Limbic Capitalism

= "a reference to the part of the brain that deals with pleasure and motivation. As our understanding of psychology and neurochemistry has advanced, companies have gotten better at exploiting our instincts for profit". [https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/10/17/18647521/capitalism-age-of-addiction-phone-david-courtwright)

Description

Mary Harrington:

"A core argument of Reactionary Feminist concerns the impact on women, and on intimate and family life, of the transition we’ve made over the course of modernity first to ‘disembedded’ life, then to a consumer one. We’ve since shifted again, into what David Cartwright calls ‘limbic capitalism’, which is to say an economy oriented toward encouraging the mass pursuit of desire, irrespective of how compulsive, pathological and antisocial the form."

(https://reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/2021-limbic-capital-flight)

Interview

From an interview with the author David T. Courtwright, of the book "The Age of Addiction" , by Sean Illing:

* Sean Illing: “Limbic capitalism” is a strange phrase at the center of your book. What does it mean and why should people be aware of it?

David T. Courtwright: Well, limbic capitalism is just my shorthand for global industries that basically encourage excessive consumption and even addiction. In fact, you could make that even stronger and say not only do they encourage it but now they’ve reached the point where they’re actually designing it.

...

It’s a reference to the limbic region of your brain, which is the part of your brain that deals with pleasure, motivation, long-term memory, and other functions that are crucial for survival. You couldn’t live without your limbic system and you couldn’t reproduce without it and that’s why it has evolved. And yet that same system is now susceptible to hijacking by corporate interests in a way that actually works against your long-term survival prospects. That’s the paradox.

* Sean Illing: How is it hijacked?

David T. Courtwright: The short answer is that companies offer products that will produce a burst release of dopamine in a way that conditions and ultimately changes the brain and develops certain addictive behaviors, which is to say behaviors that are harmful. Now, people have always peddled products that are potentially addictive. But what’s happened in the last 100 years or so is that more of these commercial strategies come from highly organized corporations that do very sophisticated research and find more ways to market these addictive goods and services."

(https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/10/17/18647521/capitalism-age-of-addiction-phone-david-courtwright)

Discussion

Towards Limbic Anti-Capitalism

"Elsewhere I looked at the uncounted costs of that increasingly frank application of limbic capitalism to the intimate domain of sex relations, whether in porn evangelism, transactional sex understood as ‘empowering’, or the monetisation of male desire and loneliness via OnlyFans. And I delved into the increasingly surreal and unsettling effects of the internet’s increasingly evident function as accelerant of all limbic, desire-based forms of commerce, and hazarded a few guesses as to where we’re heading politically if we don’t change course. Lola Bunny has paywalled herself; kids’ YouTube is the stuff of nightmares; if we’re not careful our future looks like a kind of fully automated luxury gnosticism where we’ll end up ruled by robots, because we no longer believe ourselves capable of self-government.

I’ve written much else besides over the last year or so, but this is the terrain I’ll be seeking to weave into a single argument in the book. I can assure you it’s not all doom: I have plenty to say not just on how all this is terrible, but in the book I’ll also share my thoughts on how to we might try and reconstruct livable sex relations in the rubble of absolute freedom - and how this more broadly serves an urgently needed practice of limbic anti-capitalism."

- Mary Harrington [1]

More information

• Limbic Anti-Capitalism