Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.

Enjoy.

Where Does The Dopamine Rush End?

TechCrunch pointed this out last week, but I’ll do the same: does nobody else find it crazy that the plight of poor desperate people is now our entertainment?

It’s not like this is a new concept. Rich people have always made poor people do shit for their enjoyment. Spartacus didn’t rebel for the hell of it.

But that was at least evil governments doing evil government things. Now it’s just normal rich people flinging money around to create content off poor people.

The example TechCrunch used was Mr. Beast doing Mr. Beast things like:

Or:

Or:

Or:

And many many more.

This is all weird, but I don’t want watch Mr. Beast, so I kind of tuned it out as Mr. Beast being a weirdo. I also know that Squid Games dramatized this concept, but that’s a fictional show which I also didn’t watch, so I tuned that out also.

What really opened my eyes to this weirdness is the Netflix show Outlast. The basic concept is that a bunch of people who need money competes in teams to see who can last the longest in the Alaskan wilderness. But the kicker is that there’s basically no rules outside of physically attacking other people. So the whole thing quickly descends into Lord Of The Flies.

One team even stole the sleeping bags of another team:

In the Alaskan wilderness. In winter. That easily could’ve led to hypothermia. Or worse. And for what? Some money?

But it’s also an entirely predictable outcome when you throw 16 desperate people into the wilderness with $1M on the line. You just know some crazy shit is going to down.

The question is where is the line. If we’re actively taking enjoyment from people stealing the sleeping bag of a freezing women, then how far off are we from something like the most dangerous game or squid game?

This is especially true when you consider how dopamine works. It’s like a ladder. When you do drugs, you (usually) don’t start with heroine and work your way down to weed over time. You start with weed and when that bores you you go to coke and on and on it goes. Likewise with porn. Nobody starts with the freaky shit. You start with the vanilla and then when that bores you you move up to something freakier and freakier until eventually you’re watching something that will land you in eternal damnation.

It’s the same way with content. Mr. Beast didn’t start out with locking strangers in prison. He started off by giving strangers a bit of money. But you can’t do that forever. Eventually people got bored. So he’s gradually ratcheted things up to where it is now. It’s the same thing with someone like Nikocado. He had to keep ratcheting things up to keep people engaged:

When the dopamine ladder leads to one man getting fat, it’s a sad story. When it leads to throwing poor people into a cage for our entertainment, it’s cause for concern.

Chris Christie, You Absolutely Suck

Chris Christie gives Jersey a bad name. The man should not be anywhere near the presidential race anymore. Every day he stays in it, he cements his legacy as a narcissistic fraud.

He claims he’s in the race to stop Trump. That he’s the only one telling the truth about the orange man. Yadda yadda yadda. Just shut up dude. You’re polling 3.4% nationally and 11.1% in New Hampshire, the state you’ve focused all your efforts on. Nikki Haley, meanwhile, is polling 25.7% in NH. Adding your 11.1% would be a big help toward catching Trump’s 44.1% and possibly dealing a blow to the campaign which you believe is so dangerous.

But instead, you burn more of other people’s money because who cares? It’s not like it’s your money. And it’s not like you really care about stopping Trump anyway. If you did, you’d drop out and support Haley. Instead, this whole thing is just to get back at Trump for dropping you in 2016. Because you’re a petty narcissist, and you’ve proven that before. You’re not even a smart petty narcissist. If you were, you’d be able to see all you’re doing is embarrassing yourself and helping Trump.

Chris, just drop out. It’s the best thing for the country. You know it. I know it. And the American people know it.

Is Culture Actually Stuck?

Like everyone else who writes on the internet, I’ve seen all the articles about culture being stuck. And I used to buy into them. All the sequels. The longevity of rap. Algorithms. Phone design. Logos. Etc etc.

But, two pieces of content made me reevaluate this position. The first is an article by Ted Gioia about the war between macroculture and microculture, and the second is a tweet by Dean Kissick hitting on a similar topic.

The basic argument as I see it is this. The people who traditionally set the culture are stuck. That’s the legacy media. The record labels. The major Hollywood studios. They aren’t doing anything new or interesting, or at least they aren’t doing it nearly as fast as they used to. The result is that there’s less stuff that qualifies as universal water cooler material, and the stuff that does is generally just repeats of old stuff, so the macroculture feels stuck.

The microculture, on the other hand, is booling. Algorithms actually help in this regard. You can find a weird little corner of Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok for literally anything. Likewise, you can create content for literally anything, and if you’re entertaining enough, you’ll find an audience. One of my good friends from high school has 50k followers on TikTok from a series where he searches for a weeb alt goth girlfriend. 50,000 people are taking time out of their day to watch a dude look for bitches in the comic book aisle.

There are many such cases of this happening. That’s the microculture.

The question then becomes if it’s a problem that the macroculture is absolutely shit right now. It’s pretty easy to make a case that it is. Either the elites are severely out of touch, which is bad. Or the nation doesn’t really have anything in common anymore, which is also bad. The growth of the microculture might be leading to the growth of fragmentation. Combine that with remote work, social media, pornography, political polarization, and the like, and you have our divided lonely country.

Or you could make the case that the microculture is giving people an outlet they never had before. A freedom they never felt when the macroculture reigned supreme. A community they would never be able to enjoy otherwise. And because of that, you now have a more diverse, interesting, vibrant culture then you’ve ever had before; all you have do is look.

I lean toward the latter, but it’s definitely not definitive. There are benefits to having some semblance of macroculture that can lead to national unity. Maybe we need a way to parse through the various subcultures that now exist. A map, if you will. Or maybe the elites need to pull their head out of their ass and accept they can learn from the microculture, as Mr. Gioia suggests.

Whatever the case, elite or not, we could all benefit from some more microculture.

Extras

• The California population exodus continues.

• Bye bye, DEI.

• We have to beef up our AI security.

• Not everyone is able to enjoy remote work.

• Solar is coming.

• Hey hackers, please stop North Korea.

• Renewables now cover more than half of Germany’s electricity demand.

• China is just no fun.

• I wish I owned a $6M Bitcoin mine.

• Organized crime is threatening the Amazon.

• Wealthy people are straight up not having a good time.

• Women from privileged backgrounds prefer prestigious positions over lucrative ones.

• Iran is on their nuclear grind.

• The era of secret space missions is upon us.

• China’s BYD is about to overtake Tesla as the world’s largest EV seller.

• Enter the Surveillance Olympics.

• Things are never as bad as the media makes you think.

• It’s time to restore US air power.

• It kinda looks like the world is going blind.

• All roads lead to content censorship.

• Claudine Gay is a complete fraud.

• AI, sex worker narc. 

• Humanoid robots are coming ever closer. Don’t forget: a robot is going to take your job.

• I saw multiple articles this week on Greyhound buses. Might have to dig into this in a future Stove Top.

• Democracy is in danger. Will definitely be talking more about this in a future Stove Top.

Until next time, ✌️

Hit me up on Twitter!