CONCEPT
The Race Moves Indoors
Harris's diagnosis that the competitive optimization of engagement has migrated from the public arena of social media to the private cognitive space of AI-assisted work.
The 'race to the bottom of the brain stem' that characterized social media competition—platforms optimizing for the most primitive, automatic neurological responses to maximize engagement—has not ended but relocated. In the AI era, the race operates in private productive contexts where compulsive engagement is culturally coded as valuable work rather than wasted time. The husband who cannot stop prompting Claude at midnight is, by every visible metric, working productively—building real software with real value. The neurological dynamics, however, mirror those of social media addiction: variable reward schedules, dopamine activation, the erosion of voluntary disengagement. The race has moved indoors, where it is invisible to external observers, exempt from social judgment, and protected by the cultural armor of productivity. This makes it harder to detect, harder to resist, and harder to regulate than the outdoor race it succeeded.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The outdoor race—social media's competition for visual attention—became publicly legible by the early 2020s. The harms were documented, discussed