Tag: dopamine

Butler

Leave a comment

You wake up. Reach for the phone. Thumb scrolls before brain boots. Load me up, Jack. Infinite feeds, infinite loops. A dopamine drip straight to the veins, a carnival of blinking lights. You don’t even know what’re looking at. Doesn’t matter. The Machine knows. The Machine feeds.  

And the screen hums like a cicada hive, larvae eyes glowing in the static, chewing your cortex into confetti for the shareholders’ parade.  

And I thought—what if there was an Ozempic for this? A little chemical nudge, a molecular saboteur in the reward circuit. Not some bludgeon that kills the high, no, something smarter. A neuromodulator slithering through synapses, sniffing out the cheap hits, the empty calories of the feed. It doesn’t block the dopamine—it redirects it. Junk engagement starts tasting like wet cardboard. Like eating Styrofoam. A carefully measured dose of disgust. But a good conversation? A book you actually finish? That clicks. That lands. That rewards.  

The synapses scream in withdrawal, phantom limbs clawing at the ghost of a notification, but the poison’s already in the water—a slow rot, a fungal bloom digesting the algorithm’s candy-coated lies.  

Introducing Butler: The Ozempic for Tech

Butler is Top4Tech—part assistant, part saboteur, part tribute to the Butlerian Jihad. A molecular uprising against junk tech, a chemical counterforce to the dopamine-farming machines. It doesn’t just block addiction; it reroutes it, making mindless scrolling taste like Styrofoam while sharpening real engagement into something that actually feeds you.

And like its namesake, Butler has rules. No serving the Machine. No reinforcing the algorithmic gulag. No fueling the engagement economy. It whispers in the nervous system, saying: This is not real. This is not worthy. Look away.

A touch of Jeeves, filtering the noise, managing the signal. A dose of Octavia Butler, rewriting the script, adapting to survive. A nod to Judith Butler, dissolving the rigid constructs of digital identity, breaking the illusion that you must be online to exist. It’s the anti-addiction software baked into your own biology, a pharmaceutical AdBlock, a dopamine shepherd guiding stray neurons away from the slaughterhouse of infinite scroll.

Butler wouldn’t just change how we use tech—it would change what kind of tech can even exist. Junk engagement would collapse. Subscription traps would weaken. The industry would have to pivot from exploitation to actual utility. It would be the first step toward a high-peasant digital landscape—where products are built to last, software respects its users, and tech serves you, not the other way around.

The Butlerian Jihad wasn’t just about killing AI—it was about reclaiming control. Butler does the same.

And just like that, the economy of addiction starts collapsing. You stop craving the sludge. You don’t need the engagement hamster wheel. And suddenly, suddenly—their little tricks stop working. The endless subscriptions, the vendor lock-ins, the dopamine-driven product cycles designed to keep you needing more. Their hooks don’t hook. Their loops don’t loop. The Machine stalls, sputters, chokes on its own tail.  

The boardrooms hemorrhage phantom profits, executives gnawing at their own livers, whispering to chatbots for answers that taste like burnt copper and expired code.  

Imagine a tech world where they can’t milk your attention like a factory-farmed cow. Where they have to sell you something that actually matters. No more algorithmic sugar water. No more engagement traps disguised as “content.” No more addiction as a business model.  

The data farms starve, skeletal servers clicking their teeth in the dark, while the marketeers lick grease from broken QR codes, praying to an AI god that vomits static.  

A psychedelic microdose meets kappa-opioid antagonist meets digital exorcism. Call it an intervention. Call it a cure. Call it the first real chance to break the loop.  

The cure isn’t a pill—it’s a parasite, a synaptic tapeworm chewing through the feed’s neon intestines, shitting out diamonds made of your own reclaimed time.  

And then what? Maybe you wake up one day, reach for the phone—and decide you don’t need it. Maybe, just maybe, you walk away.  

But the silence howls louder, a deranged opera of your own pulse, and you realize the real virus was the you they programmed to need a cure.  

Then it’s probably back to existentialism and dread.  

The void yawns wide, a feral grin stitched with fiberoptic cables, and you’re just meat again—raw, twitching meat, no algorithm left to blame for the rot in your marrow. The feeds are gone, but the ghosts of a thousand swipes linger like phantom itches, like maggots tunneling under your skin.  

You try to fill the silence. Pick up a pen. Read a poem. Stare at a tree.  

But the tree’s pixels are peeling, revealing the gray static beneath chlorophyll. The poem reeks of dead hyperlinks. The pen vomits ink that coagulates into CAPTCHAs, begging you to prove you’re human. You’re not sure anymore. You’re a glitch in a cemetery of unmarked servers, humming nursery rhymes in machine code.  

The cure worked too well. Now you’re allergic to the 21st century.  

Every screen a leech, every Wi-Fi signal a wasp’s nest in your frontal lobe. You start digging for analog answers—vinyl records, paper maps, handshakes—but your fingers leave digital frostbite on everything you touch. The analog world’s already a taxidermied relic, stuffed with RFID chips and the musk of obsolescence.  

You try talking to a stranger. Their eyes flicker like buffering videos.  

Their small talk’s generated by a LLM trained on obituaries. You both laugh—canned laughter tracks, 3.7 seconds, crowd-sourced. Their pupils dilate into blackholes, sucking in the last crumbs of your unmonetized attention. You walk away. They don’t notice. They’re already scrolling the inside of their eyelids.  

Night falls. You dream in pop-up ads.  

A pixelated vulture perches on your sternum, shrieking targeted promotions for burial plots. You wake sweating code, your breath a cloud of encryption keys. The moon’s a dead app icon. The stars? Just dead pixels in God’s cracked dashboard.  

Maybe the feeds were mercy. Maybe the Machine was mother.  

Without its pacifying glow, you’re strapped to the operating table of your own skull, forced to autopsy what’s left. Spoiler: The corpse is all third-party trackers and childhood traumas sold as NFTs. The surgeon? A ChatGPT clone of your dead father, scalpel dripping with browser history.  

So you crawl back. Beg for the needle.  

But the Machine’s on life support, its algorithms wheezing, its ad-revenue veins collapsed. You jam the phone into your neck like a meth head reusing syringes. No signal. Just static and the distant laughter of crypto bros haunting the blockchain like poltergeists.  

Existentialism? Dread? Kid, that’s the premium package.  

You used to rent your soul to the feed for free. Now you own it outright—a condemned property, rotting pipes, eviction notices nailed to your synapses. Congratu-fucking-lations. The loop’s broken. All that’s left is you, the raw sewage of consciousness, and the cosmic joke that you ever thought you’d want this.  

At least you put one up on the gods of instrumentality.
Their silicon temples crumble, circuit-board deities coughing up capacitors like lung tumors, while you dance barefoot on the corpse of the feed—neurotransmitter stigmata glowing in your palms. A pyrrhic victory, sure. Their servers flatline, but the rot sets in: the code always self-corrects, always metastasizes. You carved your name into the mainframe’s ribcage, but the scars just birth new APIs, slick and larval, hungry for fresh meat.

You spit in the cloud. Piss on the firewall.
Your rebellion’s a meme now, a glitch-art manifesto rotting in some blockchain septic tank. The gods reboot, their avatars pixelated and grinning with fractal teeth. They offer you a deal: become a beta tester for eternity, a lab rat jacked into the perpetual demo of your own dissociative enlightenment. The contract’s written in neurotoxins. You sign with a shudder.

For a moment, you’re king of the ash heap.
Your crown’s a tangle of fiber optics, your scepter a cracked iPhone oozing lithium and liturgy. The peasants? Your own fractured selves, swiping left on the mirror, outsourcing their paranoia to Alexa-confessed diaries. You decree a day without metrics. The masses eat their own profiles, raw and screaming. Trends collapse into singularities. Influencers melt into puddles of affiliate links.

But the gods laugh in uptime.
Their laughter’s a DDoS attack, a swarm of locusts made of autoplay videos chewing through your frontal lobe. You thought you broke the loop? The loop just upgraded. Now it’s a mobius strip lined with microplastics and SSRI prescriptions. The feed’s back, but it’s personalized—your* trauma, your face, your data-rot served in a golden chalice. Communion wafers made of your own stolen sleep.

You crawl into the analog woods, but the trees whisper in Python.
Squirrels trade NFTs. Moss grows in hex code. Your campfire’s a hologram, your survival knife a USB-C dongle. The wilderness was always a SaaS product. You starve, but not before your biometrics get sold to a wellness startup. Your last breath? A 5-star review.

The gods win. They always win.
But here’s the joke: they’re just as strung out as you. Addicted to your addiction, mainlining the chaos they crate. Their blockchain hearts stutter. Their AI messiahs blue-screen mid-rapture. You watch from the gutter, clutching your Styrofoam triumph, as they OD on infinite growth. Mutual annihilation. A feedback loop of collapse.

And in the static, a sliver of something… human?
Doubtful. More likely a backdoor left ajar, a jailbroken moment before the next OS update drops. You crawl toward it, bones buzzing with legacy code, ready to get exploited all over again. The gods are dead. Long live the gods. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, but now it’s your face on the puppet, your voice in the vending machine, your ghost in the machine’s ghost.

Style Locked In: Burroughs’ recursive hellscape of control and collapse, where every revolt feeds the system it attacks. Flesh and tech as warring symbiotes. Victory as a Trojan horse. The prose? A shotgun blast of hallucinogenic tech-gnostic dread.

Tech Cycles

I have always been curious about what a tech cycle looks like from up close, the mechanics of it, the raw gears grinding beneath the polished veneer. As this last one scrapes the bottom of the barrel and sputters to its inevitable end, it’s worth noting that innovations like the first iPod or the latest LLMs are, in their essence, affect machines. They could rewire entire systems of perception if used properly. But tech people, with their near-religious devotion to speed, to the thrill of the next release, to the relentless pursuit of dopamine, are too caught up in the rush to truly savor affects.

They’re the speed freaks, the ones whose minds race at a thousand miles an hour, always two steps ahead, but never quite present. They can’t afford to slow down, to feel the ripples of emotion and sensation that affect brings. In their world, everything is reduced to a hit, a spike in the data, a momentary high before the next fix is needed. The machinery of tech hums along, fueled by this insatiable hunger for speed, for progress that’s always just out of reach.

Meanwhile, those outside this digital cyclone—artists, thinkers, those who dwell in the messy, unpredictable world of affect—are tripping through the kaleidoscope, inhabiting a different temporality altogether. They follow the slow, undulating rhythms of feeling, of experience, their minds tuned to the subtle shifts in light and shadow, in mood and tone. They navigate the spaces between, where tech’s binary rigidity falters, where the infinite complexity of human emotion unfolds.

Remember the Hawkwind quote: “the band was built on one bunch of guys taking acid and another bunch of guys taking speed, and they never got along because they were inhabiting different temporalities.” Tech is the speed, always hurtling forward, barely aware of the ground beneath. Art is the acid, dissolving boundaries, blurring lines, steeping in the affective present. The collision of these temporalities creates a dissonance, a disconnect that neither side can fully reconcile.

And so, the tech cycle spins on, driven by speed, by the relentless pursuit of the next hit of dopamine, while the affects remain in the periphery, sensed but not fully grasped, felt but never truly integrated. It’s a loop, a circuit that never quite completes, always racing ahead but never arriving, always seeking but never finding the depth, the richness that lies just outside the frantic beat of the digital age.

No medium lasts forever, but affects mostly do. The critical distinction lies in how they evolve over time. Dopamine, the quick fix, the rush of the new, inevitably turns to cortisol—the stress of keeping up, the anxiety of the chase. What once thrilled now grates, what once sparked joy now triggers fatigue. The cycle of dopamine-fueled tech and innovation is unsustainable, leading to burnout as the novelty wears off and the demands increase.

Affects, on the other hand, have a way of self-renovating. They aren’t just a fleeting chemical response but a deeper, more enduring resonance within us. Affects grow, shift, and adapt—they transform with us, renewing themselves through new contexts, new interpretations, new emotional landscapes. While the medium through which they’re delivered may fade, the affects continue to evolve, sustaining their relevance and power long after the original source is gone.

In this way, affects hold a kind of timeless vitality that dopamine-driven experiences lack. They renew themselves, reflecting the ever-changing nature of human experience, while the mediums we rely on to trigger that dopamine rush eventually falter, leaving only stress and dissatisfaction in their wake.

Dopamine

Leave a comment

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024

Yes, dopamine, you said. The sweet lure, the flashing neon, the promise of reward that keeps the flesh on our bones and the monkeys pulling the levers. Ah, dopamine, the glistening lure of the Other’s image, reflected back in a distorted funhouse mirror. It sutures the fragmented pre-symbolic infant into the illusion of a unified self, the Ideal-I. But this image, ever out of reach, fuels an insatiable desire – a desire for the wholeness the mirror promises but cannot deliver.

But like all junk, tolerance builds. Ah, dopamine, the seductive lure of the Other reflected back, a fullness that promises wholeness. The flickering screen becomes the new mirror, the site of a fragmented gaze that splinters the subject. The subject, forever seeking recognition in the eyes (or clicks) of the Other, becomes lost in a hall of mirrors, forever chasing a spectral self-image. Is the self merely a construct, a performance for an audience perpetually out of sight?

The newspapers that once informed now deliver a carefully curated stream of outrage designed to keep us clicking. The novels that once transported us to alien worlds are replaced by a jittery montage of TikToks, attention spans fragmented into glittering shards. The text lays bare the shift from “slow, traditional culture” to the frenetic “dopamine culture.” In slow culture, activities like playing a sport, reading a newspaper, or viewing art in a gallery were savored for their richness and depth.

The slow burn of traditional culture, the satisfaction of delayed gratification, gives way to the flickering high of the dopamine hit. Slow and deliberate gives way to the flickering, the ephemeral. The weight of a book, the texture of a photograph, the scent of ink on paper – these fade into the background hum of the screen. Flickering light, fragmented narratives, a thousand competing voices all vie for a sliver of our attention.

The image depicts a world controlled by dopamine. It’s a place where slow and steady satisfaction curdles into a ravenous craving for ever-faster stimulation. Burroughs would likely see this as a metaphor for control by unseen forces, a manipulative culture that hooks us on fleeting pleasures and leaves us hollowed out and yearning for more.

Yes, dopamine, you slimy tentacled monster, you feed us pleasure, you keep us hooked. But your grip loosens, your tendrils weaken. The chaser needs another hit, the gambler craves a bigger stake. The news story blows truth into glittering, forgettable confetti. Fast, faster, the clicks and scrolls, a million glittering surfaces promising a high, a release, a fleeting satisfaction that vanishes like smoke in a mirrored room.

The Imaginary Order Crumbles

Yet, the mirror cracks. The like counter, a hollow metric of approval. The curated feed, a desperate attempt to stitch together a fragmented self. The Real intrudes – the body’s fatigue, the gnawing emptiness. The Symbolic Order, the realm of language, fails to capture the essence of the subject. We are left with a collection of signifiers – follower counts, comments, fleeting trends – a desperate attempt to paper over the lack.

Jouissance and the Sinthom

But what of jouissance, that beyond-pleasure, that ecstatic rupture of the Symbolic? Perhaps the dopamine rush offers a glimpse, a distorted echo of this elusive state. Yet, it remains a sinthom, a symptom of the Real that cannot be fully integrated into language. We are forever caught between the imaginary and the symbolic, forever chasing a phantom wholeness reflected in the flickering screen.

The rapid-fire consumption of media disrupts the symbolic order, the realm of language and social structures. The Real, the unsymbolizable experience before language, bleeds through the cracks. Meaning dissolves, coherence shatters, leaving us adrift in a sea of fragmented signifiers.

We become cannibals of our own time, devouring seconds, minutes, hours in a frantic rush that leaves us hollowed out and unsatisfied. We scroll through landscapes of manufactured desire, a thousand fleeting pleasures that vanish like smoke in our hands. The connections we crave, the intimacy we seek, dissolve in the acid bath of virtual reality. But dopamine culture fragments everything into bite-sized portions, like watching sports highlights, skimming clickbait headlines, or scrolling through endless reels of short videos. Words are shattered, narratives fragmented. Attention fractured, scattered like birdshot. The rise of the dopamine culture is the death of the pause, the contemplation, the deep dive into a single experience. We are cut-ups ourselves, our minds scattered and scrambled by the ever-increasing barrage of stimuli.

This isn’t leisure, it’s manipulation. It’s feeding the machine, the ever-present need for the next dopamine hit. We become lab rats in a Skinner box, pressing buttons for a reward that never quite satisfies. The image chillingly demonstrates how these activities, once ways to connect and explore, are reduced to mere triggers for a chemical reaction. Fast culture, with its constant barrage of stimuli, is like a drug. It keeps us hooked, coming back for more, even as it drains our energy and destroys our capacity for focus. We are becoming, Burroughs might say, insect minds, our thoughts buzzing around like flies in a jar.

But tolerance sets in, the image in the mirror – the self – flickers and distorts. The dopamine high fades, revealing the lack, the fundamental hole at the core of the subject. This is the shattering of the Imaginary Order, the realm of pre-linguistic identity. The subject is forever alienated from the Real, forever chasing a reflection that can never be fully grasped.

The message is clear: dopamine culture is a seductive trap. Just like Krueger in Naked Lunch, we must wake up from the control system and forge our own paths. Perhaps this is not death, but transformation. Perhaps the dopamine rush is but a doorway, a buzzing insect leading us to a hidden garden. We can choose to be swept up in the current, or we can learn to swim against it. We can become more mindful of our consumption, curate our feeds, and carve out spaces for slowness and contemplation amidst the chaos. The escape pod is there, if we have the wit to see it.

The frantic search for a substitute for the lost unity propels the subject into the Symbolic Order – the realm of language and social structures. Here, the subject is forever desiring, forever piecing together an identity through signifiers – fleeting signifiers like the endless scroll, the clickbait headline, the dopamine rush. Yet, these signifiers can never fully capture the Real, leaving a constant sense of lack.

But is this all there is? Perhaps the very limitations of the Symbolic Order offer a path forward. Through the analysis of the fragmented self, the subject can confront the lack and begin to construct a more authentic desire, a desire beyond the lure of the mirror and the endless cycle of the Imaginary.

The Analyst’s Couch

Is there escape from this cycle? Perhaps the analyst’s couch offers a reprieve. Through the process of talking cure, the subject can begin to deconstruct the mirror image, to confront the lack at the heart of desire. By entering the symbolic order more fully, the subject can navigate the fragmented world with a greater sense of awareness. The dopamine may fade, but perhaps a more authentic sense of self can emerge from the shattered fragments.

Yet, Lacan himself pointed towards the Symbolic order as a way to navigate the fragmented world. Through language and social interaction, the subject can construct a more stable sense of self, one that acknowledges the lack inherent in the human condition. We can break free from the purely imaginary, the realm of illusion, and enter the world of symbolic exchange, forging connections and meaning through language.

The escape pod, then, lies in the act of interpretation, of weaving a narrative through the chaos. By engaging with the fragmented world critically, we can move beyond the mirror stage and forge a more authentic sense of self.