The Reality Show Presidency: America’s Fatal Romance with the Dopamine Economy in 2025

The contemporary American, that bewildered creature perpetually hunched over his glowing rectangle, presents to the world a spectacle at once pathetic and instructive. Having achieved the dubious distinction of being history’s first civilization to voluntarily place surveillance devices in its own pockets, the homo americanus has surrendered the most precious resource known to civilization — his attention — to algorithms designed with the precision of narcotics. What emerges is neither citizen nor consumer, but rather some novel species of digital serf, voluntarily shackled to a feudal lord who pays not in protection but in momentary dopamine dispensations.

The Neurological Proletariat: A Taxonomy of American Self-Subjugation

We have arrived, dear reader, at a peculiar juncture in our national experiment — one where we have collectively agreed to bankrupt ourselves cognitively while maintaining the pleasant fiction that we remain in full possession of our faculties. The mathematics of this arrangement would be comical were they not so devastating: according to researchers at that last bastion of obvious conclusions, UC Irvine, a single interruption demands precisely 23 minutes and 15 seconds for mental recovery. Multiply this by the 100–200 daily device checks performed by…