Neil Postman suggested every era in American history is represented by a city. Boston was the apotheosis of revolutionary fervor. Chicago was the incarnation of industrial dynamism. New York was the personification of melting-pot America. And finally, Las Vegas became the avatar of overentertained America.
Postman was right about Las Vegas. The city is world-renowned for its extravagant, ubiquitous entertainment. But Vegas is more renowned for something else: gambling. And thus it’s also the ideal embodiment of the current phase of American history: dopamine media—online content designed to keep us scrolling by triggering dopamine release in our brains.
How Dopamine Media Works
While most Americans tend to think of substances as addictive—especially those that directly deliver dopamine—new research shows behaviors can be profoundly addictive as well because they release dopamine in the brain.
In 2013, pathological gambling was reclassified as an addictive disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And the way gambling works on the brain is exactly how dopamine media works. Anna Lembke explains: “Studies indicate that dopamine release as a result of gambling links to the unpredictability of the reward delivery, as much as to the final (often monetary) reward itself. The motivation to gamble is based largely on the inability to predict the reward occurrence, rather than on financial gain.”
A 2010 study found those addicted to gambling experience higher levels of dopamine release not when they win money but when they stand an equal chance of winning or losing money. The best dopamine high came from uncertainty, not victory. When it comes to dopamine, anticipation of a reward can create more pleasure than the reward itself. A slot machine is addictive because it keeps you in an anticipation loop: The big win is always just around the corner, so you pull the lever one more time, releasing anticipation dopamine in your brain.
This insight is key because it’s central to how dopamine media works. Behavioral psychologists in virtually every big tech corporation design their platforms and apps (social media, news media, video media) using intermittent variable rewards, what have been called digital slot machines. Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design—a book researching actual slot machines—explains that “Facebook, Twitter, and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites.”
Every time you post on social media, you pull a digital lever and receive an intermittent variable reward. Sometimes you win two likes, sometimes you win two hundred. If you’re scrolling through reels, some videos are duds but some make you squeal with laughter. The great appeal of short-form video content—pioneered by TikTok and replicated by Meta and YouTube—is that the brevity allows the user to pull the lever constantly. The brain constantly releases dopamine as it anticipates a reward. When you lose and get a lame video, you experience brief frustration or boredom, which only sends you back for more.
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.
Every time we do it, we’re rewiring our brains the same way gambling addicts do.
How Dopamine Media Differs From Entertainment Media
What sets dopamine media apart from entertainment media isn’t just its slot-machine design, however; it’s dopamine media’s constant accessibility and algorithmic curation.
Every time you post on social media, you pull a digital lever and receive an intermittent variable reward. Sometimes you win two likes, sometimes you win two hundred.
In Postman’s day, humans had limited access to TV. Physically, it was stationary. To watch TV, you had to sit in a room with a large device that needed to be plugged in. Additionally, you could watch only what was being broadcast on certain channels at certain times, on a schedule you didn’t design. While cable networks tried to curate more niche-based spaces—think HGTV, the Food Network, or Comedy Central—television was never actually personalized.
Dopamine media is entirely different. It’s physically unencumbered, traveling on your person and accessible anywhere. It’s also temporally unconstrained. There aren’t schedules. You can access whatever media you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.
But here’s the real secret sauce: artificial intelligence. Everything you see on virtually every app and platform—from ads to videos to posts to search results—is generated by recommender algorithms: advanced AIs that use your data to create a digital model of you so it can feed you bespoke content to keep and monetize your attention. Your social media feed is bespoke. It’s designed to keep you specifically addicted, by AIs whose computational knowledge of you is shockingly vast and actionable. Their main job is to keep you on the platform—to keep you addicted—by tracking your behavior like a dystopian digital Pavlov.
Distracting Us to Death
“Amuse” doesn’t quite describe the effect dopamine media has on us. It’s designed to distract us to death. Or, if we’re more honest, to distract us into an addiction that leads to death. Research shows that the more available and normalized a drug is, the more pervasive addiction to that drug becomes. So it’s no surprise the vast majority of American adults are walking around shooting up digital dope without raising an eyebrow. The best of us are responsible users who can consume media in moderation. But none of us is fully sober.
The addiction trade-off that dopamine media offered us isn’t a possibility; it’s already here. And if the first victims of our addiction are our time and attention span, the second (and far more important) victims are our families and relationships.
If the first victims of our addiction are our time and attention span, the second (and far more important) victims are our families and relationships.
Research shows that the more addicted you become to dopamine-producing behaviors, the less your brain rewards you for being in relationship with others. This is even true of rats: If a free rat finds a caged rat, it will try to free it. But if you allow that rat to self-administer heroin, it will no longer be interested in the caged rat. The heroin gives a better high, after all.
Our addiction to dopamine media is training us to love much what ought to be loved little. It’s making us miserably unhappy, hurting our relationships, and demanding more and more of our time to get the next high. Augustine wrote,
The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is a sound judge of these things. He is also a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally.
Dopamine media is the most powerful, pervasive, and engineered form of communication technology in human history, and it’s not shaping us to love Jesus most. It’s not shaping us to love our neighbor. It’s shaping us into pleasure-seeking addicts. Christians must recognize that, at its heart, this technological revolution has resulted in an institutional, relational, and formational crisis for the church.
This article is adapted from Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age edited by Ivan Mesa and Brett McCracken (TGC/Crossway, April 2025).