A short systems note on dopamine, incentives, and closed loops that eat themselves.

Sometimes the fastest way to understand a system is to ask something outside it.

I recently sanity-checked a thought experiment with an external system—less for answers than for resistance.

What came back wasn’t reassurance. It was alignment.

Which is always the more unsettling result.

I’ve been wondering whether there’s a structural parallel between human behavior under modern capitalism and a well-known ant control mechanism: the sugar-and-borax bait loop.

The setup is simple.

Ants are drawn to sweetness.

Borax is a slow-acting poison.

Combined, they create a feedback loop the colony cannot escape.

The ants gorge on the sugar, mark the trail, recruit others, and carry the bait home to feed the queen—unknowingly poisoning the entire system.

No malice. No awareness. Just incentives doing their job.

What makes the ant trap so effective isn’t force. It’s alignment.

The bait doesn’t fight the ants. It rewards them.

One ant finds something sweet and marks the trail. Others follow. Each pass reinforces the signal. The loop accelerates itself until collapse.

From the inside, everything feels correct.

This is what closed feedback loops look like when they work too well.

Human systems behave similarly—just with more narrative and better branding.

Dopamine rewards consumption, attention, novelty, and status. Platforms optimize for engagement. Markets optimize for growth. Individuals optimize for short-term relief.

The loop looks like this:

Buy more. Scroll more. Want more. Repeat.

Rarely pause. Never zoom out. Trust the system because it feels rewarding.

The incentives are different. The structure is not.

There’s something almost beautiful about the ant version.

One ant finds the bait. Marks the path. Returns with a gift for the queen.

The colony celebrates efficiency right up until it dies.

No villain required. Just a system that mistakes reward for survival.

This isn’t about calling people stupid. Ants aren’t stupid.

They’re optimized. That’s the point.

Systems designed around narrow incentives will faithfully pursue those incentives—even when the long-term outcome is catastrophic.

Especially when the feedback feels good.

Closed loops are dangerous when they lack brakes.

Reward systems without reflection tend to accelerate until they fail.

And intelligence, individual or collective, does not guarantee immunity—sometimes it just makes the loop run faster.

From the inside, it always feels like progress.

If you want to design better systems—or escape the ones quietly hollowing you out—you have to learn to recognize when reward, momentum, and imitation have replaced judgment.

Ants can’t step outside the system.

Humans occasionally can.

That difference matters.

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