rawdogging unreality

on navigating a world where fantasy drives reality

Remember the metaverse? That idea of a persistent reality, at once digital and physical? I suspect you do.

I also suspect that no matter how many metaverse-investments you made or NFTs you owned, if I asked whether you believed in the metaverse now you’d either scoff or recoil. And with good reason.

Yet last week I realised that the digital x physical reality the metaverse tried to capture is here, and it didn’t need any of the fancy infrastructure. All it required was a culture that normalised suspending disbelief, so much so that we became comfortable rawdogging unreality.

all the feels with none of the feeling.

My revelation was spawned by my discovery of dopamine sites – a crop of websites taking off in South Korea, which allow you to simulate activities that produce dopamine: shopping for clothes that will never arrive, ordering food you’ll never eat, smoking a cigarette you’ll never inhale or buying games you’ll never play. Think feel good with none of the actual feeling.

Simulating dopamine rich activities has always been a core part of play. As kids we prepare for the world with role playing games like shopkeepers or mummies and daddies. When we grow up we evolve from schoolyard play to simulation industries. Theme parks are a $106 billion market, 14.6 million people attend Broadway shows, and interactive porn is experiencing 42% year-on-year growth. Then of course there’s gaming, the largest and most obvious digital simulation market with 3.2 billion participants globally.

However, in every one of these instances the success of a simulation has rested on a system of infrastructure that first prises you away from reality and then eases you into the fantasy land it’s proffering. When it comes to schoolyard play it’s the social component - a friend painting the shared paracosm. In theme parks it’s the physical infrastructure - the rides with their coterie of mascots and mermaids. With interactive porn it’s the hardware - the headsets/ toys that facilitate the sexual experience. And with gaming it’s often a combination of all of the above.

Dopamine sites are fascinating because none of this infra exists. There’s no community sandwiching you into a story. No block of text narrated by an NPC. No infrastructure to transport you out of your living room and into nirvana. It’s just you, a poorly-functioning replica of a UX you’re familiar with, and your desire to toggle out of the ‘real world’. The marker of success is whether you can convince your brain to stimulate the necessary neurotransmitters. And in the case of young South Koreans, they can.

history is the story you believe

In an essay for ADIN Priyanka Desai identified Korea as “a behavioral laboratory at national scale”. She argues that Korea’s unique social and economic conditions (the world’s lowest fertility rate + high housing costs + a hyper-competitive education system + limited social mobility + ubiquitous high-speed internet + dense urban living + aesthetic obsession) place it “further along the same hyper capitalist curve everyone else is traveling”. By this logic it’s only a matter of time before the ability to rawdogg reality filters down from South Korea to the US.

Before scoffing at Mark Zuckerberg/ Evan Spiegel/ Tim Sweeney for spending so much unnecessary time and money facilitating fantasy when they could have just vibe coded a website, its important for me to state that I don’t think we could have rawdogged unreality like this six years ago. Our unfettered ability to suspend disbelief is a skill borne from recent technological developments.

In the year of Sam Altman 2026, history is composed of an infinite number of possible stories. Some based on facts on the ground, others completely constructed, most sitting squarely between the two as slop-spawned chimera incubated in an interpreted reality.

While history has always been written by the victors, pre-AI/ pre-social-media, truth was rooted in generally accepted ‘facts’. High-integrity investigative journalism was alleged (if not actually practiced), publishing was gated, and the craziest thing you could do to an image was Photoshop it, and even then only if you had the skills. History was documented, verified and (mostly) collectively understood. Not anymore.

In the year of Sam Altman 2026, history is composed of an infinite number of possible stories. Some based on facts on the ground, others completely constructed, most perching between the two as slop-spawned chimera incubated in an interpreted reality.

History has moved from something propelled by collectively accepted ‘facts’ to something both splintered and shamelessly shaped by story

A friend who works at a social platform recently confided that the most interesting thing he’s seeing online is a voracious spurt of imagined ‘evidence’ for any claim around a celebrity’s whereabouts. If someone posts the allegation ‘Bianca Censori went to Art Basel dressed as a bagel’ others will immediately generate images to support it. Even if the event never happened, these images are absorbed into the world view of the millions who see these visuals. For some this will lead to the construction of shared histories based on fictitious facts (Bianca wore the bagel), but for most it will lead to a lack of trust in anything they see online.

The result is that history has moved from something propelled by collectively accepted ‘facts’ to something splintered, and shamelessly shaped by story. It doesn’t matter if the story is real or not, in this new world whoever’s narrative can affect the most people wins.

from korea to the world (?)

On the Future Commerce podcast, Phil Winkle and Brian Lange, argued that dopamine sites were an invention too far for US consumers. They allege that they’d only ever take off as a gimmick, some marketing stunt cum-art installation baiting clicks. Supplementing Pri’s argument that US culture runs downstream from its Korean counterparts with how I see fantasy from first principles, I firmly disagree.

Fantasy is sought out by those needing to escape realities that cause them discomfort, and over the past few years the world has been plunged into what seems like a state of inescapable geopolitical dystopia. Whether it’s wars, environmental scourges, or the film of fear around a future where everything that can be done by technology will, each day we are tired by traumas. In this environment the desire to cleave dopamine from the surreal is acute.

When it comes to cleaving dopamine, we live in a society which has conditioned us to feel validated when we consume. In this landscape dopamine hits borne from the same capitalist infrastructure our minds have been trained to respond to, with none of the cost, are a no brainer (pun intended).

What’s more, the retreat to fantasy becomes a necessity when the ability to alter your circumstances is constrained. The US, much like Korea, is plagued by rising living costs, diminishing social relations, and of course growing unemployment. The result is an economic ecosystem where consumer discretionary spending is broadly stagnant. And yet we live in a society which has conditioned us to feel validated when we consume. In this landscape dopamine hits borne from the same capitalist infrastructure our minds have been trained to respond to, with NONE of the cost, are a no brainer (pun intended).

To round this off, fantasy is a central part of American cultural infrastructure as evidenced by the waning ‘American Dream’. Now with AI, Americans exist within a macro architecture which welcomes fact being superseded by fantasy more and more. Our favoured IP features singing toilets and Brainrot ballerinas. Human influencers are becoming ever more passé (see Double Speed) and the President loves an AI-generated video as much as the next sloptimist.

so what? (feelings are facts)

As an angsty 17 year old ballerina I scrawled the title of Yvonne Rainers’ memoir on my hand and never quite scrubbed it off (metaphorically ofc):Feelings Are Facts: A Life it was called, and feelings are facts is fast becoming a key tenant of our lives as technology remoulds truth.

The implications are of course far reaching. When it comes to business whether someone could ship product used to be what warranted an investment. Now many of the most valuable companies hinge on the stories around their products and what these make consumers feel. When it comes to politics, candidates are leaning less towards firing shots at their opponents’ social welfare stats, and instead attempt to dehumanise them. And when it comes to technology DeepMind’s $75 million investment into a24 is a clear indicator that it’s not just the power of compute that matters but the narratives it supports.

Reflecting on what this means for the United States Of America, I think an acceptance of fantasy can be fundamentally positive. Sites where people can elicit dopamine without ingesting nicotine, or spending cash, can only be net positives. And as Japan demonstrates via the links between its culture of animism, and its robotics progress, alternate approaches to facts-based realities can fuel innovation. Yet, ensuring we construct the right fantasies requires vigilance around which stories spread and why. We currently exist in an internet ecosystem where shock, rage and humour are what lead content to spread. As we shift to a society driven by stories, those responsible for the algorithms that determine distribution may need to operate within social guardrails, reevaluating what gets pushed. And why.