I remember being enamored with the hot take about a decade ago. To post something brief and witty in a spontaneous, explosive response to a news event and create the verbal equivalent of a basketball dunk seemed powerful and elevating, especially in a world that was becoming increasingly chaotic and unrecognizable. Showing rapier wit online could turn a frumpy guy sitting at his mechanical keyboard into the verbal equivalent of prime-time Michael Jordan.
That wouldn’t be me, though. My ability to deliver hot takes is probably slightly above average. I may be too long-winded or too slow to process things. Whatever the case, I’m no hot take champion. But I sure envied the hot take mavens. For a while, I thought excelling in that realm was a ticket to success and self-worth.
Over time, however, I came to see the compulsion to deliver hot takes as a sort of disease, the result of Internet Brain Poisoning, a condition in which the brain is short-circuited by a paradox: It’s getting too much dopamine and starving for dopamine at the same time. This paradox results in less thinking and more reptilian outrage, which in turn compounds the poisoning.
I could see the poisoning all around me. So could Sam Harris. He had to get off Twitter. It was too toxic and time-consuming. I heeded his lesson. I also contemplated my own disenchantment with hot takes, so I deleted my Twitter-X account a couple of years ago. I still have a Threads account, but I don’t post on it. When I see people trying to deliver hot takes, I cringe at the memories of Internet Brain Poisoning.
It turns out that trying to find self-worth and belonging through parasocial relationships is a false path that leaves you starving for genuine human connection. You end up lonely and poisoned by the Internet’s false promises and intermittent dopamine surges.
I’m not completely free from such poisoning. On Instagram, I still post photographs of watches, mostly G-Shocks, and sometimes tell a brief story about something I find meaningful or funny. But I don’t deliver hot takes or hunger for attention the way I used to. My relationship with social media, a branch of behavior modification I prefer to call dopamine farms, has changed, probably for the better.
If spending time on dopamine farms is the equivalent of bingeing on a banana split, I’ve cut down to one banana split a week instead of eating ten a day. I guess learning to stop grazing on the dopamine farms all day and night is a form of small progress. Recognizing what these dopamine farms do to us may be the first step toward freedom.
Dopamine farms began imprisoning us and poisoning our brains around 2010, roughly when smartphones made these platforms more accessible and addictive. Sixteen years later, our democratic norms seem to be deteriorating. As Sacha Baron Cohen recently told Scott Galloway on the Pivot podcast, it’s doubtful these dopamine farms can coexist with democracy.
It turns out that immersion in short-form videos and weaponized misinformation can make us angry, paranoid, and increasingly unable to inhabit a shared epistemic world in which we can agree on basic facts and cooperate for the betterment of our species.
During this period, as shared reality and democratic norms gave way to cultural and political polarization, I started listening to podcasts by thoughtful people who critiqued the excesses of that polarization. I’ll mention three: Blocked & Reported, featuring Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal; Uncomfortable Conversations, featuring Josh Szeps; and The Unspeakeasy, featuring Meghan Daum.
These podcasters are excellent thinkers who have done a great job dissecting the tribalism and groupthink of our time. However, I wonder what they’ll be doing as society moves forward and perhaps tires of hearing about cultural and political polarization.
To their credit, they do much more than deliver hot takes about the current moment. They offer long-form analysis and interviews, and their independent thinking is welcome. However, they often interrogate cultural excesses so ridiculous that at times it seems they’re shooting dead fish in a barrel.
Groupthink and Internet Brain Poisoning bring out the worst in people and turn them into caricatures. These podcasters have plenty of caricatures to poke fun at and criticize, but I suspect they’re growing tired of the exercise. I suspect they want to move on to something else.
These three podcasts have given me comfort over the last five years, but I sense a sea change. I suspect they’ll either change direction or eventually cease to exist. When it comes to dopamine farms, Internet Brain Poisoning, and groupthink, I suspect I’m not alone in my disenchantment. There may be a mass exodus from these platforms, although I know the learning curve can be slow.
This exodus may take time. The sooner the better.
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