From "Boomers/The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster" — a 2021 book by Helen Andrews (and I earn a commission if you buy it using that link).
Here's a 2019 Vox interview with Courtwright. Excerpt: "I make a distinction between ordinary capitalist enterprises like companies that sell people rakes or plows or nails or whatever.... But I think of limbic capitalism as capitalism’s evil twin, a really cancerous outgrowth of productive capitalism. There is a certain class of brain-rewarding products that lead to a form of pathological learning that we call addiction...."
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64 comments:
I find the interactions at a gaming table far more interesting than my own interactions with a screen.
The flashing lights, the sound, the constant motion of the screen all are way too jarring. Maybe I just need to get over it, and sit down and feed in quarters or tokens or whatever to become addicted. Haven't gotten over the sensory overload however.
Ah, but there's a cure: Maturity ~!
Limbic capitalism.
I like the phrase.
Spending continues until one runs out of money.
Humans respond to what is possible. Video games will shift back to being hobbies if men do not have financial support. There were plenty of men who used to fixate on sports, hang out in gyms, or go men's clubs rather than pursue careers. Loner males mirror the growth of virginal communal females in colleges.
How are these folks without jobs supporting themselves?
Some via parents and trust funds, no doubt. But the majority?
Are they living off the taxpayers dollars?
Does the article say?
John Henry
There have always been people who addict themselves to fads. And there have always been those who manufactured/sold those fads.
Courtwright had a book to sell and 'limbic capitalism' was his hook.
Equating online gambling with Nintendo gaming is quite the stretch. Just because both use screens doesn't mean they correlate.
OK. You got me on this one.
men are finding the substitute good enough to be going on with, declining to pursue either permanent employment or marriage.
There are logical and sane reasons for this.
Marriage is no longer the same product that it was 50 years ago. The product has deteriorated. Gone are the days when marriage meant a wife living at home, caring for children and the family, while the husband worked to bring home the food and pay the mortgage. That product no longer exists. That was the marriage product and it worked very well for thousands of years.
Maintenance payments, alimony, child support that the mother spends on herself and not the kids ... these are the new product "features" for women, but for men these are "bugs." Men, understandably, do not wish to be indentured servants to a bunch of ungrateful women.
Women have priced themselves OUT of the marriage market. Lo and behold, Tinder appears. Problem-free sex. OnlyFans appears. Porn explodes. Seems there is a lot of women out there who are thinly-disguised wh0res.
So, the marriage product now has significant downside risks, long-term costs and the quality of the product declined. Not so strange that men are turning to video games instead.
Women do not get to exist in a relationship economy and not understand that it's up to them to maintain product quality and price. Ignore those and you'll find you no longer have a market.
Equating online gambling with Nintendo gaming is quite the stretch. Just because both use screens doesn't mean they correlate.
It's a lot closer than you'd think. Both are masters at figuring out the most efficient way to trigger the dopamine response and keep you hooked. Additionally, a few online games such as Fortnite have skirted the issue of gambling in recent years with lootboxes and such. Paying money for a random item which you can possibly sell for a profit is gambling.
Slots players were always the dummies in the casino..best odds were craps, blackjack and poker.
They finally banned video poker in SC after several millworkers spent their check in the video poker parlor while their children slept overnight in the car outside. It's the crack of video games.
This has an old man and church lady vibe to it. "Young men today just sit around tinkering with automobiles and strumming on guitars. When I was young, we were storming the beaches of Normandy!" "Gambling is a sin, and if we're not careful, it will lead to dancing!"
The worst thing that can happen to a gambler is to win their first bet. Never get involved in zero sum games. Probably the best life lesson there is.
Wait a minute. Young people are wasting their lives playing videogames and watching pornography and it's old people's fault??
Joe Rogan clip: apparently the brain is tapping into an evolutionary adaptation, the search/reaward for food
In another video I heard that the release of dopamine occurs as an encouragement to try again. Say you are hunting with bow and arrows and most of the time you miss the target. You might get discouraged and give up, ensuring you starve. Dopamine is released to encourage you to keep trying so you won’t starve.
Now that we don’t starve, but we still have this programming, what do we do with it? Use it for Recreation.
Why do people hate video games so much?
My kids got the new version of nintendo recently. I was never much into video games as a teenager, but I can see the appeal. It's pretty fun! Now I play sometimes too. It seems no worse than television and at least it's interactive. Certainly more engaging to the mind than vegetating while watching some crime drama or whatever drivel is on TV.
A lot of articles coming out recently arguing that adults playing video games is some particularly pernicious decadence. But we're just at a time where people who grew up in the 90s with video games are now adults and they're continuing their old hobbies. Let people recreate in the way they like.
There's a way around this. I joined Duolingo, the language learning app. There's lots of bells and whistles that encourage you in your language learning. It's kind of addictive and definitely more fun than learning a language in a school environment....Capitalism gives people what they want. Socialism gives people what the educated, informed people think that they should want. By and large, capitalism has a demonstrably better record in fostering human happiness than socialism. Capitalism has produced more than video games and Big Macs. Government programs are responsible for things other than Social Security and Medicare. They haven't yet initiated collective farms here, but our education system is certainly producing a lot of illiterates at vast government expense.
For all the criticisms of men for playing video games, social media has been far worse in its effect on women.
Buckwheat,
You are right that the marriage "product" has badly deteriorated, but your timeline is laughable. What you describe is the product as it existed in Late Industrial Revolution times; before that -- truly for thousands of years -- most everyone existed as agricultural families, or even subsistence farmers or herders.
Given a choice.....many find the Eloi choice far superior. Just don't mention the Morlocks, you know the ones providing free food.
Plus, all the women are fat now. The Japanese are working on solving this problem and the early models are quite pleasing to the eye.
Unfortunately, the decline of men and marriage cannot be considered a "problem." The folks who engineered the decline or benefited from it happen to be the ones who declare what is a societal problem.
"Women have priced themselves OUT of the marriage market."
Most college graduates are women. Women are much more hesitant to marry down than men are so there are not enough male graduates to go around. As well, they tend to come out of college insufferably woke and virtually unmarriable as judged by the average normal American male.
How bad do women have to screw things up that men would come to prefer video games to their company? Well, it looks like that's where we are today.
Whereas capitalism is productive, earned, socialism is extortive, emotive.
Limbic guaranteed basic income is required for limbic capitalism in most cases.
Thanks for the market analysis, Buckwheat.
Women without jobs have the Democrats the way women without boyfriends have ice cream...
Sympathetic socialism.
Buckwheathikes said...
Women have priced themselves OUT of the marriage market. Lo and behold, Tinder appears. Problem-free sex. OnlyFans appears. Porn explodes. Seems there is a lot of women out there who are thinly-disguised wh0res.
I'm old enough to remember when women didn't want to be objectified.
Are we in late-stage stochastic limbic capitalism?
I love a good word salad in the morning.
Some "addiction": I dropped video games decades ago.
From what I can tell the latest and most distilled version of all this, is something I've just noticed this year as I turn on a good college football game or an NFL game, and that is the (to me) new and relentless amount of advertising for online gambling apps - all offer some free amount to get you started betting on line. It's the mix of sports, gaming, video screens . . . .and I support they toss in some passible level of porn. Addiction in that? I suppose. Definitely a time-tested, over-used marketing plan to get as much money from bored and lonely men as easily as possible.
It'll probably work.
"I dropped video games decades ago." You get a merit badge.
What do I get for never starting?
"Casino owners discovered in the late 1980s that people who gambled on screens became addicted three to four times faster..."
"Oh, no!", he said while reading the blog post on his laptop.
This guy goes to the doctor.
Doc asks him what seems to be the trouble.
The guy drops his pants and his pecker is bright orange.
The doc says, My goodness! How long has this been going on?
The guy says, For a while now. What's wrong with me?
The doc says, Has there been any significant change in your habits or behavior? Have you been anywhere you could have been exposed to any chemicals?
The guy says, No. No. I'm kind of a homebody. Mostly I just watch porn and eat Cheetos.
I'm quite partial to video games and always have been. There have been occasions when gaming when beyond midnight! But this doesn't detract from things that doing in the real world.
Capitalism provides what people want. Those wants can be bad for them physically or psychologically when taken in excess.
One would have hoped that education would have taught an understanding of the human psyche, and an individuals abilities and weaknesses, along with all the education needed to function in society, to the individual, rather than just the elitists.
Clearly, education is not the purpose of the current education system.
In the book _The World Beyond Your Head_ by Matthew Crawford, he describes people addicted to gambling who will soil themselves rather than leave the slot machine to use the restroom.
This corporate "hacking" of the biological reward mechanisms is pervasive, however, and not just limited to Casinos. For example, it is present in food production. The flavors in food today have been designed to maximize the human desire to consume more.
The principle failure in the culture seems to me to be that, in conjunction with the power to produce these junk-calorie pleasures, we also as a culture de-prioritized the values of self-restraint so as to elevate the values of self-discovery. The natural (albeit brutal) consequence of this in the long run will be the abandonment of the use of reason to discern what is good from what is bad, and therefore the domination of the weak by the riotous passions that rape and pillage.
"I'm jobless, unshowered, and living in my parents' basement, where I smoke weed and play games all day, because today's women just won't make any effort!" And people wonder why women don't want to quit their jobs and spend their lives propping these guys up. We should be teaching young men to be men for their own sake, not because that's how to get a woman to take care of them.
When Mom and Dad's money runs out when junior is 45, reality will reassert itself.
Nintendo and video gambling differ in one major way- Nintendo gives you free extra lives for free, the slot machine requires a quarter.
Never ever gamble with an algorithm. It is programmed to seduce you not pay you.
Women voted in the welfare state so they would not be dependent on loutish men.
And now men have taken the welfare, too, and decided to enjoy video games and porn, so they would not be dependent on churlish women.
WIN WIN?
As with any potentially addictive substance or action, peoples' responses will vary along a continuum at one end of which is a disorder in which the substance or activity degrades or destroys the quality of life of the user. There definitely are people "addicted" to gaming; I have seen it with my own eyes. And their addictions can be just as destructive to themselves and those around them as addictions to drugs, alcohol, or gambling.
It's difficult to separate features that make something a fun game from those that make it an addictive game, but it's not impossible. One thing game designers know is that different rewards systems produce different user responses.
Perhaps surprisingly, reward systems based entirely on skill are less addictive than those with a strong random component, which is why your Facebook feed and your TikTok stream will serve you tons of stuff you have no interest in seeing along with the stuff that you do want to see. People ask "Why doesn't FB allow me to just see the very latest things that any of my friends have posted?" and the answer is that you would spend FAR less time on it that way, because you'd get the news/info/pictures of cats you wanted and then move on. But now you scroll and scroll and scroll past tons of craps to find things you want.
(And yes, that is hardwired hunter/gatherer behavior. I can practice my fly-casting in my yard for a while and then I get bored or tired. Put me on a body of water, and let me get occasional attention from fish, and I'll cast until my arm is number and I'm mosquito bitten and sunburned).
Some regulation restricting the reward systems (frequency of unwanted material, stopping infinite scrolls, maybe even mandatory "time outs" after X number of minutes, would go a long way to preventing and breaking addictions. I can remember addictively channel-surfing and having to use a lot of willpower to stop right up until HD came along and it took just a tiny bit longer for the channel to change. Suddenly: uninteresting. It's the immediate feedback that feeds the addiction, the push of a button and the instantaneous response, and it is probably in all of our best interests to take away some of that power from the companies that produce this material.
I'm extremely displeased with the NFL for partnering with an heavily advertising betting on games. The Feds and states have enthusiastically embraced limbic capitalism before most of us were even aware it existed. Look what they did in the Great Shutdown of 2020: closed schools and churches and left open the bars and weed shops and strip clubs. Is there any state left that does not promote gambling via the various lotteries? None of great benefits they sold the CA Lotto on came to pass ("save the schools" my ass!) yet it keeps growing. Liberals used to claim to want to protect the poor and uneducated from predatory practices but have all gone silent even though it is well know that lotteries are largely a tax on the poor and stupid, the less one earns or is educated the more likely to "play."
Even the word "play" is such a pleasant anodyne description of what is essentially a continual drain on resources from the poorest Americans. Can we at least restore Pete Rose now that his "crimes" are legal?
Looks to me like the author took something she read about this which is about gaming "machines" such as traditional slots and flipped it into "gambling on screens" to tie it either ignorantly or dishonestly into the more recent rejection of modernity which uses the video screen as a proxy, all to give the book a hook.
Limbic Socialism = Soma.
Kate said Equating online gambling with Nintendo gaming is quite the stretch. Just because both use screens doesn't mean they correlate.
I hate to disagree with the witty and generally correct Kate, but it is indeed a short path from Nintendo to Candy Crush to the "games of chance" apps. I see ads for "slot machine" apps all the time. Once the risk and reward addiction kicks in, even where all you "win" is an attaboy, it is remarkably easy to get these people to risk actual money.
One more win for entropy and loss for civilization. Yes I am gloomy about the state of things this week.
Also - "the way men without girlfriends have pornography" - I got news for all you girlfriends out there.
"Are they living off the taxpayers dollars?"
That time-honored phrase is less and less relevant. Our government has discovered, as many others have discovered in the past, that it is much easier to print new money than to get citizens to part with the money they already have.
I ventured into a casino once about 1995, along with my ma and younger brothers, who all enjoyed such pastimes--and the 'free' food.
My $50.00 was gone in about 15 minutes at the 21 table; for the next few hours I hung out and observed the very sad people around me, hoping for that big win from the slots that would solve their problems.
A very depressing experience.
"I'll strip you of life, strip you of breath
Ship you down to the house of death
One day you will ask for me
There’ll be no one else that you’ll want to see"
Men WITH girlfriends use porn.(Have you ever met a woman?)
If computers and the internet existed when I was in my teens, I would have never come out of my bedroom.
When I was in high school, only a very few guys got lucky with the girls. Now, it's BJ City and sex texts and nude selfies galore. At my advanced age, I enjoy more whoopie simply because a decade ago I took the Red Pill and began relationships with younger women.
Having said all that, I am a traditionalist at heart and I wish I could have had ONE wife whom I enjoyed a long, happy (but not perfect) marriage with.
I suffer from many addictions and I want stuff that makes me feel good. And, when I get it, I want more of it. Until I lose everything, everyone and have to start anew, one day at a time. Speaking of time, it's time for me to go to a meeting. God Bless.
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
Men without jobs have video games the way men without girlfriends have pornography, and growing numbers of men are finding the substitute good enough to be going on with, declining to pursue either permanent employment or marriage.
Now do the Bachelor series, HGTV, and Food Network.
I believe there is a measurable difference in the way different people are attracted to addictive behaviors. To me, gambling was only fun when I was playing cards with friends. When I fist visited a casino, I was amazed that there was nothing fun to do. I would have spent some money on a game involving physical skill, but everything is based on chance, and that has no appeal to me. Likewise, video games lack the tactile touch and physicality that attracts me to sports, driving, riding, or any other activity.
Nintendo and video gambling differ in one major way- Nintendo gives you free extra lives for free, the slot machine requires a quarter.
Modern videogames, especially phone games, have embraced "microtransactions." Now, you can buy extra lives for $4.99 rather than waiting 24 hours for more chances to play, or buy upgrades for your character.
Lem the misspeller said...
Dopamine is released to encourage you to keep trying so you won’t starve.
Simple hunger came long before the bow and arrow. Any hormonal explanation needs to explain the same drive in other mammals at least.
That a tiger will eat dirt to belay the cramping points to the stomach as the primary motivator.
I seem to be immune to screen- or machine-addictions (with the exception of Althouse of course). I don't even have a smartphone, and even after an upgrade will only have a more advanced flip phone. (My wife is all in on the smartphone life, and spends most of her waking hours glued to it. No gambling, though.)
Poker? Deal me in. I can go to the casinos and find some, but am too lazy to make the drive. I used to have enough friends and brothers to play several times a year. No more.
My wargaming friends--also a dwindling band--all have smartphones and play a lot of games with AI on their computers, but when I hear about it, I'm just 'meh.'
The Crack Emcee said...
Some "addiction": I dropped video games decades ago.
Agree with Crack. I played an MMORPG and loved it. Ran a league and everything. Stopped cold about four years ago to divert the time.
Do I miss it? Only vaguely and only for the chats with league mates, not the play itself.
Have I gotten back on? Not once.
Narr said...
"I dropped video games decades ago." You get a merit badge.
What do I get for never starting?
The same badge in reverse colors.
Rabel said...
Also - "the way men without girlfriends have pornography" - I got news for all you girlfriends out there.
I got news for some boyfriends... All those paperbacks? There's a reason she reads them when you're not around and he's usually on the cover.
did Trump not have touch screens in his casinos? such a revenue loser!
I've never had any interest in any of it.
I hope all you "commerce Uber allies" Libertardians & Paleo Cons read this. Vices being decriminalized and monetized for tax and profits is just begging for the worst sorts in private enterprise and government to jump in feet first. And this is why we must HAVE regulatory limits on this "commerce" from the get go or the societal costs will be very high. No free-markets™ & private torts can't be trusted bc it's never worked in the past. That's been shown time & again.
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