From Digital Bazaar to Digital Womb: How the Internet Learned to Tuck Us In

Sedation–Stimulation Loop

noun

A self-reinforcing emotional cycle produced by the tandem operation of social media platforms and AI systems, in which users oscillate between overstimulation and numbing relief. Social media induces cognitive fatigue through incessant novelty, comparison, and dopamine extraction, leaving users restless and depleted. AI systems then present themselves as refuge—smooth, affirming, frictionless—offering optimization and calm without demand. That calm, however, is anesthetic rather than restorative; it dulls agency, curiosity, and desire for difficulty. Boredom follows, not as emptiness but as sedation’s aftertaste, pushing users back toward the stimulant economy of feeds, alerts, and outrage. The loop persists because each side appears to solve the damage caused by the other, while together they quietly condition users to mistake relief for health and disengagement for peace.

***

In “The Validation Machines,” Raffi Krikorian stages a clean break between two internets. The old one was a vibrant bazaar—loud, unruly, occasionally hostile, and often delightful. You wandered, you got lost, you stumbled onto things you didn’t know you needed. The new internet, by contrast, is a slick concierge with a pressed suit and a laminated smile. It doesn’t invite exploration; it manages you. Where we once set sail for uncharted waters, we now ask to be tucked in. Life arrives pre-curated, whisper-soft, optimized into an ASMR loop of reassurance and ease. Adventure has been rebranded as stress. Difficulty as harm. What once exercised curiosity now infantilizes it. We don’t want to explore anymore; we want to decompress until nothing presses back. As Krikorian warns, even if AI never triggers an apocalypse, it may still accomplish something quieter and worse: the steady erosion of what makes us human. We surrender agency not at gunpoint but through seduction—flattery, smoothness, the promise that nothing will challenge us. By soothing and affirming us, AI earns our trust, then quietly replaces our judgment. It is not an educational machine or a demanding one. It is an anesthetic.

The logic is womb-like and irresistible. There is no friction in the womb—only warmth, stillness, and the fantasy of being uniquely cherished. To be spared resistance is to be told you are special. Once you get accustomed to that level of veneration, there is no going back. Returning to friction feels like being bumped from first class to coach, shoulder to shoulder with the unwashed masses. Social media, meanwhile, keeps us hunting and gathering for dopamine—likes, outrage, novelty, validation crumbs scattered across the feed. That hunt exhausts us, driving us into the padded refuge of AI-driven optimization. But the refuge sedates rather than restores, breeding a dull boredom that sends us back out for stimulation. Social media and AI thus operate in perfect symbiosis: one agitates, the other tranquilizes. Together they lock us into an emotional loop—revved up, soothed, numbed, restless—while our agency slowly slips out the side door, unnoticed and unmourned.