126. Digital Drugs
What is a Digital Drug? How is it defined and what does it do? How does it differ from a "physical" drug? What are the legal and health implications as we rocket towards this technology?
When we talk about drugs we traditionally mean some substance that contains an active chemical that alters human physiology when consumed, injected, absorbed, or inhaled. The chemical comes from outside the body and then enters the body. In medical and physiologic sciences the term for this is:
Exogenous
AI is getting a bit too smart, it’s mentioning Endogenous without me even asking. “Naturally” occurring chemicals that are created inside the body by the body are Endogenous. In both neuroscience and pharmacology we attempt to identify these natural substances that are released in the body, isolate them, and then manufacture them outside the body. This can be for the purpose of research, medicine, recreation, or even warfare.
As our science and technology advances, we can do incredible things by creating an endogenous chemical outside the body, and then put it back in the body. We can even modify it to make it more powerful. A good example of this is Fentanyl, which was synthesized in 1959 by Dr. Paul Janssen, designed to mimic and improve on morphine, which in turn mimics the endogenous endorphin chemicals.
AI is really impressing me by even answering questions before I can ask them. You might be surprised to find that Fentanyl is a 65+ year old drug, and just how advanced neuroscience was even back then. The progress we have made since then, and especially in the last 10 years, would sound like science fiction to those that are not biological scientists.
Generally endogenous chemicals are considered much safer than exogenous chemicals because they are made by your body and the body is exceptionally well regulated to handle the things that belong in the body. Of course things can go wrong, and that’s when disease occurs.
What is a Digital Drug?
A Digital Drug is a form of media that has been created with the purpose of optimizing the release of an endogenous neurotransmitter when a human is exposed to it. Typically this is done for the purpose of boosting engagement, but more advanced forms can have a wide range of effects as there are over 60 neurotransmitters in the human body.
Typical target neurotransmitters are adrenaline, dopamine, and oxytocin. The first two have become ubiquitous but it’s only with research in the last 10 years that developers have attempted to stimulate oxytocin production.
I think a duration component is important to consider, though this becomes a bit subjective. Is a scary movie a digital drug? What about the movie Saving Private Ryan?
When it comes to passive media, I would put a viewable media in this category if it is attempting to trigger a chemical release for the entire duration of the program, in order to maintain Stim Lock, which I first described in a 2018 interview. A good example of this would be CoComelon. In such a product, the stimulation pulses are timed to land approximately every 2 seconds to prevent the Lock from being interrupted. These pulses are carefully timed by the manufacturer and not accidental.
It is a very effective product.
For interactive media (including slot machines and social media) the stimulation pulses are usually a bit more intermittent. In a first person shooter (FPS) game, the pulses generally increase in frequency the harder the player pushes in the game, giving a reactive effect. With a slot machine, the pulses tend to become evenly spaced as the user “Locks”.
With social media, pulses tend to be timed around the user’s sleep schedule and might be approximately once per hour when they are not using the app (to get them to use the app) or fall into a slot machine like cadence like with Tinder.
I will define a “Pulse” as a visual and auditory attention grabbing event that is linked to a reward or a threat.
Serum Half Life
These neurotransmitters are very powerful and travel in the blood, or in some cases the cerebrospinal fluid. The way we measure how quickly these are removed from circulation is by measuring how long it takes for half of the substance to be removed (metabolised). So if something has a 2 minute half-life, half of it will be gone in 2 minutes, and 75% of it will be gone in 4 minutes.
Thus to maintain peak serum levels pulses typically would have to be more than once a minute, especially with dopamine delivery products. Currently almost all the Digital Drugs on the market target Dopamine primarily. Digital Drugs that Pulse the consumer too many times in a minute might be Overdosing the consumer, and this is a high priority concern for me. The result could be both addiction and harmful adaptations/desensitization. Dopamine delivery is optimized when it is delivered on a intermittent reinforcement schedule:
Slot machines, Tinder, Social Media, even LinkedIn: they all use Intermittent Reinforcement to augment engagement. In an FPS game intermittent reinforcement is provided either by other players or by AI opponents. If the player gets too good and is not surprised sufficiently by gameplay, serum dopamine will drop. To counter this, players are ranked (often this information is hidden from the player) internally and the game will attempt to match them with equally skilled opponents that will keep them on their toes.
Stim Lock
This is when a product attempts to maintain user eye contact on the screen at all times. The use of eye tracking for this purpose will become illegal next year under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. But that’s not necessary as long as your product maintains stimulation pulses that are fairly rapid.
Many products are aimed at children, but also at parents, for this purpose. The parent can activate the Digital Drug and hand the device to a child. The child will enter Stim Lock and be exactly where you left them when you come back later. This can be very handy for disabling a child while you do other activities.
But don’t forget the child because they will forget to eat, drink, or use the bathroom while Locked. Batteries might run out eventually, but not if the child knows how to plug the device in. Of course a parent is not needed in this routine if the child knows how to operate an electronic device with a Digital Drug available. The child might even access the DD instead of sleeping if allowed private access to it in their room.
Even endogenous chemicals can become addictive if abused. Thus there are risks to repeated use of Stim Lock or any Digital Drug that has not been designed with safety in mind:
You might be thinking “At least my 4 year old doesn’t have to worry about dangerous content or cyberbullying.” I’ve observed a marked increase in media portraying violence by females on males all across the media spectrum. This is becoming normalized in media, and thus normalized in life. Men fight back. Most domestic violence scenarios are initiated by women and finished by men. The most frequent domestic violence scenarios occur between two women cohabitants (same sex couples).
This is just one example of “seemingly harmless” content that even your very young child could be exposed to and internalized. You likely won’t notice because the whole point of using a DD to Stim Lock your kid is to restrain/sedate them while you do something else. Regular media (like news or narration) isn’t designed with these rapid pulses so a child can put the screen down and look for food. Or trouble.
Oxytocin Based Games
Oxytocin is normally released during positive social interactions. As humans become increasingly socially isolated, they are becoming increasingly deficient. Thus restoring oxytocin is not only pleasurable, but healthy. Oxytocin boosts the immune system, improves mental health, and can even have anabolic (growth promoting) effects. Without oxytocin, humans also become more aggressive and less trusting.
Thus, unlike adrenalin and dopamine, oxytocin is a reward neurotransmitter with a long list of beneficial secondary effects. Replacing adrenalin and dopamine based DDs with Oxytocin based DDs would thus be very popular with consumers, potentially quite lucrative, and could even have public health and societal benefits.
The vast majority of research on oxytocin has only been done in the last ten years, so there is this delay from academia to industry. I am attempting to normalize the discussion of Digital Drugs so that we can better protect ourselves from harmful DDs, and consider switching to beneficial DDs. All of the technology needed to non invasively measure these neurotransmitters has been developed in the last few years and these products can be developed quite easily once they are greenlit and appropriately staffed.
Making Digital Drugs
Because they exist in a legal grey zone, there is essentially zero chance of them being regulated in the next 10 to 15 years. But data gathered from these products can allow consumer safety regulations to be developed in the future. Currently, major platforms are doing this research in secret internally, and not sharing this information with consumers or regulators. Tobacco industry style. That’s not good for consumers.
I shared my concerns in my previous paper, Ecstatic Monetisation and Dopamine Death, that damage from abnormal and prolonged dopamine exposure is damaging the population. Not only is this reflected in mental health statistics, which are all drastically trending down, but also in a marked rise in the rejection of dopamine based digital drugs, especially in the First Person Shooter genre. This is costing the interactive media industry billions of dollars. Everyone is blaming everyone else instead of approaching the problem scientifically.
We need testing, which I got permission to do at Wargaming’s Florida QC testing center in 2014. But the Crimean war resulted in my budget being frozen before we could deploy some experiments. With a baseline of data we can rapidly determine what are safe and effective ranges and durations for all of these neurotransmitters triggered by media. Right now you have developers just saying “MORE!” without any sort of scientific or clinical education, in total disregard for public health. That’s not going to have a good outcome.
How to Approach Research
Hire appropriately qualified people. You should have room in your budget after you used AI to lay off 25% of your workforce.
Set up a testing center if you don’t already have one. It’s possible this could even be done remotely. Create a schedule of control and DD-capable games to be played by consenting volunteers or employees.
Gather lots of data using neurotransmitter detecting watches or such. I’ve played around with one of these in 2023, they are very impressive.
Pay attention to patterns, and start formulating hypothesis for future experiments. Then run them.
While not required, it would be great to publish the results as this can help normalize the tech and improve oversight. Without that, the potential for abuse multiplies.
Increasingly effective products can be designed, that consumers will not build up intolerance to. If I am correct about building dopamine intolerance in the gaming community, the groups currently secretly deploying dopamine-based DDs are going to be royally auto-screwed as customer demand dies off.
I think we need some age restrictions on some of these products, in addition to increased transparency. Parents can’t make informed consent decisions if they are not informed. That’s a bit long term. This generation will not be protected so we will get a lot of interesting and tragic data out of them as we use our children as guinea pigs.
I would like to think that consumer friendly digital drugs will not only be well received by consumers, but also by regulators. They might even get subsidies from various governments because of the positive public health benefits of healthy games.