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"The concrete idea is something I call the Gollum effect. It is a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption."
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Our food choices are only a subset of our overall mode of consumption, which I call combinatorial consumption. Combinatorial consumption reduces the universe of human potential to a deeply-impoverished ghost of itself; a potentially infinite range of creative consumption behaviors reduced to paint-by-numbers consumption. Our lives are about choosing within the confines of a giant macro version of the Starbucks drink-construction decision tree. The dizzying, but finite variety on offer, helps distract us from the general impoverishment of what’s on the decision tree, with respect to the unbridled bounty of nature that is not on it.
We live in a cartoon universe where Claritas PRIZM psychographics categories have morphed from partial description of a population of human beings to a nearly-complete, Procrustean prescription for the construction of a universe of Gollums.
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On one side of the line separating those fighting for their souls and those who have lost it, you have the deadly game of existential chess played by the protagonists of Extreme Couponing, who exult every time they game the system and manage to buy $1000 worth of groceries for $20.
These are people who spend all their spare time collecting, organizing, investing in, and analyzing their coupon collections, to mount weekly attacks on grocery stores, like card-counting blackjack players at casinos. This is what Gollumized raving-fandom looks like.
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"The hypothesis behind much of this work is that finding information can cause a rush of dopamine – which is called in behavioural science circles a ‘reward stimulus’. Over time our brains can become sensitised to the anticipation of the dopamine reward – even though the reward itself brings us diminishing returns. In other words: the sensation of wanting more information doesn’t have an ‘off switch’."
Recent studies suggest that internet addiction disorder (IAD) is associated with structural abnormalities in brain gray matter. However, few studies have investigated the effects of internet addiction on the microstructural integrity of major neuronal fiber pathways, and almost no studies have assessed the microstructural changes with the duration of internet addiction.
Kids spend an increasing fraction of their formative years online, and it is a habit they dutifully carry into adulthood. Under the right circumstances, however, a love affair with the Internet may spiral out of control and even become an addiction.
Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain.
"Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best."
To be confident of the claim that they are better than some other group, they have chosen to compare themselves to a eugenic Nazi regime that euthanizes senior citizens. That such a regime is wholly a figment of their warped imaginations is less revealing than the fact that they have been forced to imagine such a horrifying scenario in order to find something with which they can believe they compare favorably.
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