There's no doubt that someone will have to produce a drug that gets you off low-dopamine scrolling, so that you can stop scrolling altogether. And then that drug—or that neurological intervention—will take a big market share from tech companies, which will lobby to have it banned. There's no way hundreds of millions or billions of people can plausibly keep getting cognitively nuked without some kind of cognitive GLP ending up on the market; tech addiction feels like it’s got to become a medical problem soon enough. It’s a medical problem with spiritual dimensions. Like any cure, like any GLP even, there will be side effects—perhaps terrible side effects—that we’ll have to choose between.1
Some live double. Double vodka, double whiskey, double women or double men, double album, double fantasy. Some people seem to live lives twice over while we're only living one. Double the trouble, double the jeopardy.
One thing I keep coming back to in my reading is that all the energy of the late 1960s came from the late 1950s, early 1960s; something authentic begins to get killed off, literally, by the mid 1960s— beginning with the Kennedy assassination and through MLK and Malcolm X and RFK (and I think as a late echo, John Lennon). 1968/9 wasn’t the beginning, but the dying burst of a combustive star.
The infinite scroll makes you feel like you’re always on the verge of discovering some kind of forbidden synthesis of knowledge—the truth behind reality.
Dr. Johnson writes in The Rambler, Number 64: “Friendship may be at once found and lasting. There must not only be equal virtue in each part, but virtue of the same kind. Not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both. We are often, by superficial accomplishments and accidental endearments, induced to love those who we cannot esteem. We sometimes, by great abilities and incontestable evidences of virtue, compelled to esteem those whom we cannot love. But friendship, compounded with esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and is permanent from the other, and therefore requires not only that those candidates should gain the judgment, but that they should attract the affections. That they should not only be firm in the day of distress, but gain the hour of jollity. Not only useful in exigencies, but pleasing in familiar life; their presence should give cheerfulness as well as courage, and dispel like the gloom of fear and melancholy.”
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