media and trying to
| balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of
| modern technology makes me anxious to have kids (and I've met
| a lot of parents who had some issues with it).
| sifar wrote:
| >> trying to balance autonomy with managing the
| exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious
| to have kids
|
| This is a legitimate concern and the anxiety is
| understandable. I think that would make you a much better
| parent than many. Most often, parents use these as
| crutches, so as a parent one has to set ground rules (for
| ourselves) and enforce them.
|
| No tablets/phone access for entertainment till 6-7 yrs -
| there is simply no reason for this. No unsupervised access
| till 10-12 yrs.
|
| Use game console like the switch instead of mobile games.
| Curate stuff for them. Mostly be involved in how they use
| technology, discuss with them what it is and what effect it
| can have in a way they can relate too.
| alexk307 wrote:
| While I'm empathetic to the overall theme of the post, the
| strawberries are a terrible example and takes away from the
| message. Strawberries are delicate little fruits that until a
| handful of decades ago, were seasonal expensive treats. It's not
| necessarily a bad thing that we've made a synthetic analog that
| allows less fortunate people to experience the taste of a perfect
| strawberry. Real strawberries aren't disappearing because of
| this, if anything this would have the opposite effect because
| strawberry consumption in the US have ~quadrupled in the past few
| decades [1]. No one replaced "500 individual human experiences",
| strawberries are not "extinct", there's no data to suggest that
| people "prefer the synthetic version".
|
| [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/77884
| hstaab wrote:
| "The future is flavor blasted"
| heddycrow wrote:
| The real answer to "which came first, the chicken or the egg" - a
| long line of chicken-like creatures hatched from an egg before
| the first ever chicken hatched from an egg.
|
| Why lead with this? There is a very long line of dopamine-
| fracking-like behaviors that hatched before now.
|
| How difficult is it to say that we can't use science to create
| strawberry flavors but we can use science to basically create
| what strawberry means in the first place? Oh, you think that the
| strawberries we have now in all their varieties just arrived with
| us on the planet in their current form?
|
| Who is to say what the point is where too much tampering is
| enough? HINT: it's not the ones consuming, they like the new
| stuff regardless of whether it's real or not.
|
| It's tempting to point the finger at The Capitalist or
| Capitalism, but this misses the mark no matter how close it is.
| You are the Consumer. You empower enshit.
|
| Don't believe me? Go build something and see. People don't take
| the time to look at what you have built and who you are to
| determine if your product is a worthy investment. You have to
| sell them. You have to court a demographic and place your
| product. You will spend a lot of time doing this unless you are
| already somehow connected into a network that turns everything
| you touch into gold.
|
| After this process, see if you are not sympathetic to strawberry
| flavoring. And this is all your fault, right? It has nothing to
| do with The Consumer, we can't blame those people. We can't blame
| "You" because you aren't rich and powerful. Even though it's
| "You" and many people like you that are the whole engine of this
| thing.
|
| TLDR; "dopamine fracking" is a great term. It lets us explain
| what those "others" are doing to "us" while we sit by passively
| and accept our fate.
|
| Shame on them. When they hear this term they will be ashamed and
| fix their ways or we will make them through our friend The
| Government.
|
| But where's the clever and magical term that makes "us" behave
| differently?
| sailfast wrote:
| The article doesn't make it quite clear but dopamine fracking
| (such as described) requires both you and the companies to work.
|
| The companies are trying to make something you'll want, and you
| want it! But if you allow fracking on your "property" then you
| will be left with poisoned aquifers and empty of substance.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > But if you allow fracking on your "property" then you will be
| left with poisoned aquifers and empty of substance.
|
| So it's analogous to the mythical bogeyman version of what
| fracking was hyped up to be, and not how it actually turned
| out.
| suncemoje wrote:
| Reminds me of a few parallels, mainly the attention economy [0]
| and The Social Dilemma documentary [1]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma
| thinkthatover wrote:
| just because everyone seems to keep asking this on different
| threads - hacker news is definitely social media, with a few
| extra steps. Its where i come to get my dopamine hit at least
| nlanier wrote:
| I've found that this engineered optimization has a more
| pernicious side effect: killing curiosity.
|
| Lack of complexity stunts the desire to become curious - to give
| reasons to look closer, ask questions, compare experiences - and
| ultimately develop 'taste'.
|
| When everything is optimized into its most obvious, frictionless,
| immediately-rewarding form, the sum of all experience becomes
| more 'pleasant' but harder to care about.
|
| The author touches on something that's been grating at me (and is
| professionally relevant) for some time now, and I appreciate his
| effort to articulate it.
| webdoodle wrote:
| Interesting take. Do you think they are intentionally killing
| curiosity? If so, why?
| epistememe wrote:
| What once motivated going deeper to satisfy the curiosity
| instinct is now satisfied by breadth. Quantity has a quality
| all its own. "When everything is optimized into its most
| obvious, frictionless, immediately-rewarding form, the sum of
| all experience becomes more 'pleasant' but harder to care
| about." This is an insightful and important point. Humans place
| value on what requires effort and resources to achieve/acquire.
| The timeline has been condensed so that immediate rewards are
| required, or attention/effort is directed elsewhere. Any
| extended effort or depth requires frequent dopamine rewards.
| Those born well into the Internet age have a different
| disposition that is difficult for older generations to
| understand. In some ways, the difference is quite profound and
| not unlike that of a foreign culture.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| > " Written by a human."
|
| Thank you.
| initramfs wrote:
| Great article.
|
| I've wanted to write an article about mulberries (long before
| this article), and the reason why they are not sold in grocery
| stores, is because of their precious shelf life and tendency to
| stain with gendle handling.
|
| I recently read about CERN transporting antiprotons to another
| facility.
|
| I then thought, if CERN can move antiprotons, surely someone can
| figure out how to sell mulberries at the local grocery?
|
| Of course, not everything needs to be commercialized. Some of the
| best things in life are free.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| The conclusion acknowledges information compression, media
| hygiene and awareness. Solid points which most online surfers
| lack of.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| As the saying goes, experience keeps an expensive school, but
| humanity will learn in no other.
|
| The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk.
|
| It is indeed interesting to observe how attitudes in tech seem to
| be changing, especially with the specter of AI. I think some of
| it is just the lament of the keypunch operator or some kind of
| parochial and domestic grumbling concealed behind the appearance
| of something greater, but some of it does seem like its rooted in
| at least an intuition about where everything is headed...and has
| been heading.
|
| What the author is describing is consumerism. Consumerism devours
| everything and soon enough becomes a way of life. But as a
| society, we are enslaved to consumerism. We cannot let it go. We
| don't even know that we should. Status in consumerist societies
| is tied to consuming power! You don't want to be left behind, do
| you? So, unfortunately, the only corrective for an obstinate
| people is reality itself, which _will_ come for its pound of
| flesh sooner or later. And we 're seeing it. The drowning man
| must let go of his satchel full of fool's gold, but he is unable
| to and the satchel takes him to the dark depths until perhaps he
| is can no longer hold his breath. Reality has to pry his fingers
| from that satchel.
| mlboss wrote:
| I know this article talks about digital media, but in general,
| that is what any technology does. It distances us from nature and
| makes things more convenient, but it also takes away the nuances
| involved.
|
| Any concept that helps us categorize real things also takes away
| their individuality. Every tree is different, but the word "tree"
| takes away its uniqueness. A "tree" becomes something that
| provides humans with food, or something that can be used for
| firewood or paper.
| kinjba11 wrote:
| This reminds me of the concept I learned of recently: that
| metrics and simplified quantitative information has been
| digesting the world for a long time. Simplified metrics like
| 'pounds of strawberries sold' take over our value systems instead
| of more squishy values like 'humans enjoying varied and great
| tasting strawberries'.
|
| The drive for 'number goes up' eliminates nuance and we lose
| something _real_ but poorly quantified and thus not valued. And
| this dopamine fracking has been happening for a while, is the
| latest version of that. Whatever gets eyeballs and we can measure
| getting eyeballs, wins, despite the dystopian consequences.
|
| The book 'The Score' by C Thi Nguyen goes into this, has given me
| a new way to see if something I value is actually just a metric I
| learned and unconsciously am following. He outlines 'four
| horsemen of bureaucracy' that have replaced more nuanced values:
| the need to scale (losing nuance and geographical variability),
| make something mechanical and repeatable (lose nuance and
| adaptability), replaceable parts (losing nuance, make everything
| fungible, humans as replaceable), and centralized control (lose
| individualized voices). These were great in the first wave as
| they've increased our standard of living and made e.g. mass
| production of medicine and such possible, but now as more ways
| are found to extract attention these forces are eating away at
| our lives
| marciob wrote:
| I had a similar realization recently while reading books and then
| watching YouTube videos on the same topic. The difference was
| very obvious. YouTubers often distort the subject with engagement
| hooks and unnecessary compression, which also misses the context.
| Sometimes the result is in essence a very different thing.
| OneOffAsk wrote:
| > because just like in actual fracking, it is immensely harmful
| to the long-term health and sustainability of anything it is
| applied to
|
| An otherwise good article, but weakened by this bit. Fracking and
| the use of natural gas is actually pretty great ecologically
| compared to the other ways we get and use fossil fuels. It got a
| bad rap because it probably really stunted US adoption of
| renewable resources... and it's my theory the coal industry was
| behind the public damnation.
| casey2 wrote:
| Can someone define dopamine? I'm also not very comfortable with
| re-purposing scientific terminology for memes.
|
| My best guess is "guilty pleasure"
| rphv wrote:
| Humans are evolutionarily optimized to do this. Add this to the
| long list of behaviors which were once beneficial from a survival
| standpoint but are now detrimental to our health - e.g.
| tribalism, shortsightedness, an insatiable taste for fats and
| sugars.
|
| "The human species can change its own nature. What will it
| choose? Will it remain the same, teetering on a jerrybuilt
| foundation of partly obsolete Ice Age adaptations? Or will it
| press on toward still higher intelligence and creativity ...?" -
| E.O. Wilson "On Human Nature"
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