Where are the limbic anti-capitalists?

Who will take a stand against the predators who hack our instincts for profit?

The number of teenagers who meet up with their friends ‘nearly every day’ has fallen off a cliff since 2010, which is when smartphone usage started to rocket among that demographic:

Over the same timescale adolescent mental health - especially among young women - has plummeted:

Who could have guessed that being glued to your phone all day instead of meeting in real life is really, really bad for young people?

You’d think this would be a slam-dunk for regulatory intervention - after all, we’ve had no problem in the past introducing regulation to prevent adolescents from smoking, for example. But when US Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill recently to impose an age limit of 16 for teenagers om social media, it prompted an instant broadside from the Right. David French inveighed in National Review against ‘Republican Daddy State’ thundering that attempts to ‘micromanage social media’ were ‘an affront to limited government and personal responsibility’.

The most charitable possible interpretation you can give to this is that Right-liberals haven’t been paying attention. They haven’t noticed that what the historian David Courtwright calls ‘limbic capitalism’ has been hard at work for decades now, doing an end-run both around government and around the human capacity to self-regulate.

In Courtwrights’s words, limbic capitalism is “a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments and criminal organizations, encourage excessive consumption and addiction”. It’s a business model that sets out deliberately to hack pre-rational pleasure and reward systems for profit, deliberately driving addictive and often self-destructive behaviours in the interests of selling more product.

Examples include junk food, which emphasises ‘hyperpalatable’ flavours and textures that hack evolved organismic preferences for high-energy food, incentivising compulsive eating and delivering little nutritional value. Such addictive food-like substances are a direct driver of obesity and related health issues - all while raking in close to a trillion dollars worldwide.

Pornography also fits the bill, hacking pre-rational sexual urges and reorienting them to a ruthlessly profitable industry estimated to be worth around $100bn worldwide. So does gambling: also wildly addictive, also defended by the liberal Right, also worth half a trillion dollars.

And it’s hard to dispute that social media also fit the bill. Most popular platforms are meticulously engineered to create and reinforce a constant stream of tiny dopamine hits, rewarding every post and interaction with likes and replies and further stimulation. The addictiveness is well-documented, for adolescents it’s near-irresistible, and it’s worth another half a trillion dollars annually.

Those who insist there’s a “conservative” case against protecting still-developing minds from the wolves of limbic capitalism are in effect giving a green light to the commercial equivalent of cancer: a metastasising outgrowth of parasitic industries, hard at work strip-mining our most basic organismic drives to the detriment of our individual and collective wellbeing.

As long as the Right remains either accidentally or wilfully blind to the toxic, predatory nature of this business model, they’ll go on mumbling about ‘personal responsibility’, ‘freedom’ and ‘free enterprise’, while hand-waving the innumerable immiserating impacts of junk food, pornography, social media and other addictive-yet-noxious business models that weaponise our own drives against us for profit. And as long as anyone goes on pretending there’s a “conservative” case for this dereliction of duty, the Right will go on failing to do the one thing conservatives should do: wield power responsibly in defence of human flourishing.