You own the most valuable real estate in the world. Deep inside your brain is the nucleus accumbens, a pea-sized bundle of neurons. When you do or anticipate something rewarding, dopamine is released in this part of your brain, motivating you to repeat that behavior.
Corporations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to capture this reward system. The miners and merchants of dopamine use bits of software — social media, pornography, online gambling and other apps — to deliver quick hits of the chemical, keeping you coming back for more and cutting out the real world.
This is digital dopamine, and it’s carving a fault line in our society. On one side is the online realm, where everything is instant, easy and alone. Lots of money can be made there, but little meaning. On the other side is the shrinking terrain of real life, where meaning is made.
As the father of three children under 6, I do not want their brains programmed by corporations, like software. And as a congressman on the committee that oversees much of technology and commerce, I know there are deeper forces at work here: In our laws and in our markets, America has stacked the deck in favor of virtual reality over our material reality.
And it’s about to get a lot worse. To power the artificial intelligence boom, Meta, Google and the other tech titans are investing sums in infrastructure, such as data centers and semiconductor factories, not seen since the railroad age. A.I. is being incorporated into relationship bots, immersive experiences and neural implants. Phones and other consumer technology will soon become even more addictive.
For a preview, look at the plight of adolescents, particularly young men, who are at the frontier of the digital dopamine realm. Their nucleus accumbens is highly sensitive. Their prefrontal cortex, which is vital for controlling behavior, is underdeveloped. This combination can lead young men to aggressively seek novelty and status.
Societies have always wrestled with those instincts. But today, our society is routing young men to online sports betting, pornography and bot-infused social media platforms, like Meta, whose policies at one point deemed it “acceptable” for bots “to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” In this realm, it’s all digital reward, with no in-real-life effort. Young men are the worse for it, in both work and love. That’s not only a failure; it’s a warning about a technology that will soon saturate our culture.
Americans do not want this. Just look at the outcry from state and local lawmakers of both parties when House Republicans tried to ban states from regulating A.I.
We need to take action to both regulate the online realm and make IRL effort more rewarding.
Start with online. The Consumer Product Safety Commission insists that pharmaceutical companies put medications in child-safe bottles. It should do the same for apps that deliver digital dopamine. Labels could inform adults that using these apps comes with risks, and laws could restrict children’s use.
To develop strong, empirically sound standards, app developers should have to share anonymized data about user behavior with scientists studying the effects of digital dopamine, so that we can fully understand the effects of their products.
Meta, for example, recently revealed in court that, on average, people spend only 7 percent of their total time on Instagram viewing content from friends. Most of the time, they’re consuming short videos recommended by its A.I.-powered algorithms. Those algorithms are fundamentally changing Americans’ sense of self and society. They should not be corporate secrets.
This kind of medical approach will be more effective than roundabout antitrust action. The platforms and business models for dopamine mining are changing quickly. Rather than chase corporations as they shape-shift, regulators should focus on that pea-sized bundle of neurons where feedback loops of pleasure and pain get twisted into addiction.
Our in-real-life terrain also needs upgrades. We need to foster an economy that works like Legos, a game of patience and skill that involves building things together, not Monopoly, which is all about extraction. For too long, our economy has looked more like Monopoly, and it has deprived too many Americans of jobs with meaning and purpose.
America needs to build five million more homes, generate gigawatts more nuclear and geothermal power, and manufacture more ships than the Chinese Navy. Where government is getting in the way, like with zoning codes that stifle housing development, lawmakers should cut through the red tape. Where corporations are too vested in the status quo, like oil conglomerates and defense contractors, the government should challenge corporate power and level the playing field for start-ups.
Our IRL terrain especially needs more innovation in what’s called tough tech. Tough tech companies use frontier science and engineering to solve the world’s hardest material problems, from climate change to disease, by inventing technologies in fields like fusion energy, cell biology and A.I.-powered robotics.
We need more people to run the construction sites and factories powered by this technology. Otherwise, America will fall behind China. We should establish 1,000 new trade schools across the country. Along with trade unions, these schools can enlist the next generation — particularly young men, who are struggling in school — to sweat and strive offline.
When I joined the Marines 15 years ago, the corps gave me camaraderie and competence in service of a mission bigger than me. The infantry made me a better man. But young Americans should not need to carry an assault weapon to help the nation, or themselves. We must recruit them into building the real world.
Social order is not spontaneous. If we want IRL effort to triumph over digital dopamine, our public morality must reflect that. We ought to expect of one another an ethic of improvement, both national and personal. And we should insist that technology serves, not subverts, that ethic.
Jake Auchincloss represents Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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