GoKawiilDopamine Fracking 2026.04.13
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8 min read
$ dict "Dopamine Fracking" | less The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources — money, crowdsourced math, analytics, optimization, min-maxing, popular opinion aggregation, etc. — into a previously casual or complex, layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit, with no regard for anything except dopamine.
One late evening while chatting on Discord, I coined the term "dopamine fracking" to describe a phenomenon that has become increasingly prevalent in online culture — a concept which I previously struggled to express. It's a metaphor, because just like in actual fracking, it is immensely harmful to the long-term health and sustainability of anything it is applied to, but in the short term, it can yield a very intense and concentrated hit of dopamine (or oil).
I briefly called this "sloptimization" — a term which was probably coined by AI bros to describe the process of optimizing AI models to pass benchmarks, but it doesn't quite capture the destructive nature of the practice. I guess you could say that a close alternative would be "commodification," "over-consumption," or "industrialization" of the human experience, but... all of these words sound more like sterile economic terms and don't actually signify how utterly devastating this has been to culture, creativity, and connection. I feel like "dopamine fracking" creates a much more guttural, visceral, disgusting image of an oil rig in your brain, or worse, in things you love and cherish.
Commodifying the Human Experience #
I was inspired to come up with this after watching a few of Metta Beshay's wonderful videos about drugs in the context of their original cultural significance. He covers a lot of different substances and their histories, and I highly recommend going to his channel instead of listening to me (an idiot) talk about it. In short, there's a reason why certain drugs were used in certain cultures for thousands of years, but became much more nefarious and destructive when they were taken out of that context. That reason is the industrialization and cultural erasure by the Enterprising Capitalist™️.
The same thing has been happening to so much of our culture, hobbies, and even relationships. For all intents and purposes, an enormous number of people live online. The constant search for the next big thing, the next big hit of dopamine, has led to a culture of overconsumption and addiction. Whether it's communities becoming too popular, music becoming too cliché, videos becoming too "MrBeast-y," movies becoming too Marvel, websites becoming too flat — all that matters is the dopamine hit. And the long-term consequences are ignored. Not out of malice, but because it feels as addictive as a commodified drug, and people are simply trying to get their next hit.
I'm not saying that the things I listed lack merit or effort: an immense amount of work undoubtedly goes into any movie, song, or video if it's made by a person or team and not by AI. But at a certain threshold, if everything converges on a single point, there's quite literally no room for anything else in zero dimensions.
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