The Dopamine Industrial Complex
Thoughts on the greatest threat to your mind
If you don’t know something exists, you’re bound to be powerless against it. It is the unknown unknowns that eventually trip us up, but this essay will hopefully shed some light on what exists, and what you could do.
The term "military-industrial complex" term was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address on January 17, 1961. It describes the relationship between a country's military and the defense industry that supplies it, where both sides benefit - the military receives weapons while corporations profit from supplying them.
Today I'll talk about a more powerful industrial complex - one that didn't have a name until now, which makes them all the more efficient at what they do- The Dopamine Industrial Complex.
The Dopamine Industrial Complex, perhaps with the beautifully appropriate acronym, DIC, consists of many corporations - and each of these corporations rely on one simple tactic at their core - to hijack our brains reward centers & produce as much dopamine as cheaply as needed to maximize profits.
One could argue while reading the above statement that it's not wrong for corporations to do so- and in a free market if we choose such options for cheap dopamine hits - we're the ones making this decision, and while that is true- there is a big difference between corporations who are experts at hacking away at your reward centers, making you crave and be addicted to their products for little to none long-term fulfilment & companies that build products and services that make our life better.
You could then argue that cheap production of dopamine does make our lives better - from a cigarette after a stressful experience to doomscrolling on TikTok to pass the time to a quick trip to McDonalds at the end of a long day to a teenager discovering the mysteries of sex by casually lying about the “Are you above the age of 18?” site banner on adult sites, all of these things - despite being harmful, despite many realising that they're harmful in excess & in the long term- still solve crucial human problems like boredom, hunger, existential dread - and to that, I'd say yes: you're right.
Our lives are filled with vices, and everyone has their poison and they may have justification for each of them. It's easy to judge the drug addict when I don't know about their circumstances. And I'm not here to claim a moral high ground and preach niceties about what you should do or shouldn't do.
But I am here to tell you things that should make your lives better - and that involves telling you that if you can, you shouldn't willingly hurt yourself. I'm self aware enough to know that I'm not a saint, and from scrolling on X to countless other vices- I'm not a perfect person. I try to practice what I preach & I try to avoid the tentacles of the Dopamine Industrial Complex but I, like most of you, mostly fail.
From grabbing my phone to check X every hour, to quickly replying to emails, I could go on and on and talk about my vices (and not just limit it to the harmless ones)- but just because there's an ideal self I can't yet reach, doesn't mean I can't try to be better every day and I hope the same is true for you.
Thus, the point of this essay is to first & foremost recognise how the Dopamine Industrial Complex works. With that knowledge, you'll be better able to make decisions that lead to a healthier life & calmer mind.
Before we begin, let's talk about dopamine.
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Modern life is filled with experiences which are carefully engineered to produce dopamine and reward our brains. As technology improves, such experiences get more intense, available and cheaper (and almost free in many cases).
But what is dopamine?
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter often described as the brain's chemical messenger for pleasure and reward.
When we experience something enjoyable or fulfilling- eating delicious food, receiving social praise, achieving a goal- dopamine is released in key brain regions, producing feelings of pleasure and motivating us to repeat the behavior. But what's fascinating about dopamine is that it isn't only about the momentary pleasure we get - it's also heavily involved in reinforcement learning. It helps the brain remember- "that was good - do it again"
This mechanism is fundamental to how humans (and other animals) learn what is beneficial or harmful.
Everyone loves these dopamine rewards, but here's where things get more interesting -
Over time, cues associated with the reward (the smell of food, the ping of a notification) can also trigger dopamine release, driving anticipation and craving. Dopamine thus contributes not just to liking something, but to “wanting” it.
It’s an endless cycle of desires, amplified each time through cues and rewards, and all you can do in the face of not recognizing it, is just accepting its effects.
From an evolutionary perspective, this reward circuitry developed to reinforce survival-critical behaviors. Obtaining food, sexual activity, nurturing social bonds- all are tied to dopamine so that our ancestors would "feel good" for doing them and be driven to repeat them.
In essence, nature's strategy for ensuring survival and procreation was to "reward" us with pleasurable feelings when we did things that increased fitness (finding energy-rich foods, finding a mate, caring for family). This system, in moderation, helped humans survive in environments where rewards were scarce and hard-won.
But today, rewards aren't scarce. Just look around you, or open your phone or a browser tab. Everything’s there a tap and click away.
Thus, in a world of abundance, the same system that served our ancestors is now hyper stimulated every single day, satisfied to the brim, but still the human condition keeps us seeking more.
Our brains did not evolve for nonstop hyper-stimulation- yet modern products can deliver continuous or highly frequent rewards.
When the reward center of our brains is so overstimulated, it becomes "less sensitive" over time, so that "you don't get the same feeling of pleasure" from smaller everyday stimuli.
In parallel, one often needs "more" of the rewarding substance or activity to achieve the previous high- which is known as tolerance.
Scientists have observed that excessive consumption of pleasurable stimuli- whether sweets or cocaine, can induce a state of "reward hyposensitivity," where normal life's pleasures register as feeble
In other words, chasing dopamine in the short term can compromise our capacity for sustained contentment. Yet, that is what we're all constantly being primed to do.
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Now that you know how dopamine works, with this lens, it's easy to look at the most profitable consumer industries and conclude how they're all obviously employing vast amounts of resources to hijack our brains.
Fast food is a classic example of this. Processed foods are formulated with carefully calibrated levels of sugar, salt, fat, and flavor enhancers to be hyper-palatable, making them far more rewarding to the brain than simple whole foods.
When we bite into a cheeseburger or donut, the combination of sugar and fat lights up dopamine pathways related to taste and reward. In fact, research has shown that highly palatable foods (e.g. the archetypal sugary, salty snacks of a Western "cafeteria diet") can induce addiction-like changes in the brain's reward function.
They trigger dopamine release similar to drugs of abuse, and with repeated overeating they can cause neural adaptations akin to tolerance and dependence
This reinforces a habit loop: stressed or bored? Eat a tasty treat, feel a little better (briefly), repeat. The immediate gratification makes it easy to ignore the long-term consequences like weight gain, metabolic disease, or poor nutrition.
In evolutionary terms, our brains still react to sweet, fatty foods as rare precious rewards- yet in modern times, these are cheap and ubiquitous, leading to overindulgence. The fast food industry profits immensely from this mismatch, selling inexpensive ingredients in hyper-palatable combinations that our brains find irresistible by design.
If fast food exploits our taste buds and hunger instincts, social media exploits our social instincts- using dopamine as the lever.
All social platforms are built as variable reward machines, delivering unpredictable, novel social feedback and content with every refresh. All platforms, while being similar to slot machines, are also validation machines- reinforcing your behaviour with likes, comments and discovery.
The system works, and works great enough to displace mainstream giants, but it works by exploiting dopamine centres of both the consumers and the creators, and by the time most realise it, it's often too late.
There are other industries where it's clear that they're certainly not good for you.
Online pornography is one such industry that explicitly targets the dopamine reward system- in this case by exploiting the brain's response to sexual stimuli and novelty.
Sexual arousal naturally releases dopamine, and from an evolutionary stance, seeking out mates is a primal drive reinforced by the reward circuit. Online porn capitalises on this by serving you both unlimited novelty, coupled with unlimited personalisation. There's something for everyone, no matter what that thing you think is, it exists.
This is okay for most people in the short term, but even if 1% of users end up having their lives effected, that's millions of people.
One survey of adolescent males found about 10% had reduced interest in real-life sexual relationships because they preferred pornography- seeing it as "faster, safer, less demanding" than finding a partner, and more precisely tailored to their fantasies.
How many among these 10% will grow old with crippling addiction never to form fulfilling relationships again? The answer is not zero.
We can dial it back from the most harmful of services to harmless services like streaming platform. Yes, they're repositories of great stories, but when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says that their greatest competitor is "sleep", and they're winning the war against it, each new addition to Netflix from the autoplay resulting in heightened usage to trailers that don’t show a “trailer” but just a part of the film most likely to hook you, we all know that they're maxmizing their focus on our dopamine levers.
(I don’t think anyone has noticed the “trailer” being replaced by something designed to hook you, but if you want a clear example, look up the trailer of Jerry Maguire on YouTube, then search on Netflix for the movie and hover over the thumbnail).
The final item on this list - which can keep growing as long as we want it to, is gaming. Gaming is mostly a harmless activity in moderation and a great medium for modern storytelling. But it is slowly being eclipsed by gambling and loot boxes, where every game is being engineered to be as unpredictably delightful as possible with the added caveat of charging your credit card for in-game currency and purchases.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
These are all industries thriving on frying your dopamine receptors, making you want and crave more of what they're offering, keeping you unfulfilled, but where is the complex?
Where is the collusion?
Where is the grand conspiracy where they're all secretly acting together to wage war against your delicate mind?
The answer is advertising.
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The greatest proof of the DICs working together and thriving is ads.
The most powerful of these online are Google & Meta ads.
Because of sophisticated tracking, almost anyone can finely target you, to influence your purchasing decisions. If you watch an unboxing video on YouTube of a product, the same product starts showing up as ads on sites entirely unrelated to the product. If you scroll through Instagram and find an ad, click on "Shop Now" and buy something, even that purchasing decision is fed into the algorithm so that now, others who have bid on that particular demographic can now serve you ads to sell you things you're more likely to buy after shopping for that particular item.
And this model of advertising is lucrative. Tracking every user's every move, and serving them just the right ads at the exact moment they're most vulnerable to purchase something, has proven to be as effective as to build empires of billions for these tech giants. Unfortunately, it has also led to a hostile and worse Internet, where even though more content is more free than ever, more people are also incentivised to be as "ad-friendly" as they can be.
This "people" situation extends to every influencer on every platform, from micro-niche influencers who just survive based on affiliate links and sponsored listings, to large podcasters who stop a podcast midway to tell you about the latest alternative of Athletic Greens or the best VPN.
The ones who are not as "ad friendly" aren't looking out for you, either. They're encouraging gambling sites with referral codes, whether that's some influencer casually streaming their hypothetical wins and losses on Twitch, encouraging more of our desperate for "escaping the matrix" youth to start down the gambling rabbit hole, or entire content farms churning out "faceless" YouTube videos with the branding of gambling sites at the bottom right corner.
Nobody's safe, and hacking the reward pathways of humanity is extremely profitable.
So what are we to do?
The best answer I can come up with, the one that is actionable, other than the usual "Use Adblock, be mindful of what's happening to your attention, etc" is that you must understand the invisible forces in action, every single second, who are trying to influence you. An ecosystem of influence exists today to inflict you with desires that aren't your own. Every step in the cyberspace is filled with trackers and cookies, like hostile drones always following you around, knowing your every move.
Everyone's in on it, most even without realising it, and the only way to opt out is to be aware of the fragility of your own mind.
Those who are highly conscientious and disciplined may not be affected, but most people are not. Most are normal people like you and me, but not all hope is lost for them either.
Stepping away from screens once in a while. Objectively noticing your desires, tracing back to what triggered them, noticing the cues and replacing them, all of these can help. Use the notification filters on your phone- turn them off when you’re working or simply resting, and don’t reach for it out of sheer boredom. Cultivate the ability and patience to be bored, and indulge in activities that enrich your mind instead.
Most importantly, understand that every small step you take can go a long way. If you spend 4 hours on TikTok everyday, simply not doing that will help you save over 2 months each year! If something on TikTok influenced you to buy something you don’t need, to impress someone you don’t like, recognize that cycle and break free of it.
The Dopamine Industrial Complex is winning, but it’s not going to always stay this way. We can take it down.
It's not going to be easy.
But the only way to do that is to understand that it exists, in the first place.
