Societal change does not originate from action alone, nor does it spring up spontaneously. Both revolution and status quo originate in a “way of thought”. The way we perceive and emotionally process the world around us is one of the fundamental causes of our everyday actions. But what happens if even our perception of reality and our capacity to focus, reflect, and process information, becomes increasingly dependent on one’s income?
The growing gap between social classes and the use of digital technology is transforming thought itself into a luxury good. This is an observation being made across the political spectrum now, with the conservative author Mary Harrington publishing a prominent opinion editorial in The New York Times last year on this topic.
The constant pursuit of dopamine creates states of addiction, stress, and emotional craving. Prolonged exposure to this form of stimulation increases the likelihood of symptoms such as attention disorders and an inability to comprehend long and complex texts. We can observe the effects of high-dopamine applications, the influence of visual technologies, and - above all - the phenomenon of doomscrolling on political consciousness today.
The Political Effects of a Dopamine Economy
This perpetual hunger for entertainment, excitement, and instinctual stimulation is deeply dangerous and its consequences are already visible across technologically advanced societies. Several symptoms stand out: a growing disaffection with stable, democratic forms of government, perceived as emotionally unexciting; a shift toward emotional, non-rational modes of political communication; dependence on digital platforms as primary sources of information; a declining ability to process complex arguments and sustained narratives.
These tendencies are evident in contemporary media landscapes. Political communication has become increasingly superficial and demagogic, designed to appeal to instincts and trends rather than reasoned judgment. The so-called Gen-Z “revolution” may be better understood as a testing ground for the institutionalisation of World Wide Web-based forms of control.
The sharp ideological polarisation between young conservatives with authoritarian tendencies and libertarian-communist subcultures may serve as an early indicator. The capacity of political actors and entertainment industries to distract, mobilise, and redirect mass attention constitutes a vast social experiment, one backed by political and economic interests seeking to consolidate a new form of hegemony.
Technology as Class Struggle
The use of technology is not politically neutral; it is a matter of class struggle because it shapes how people think. Continuous exposure to forms of entertainment such as Instagram Reels, TikToks, and YouTube Shorts is disproportionately characteristic of lower and middle classes. Harrington is correct when she observes that short-form content functions like ultra-processed food for the brain: the more it is consumed, the more it displaces higher-quality intellectual habits such as reading or sustained viewing.
When already fragmented social groups are exposed to algorithms designed to maximise emotional engagement, the result is predictable. Extreme content is amplified, because outrage, fear, and excitement are the most efficient drivers of engagement. Under these conditions, the spread of extremism is not an unintended outcome, but a functional one. It serves less as an endpoint than as a means, a distraction from the larger dynamics of capital accumulation and the preservation of the existing order.
Technology, in the hands of large economic actors, becomes a tool for the private reinforcement of power by those who already possess it. The difference today is that neither free markets nor free information will survive in their classical forms. Production and consumption will continue, but in developed societies social mobility will erode under an emerging technocratic-oligarchic system and may eventually disappear altogether.
Democracy in an Age of Cognitive Inequality
The regulation of technology and the defence of free speech are therefore urgent political tasks, especially for lower and middle classes. Without conscious resistance, societies risk drifting toward a totalitarian mode of thought. Elite families already shield their children by enrolling them in schools where smartphones are banned and technology is carefully controlled and critically examined.
For the rest of society, recognising this imbalance is a democratic responsibility. Without intervention, cognitive autonomy itself risks becoming hereditary privilege. As the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault famously observed in The Will to Knowledge, “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared. . . power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations”. Doomscrolling may appear trivial. In reality, it is one of the most effective mechanisms through which those relations are being reshaped today - and this threatens democracy itself.
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