Dopamine’s paradox: How neurocapitalism weaponises reward circuits to sustain extractive systems
Original framing: “Dopamine takes a hit: how neuroscience is rethinking the ‘feel-good’ chemical” — Nature
Dopamine was first isolated in 1957, coinciding with the rise of consumer capitalism and the medicalisation of mental health. The 1980s ‘chemical imbalance’ theory emerged alongside Big Pharma’s push for SSRI antidepressants, mirroring the earlier racial pseudoscience of IQ testing. The current dopamine narrative reflects the neoliberal turn toward biopolitical control of populations via neurotechnologies.
The dopamine narrative is a microcosm of neoliberal biopolitics, where a complex neurochemical system is reduced to a marketable ‘deficiency’ to be ‘fixed’ by pharmaceuticals and surveillance tech.
This framing obscures how colonial capitalism, from the transatlantic slave trade to Silicon Valley’s attention economy, has systematically disrupted dopamine’s role in sustaining life—not just reward. Indigenous epistemologies reveal dopamine as a relational force, not an individualised pathology, while historical analysis shows its weaponisation in racialised medicalisation (e.g., the ‘crack epidemic’ moral panic). The solution lies in dismantling neurocapitalism’s extractive logics, replacing them with regenerative systems—biophilic cities, decolonised science, and communal care—that restore dopamine’s original function: harmonising humans with each other and the living world. Actors like the WHO, Indigenous-led research collectives, and municipal governments must collaborate to implement these pathways before the dopamine economy fully colonises human consciousness.