2026.04.13

8 min read

The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources — money, crowdsourced math, analytics, optimization, min-maxing, popular opinion aggregation, etc. — into a previously casual or complex, layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit, with no regard for anything except dopamine.

Origin

One late evening while chatting on Discord, I coined the term "dopamine fracking" to describe a phenomenon that has become increasingly prevalent in online culture — a concept which I previously struggled to express.…