Part 1 of 2: How Dopamine Drives Anger on Social Media, aka "The Joy of Hate"

This essay is an excerpt from Taming the Molecule of More, Chapter 11: Taming Social Media.

Until social media, it was nearly impossible to have a significant relationship without meeting someone in person. Now we have friends, clients, employers—and opponents—we’ve never been in the same room with.

This has consequences.

For most of history, we gave others a wide berth for privacy. Boomers can name people they’ve known since childhood whose political affiliations remain a mystery.

Yet today, via social media, we don’t have to ask those kinds of questions because we regularly broadcast the answers.

We ask intimate questions of people we’ve never met and criticize them for answers we don’t like. It’s now scarily common practice to identify someone who’s expressed some heterodox opinion, gather a mob, and punish them with public reproach or economic isolation.

How did we get here?

Being at a distance removes the incentive we once had to engage sincerely, exercise caution, and offer grace. The physical-world culture of human interaction came with guardrails that the online world doesn’t have. Being nasty in person can earn you a sock in the jaw. Being nasty anonymously and at a distance comes with no consequences at all—at least, not immediately.

Online conflict is attractive. Agreement is stasis, but conflict comes with the opportunity for a series of dopamine hits. Without the disincentives to physical and emotional violence that are built into real-life contact, we are free to be mean and destructive, then meaner and more destructive. Short of hunting someone down, there won’t be physical comeuppance because there cannot be. In this way we are no longer incentivized to be patient in the face of offense.

This is how social media so often enlists the dopaminergic capacity for imagination into the joy of hate.

Part 2 gets posted tomorrow.