Experts had labelled doomscrolling the most dangerous addiction of the century, and RB-67 was the solution. Smiling actors in lab coats announced the miracle cure in a series of ads on Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube shorts. Henry Siddik, every inch the proud scientist, went on a media tour to share his psychotropic medicine with the world. Of course, nobody really understands how psychiatric drugs (or any drugs) affect the human brain, Henry Siddik included. He was just in charge of the studies that proved when you dose people with RB-67, they stopped doomscrolling and rated themselves as “less depressed” on a 1 to 5 scale. Mostly.

There were a few minor side effects (headaches, nausea, reduced sex drive, a slightly vacant expression, etc.), but these could be dismissed with an extensive warning label written in tiny font that nobody bothered to read. People didn’t really read anymore, anyways. They went to work, and then they went home and watched television and scrolled on their phones. Henry Siddik had conducted extensive interviews with the testing population, and the results were conclusive: people wanted to stop doomscrolling, but they couldn’t. Henry called the phenomenon “mental exhaustion resulting from continual dopamine depletion”, which was psychobabble for “nobody wants to do anything hard when being on your phone is so easy”. 

“The problem,” Henry confided to his dog, Ford, “is that they don’t want to do anything when they’re on RB-67, either.” Ford looked knowingly at Henry. He understood the problem as well as any dog that has listened to a complicated lecture many, many times.

In short, the problem was this: the AI boom of the early 21st century was supposed to increase productivity. It had not. It could increase the appearance of productivity, but there was no critical thinking or human emotion behind the jargon-filled slop that dominated corporate memos and newspapers and movie scripts and books. People started to complain — especially about the movies (and the visual entertainment industry is very important for crowd control). They wanted meaningful content, but they didn’t want to do the work to create it.

Economics majors everywhere were in a panic about productivity. Polls showed that over 60% of employees admitted to doomscrolling during working hours. Less than 30% of American citizens found their work “personally meaningful”. More than 70% of anonymous survey participants said that if they did not find a task meaningful, they were “very likely” to use AI to complete it. 

“People just don’t care about their jobs anymore,” Henry Siddik complained. “And then they’re so exhausted from their jobs that they don’t want to do anything when they get home. 

“Woof,” Ford replied, which meant: “Your society was built on exploitation. Your system of production offers special privileges to a lazy class that profits from the labor of the working class. People are sick because they have finally realized that the dream they’ve been sold is a lie, and they can’t work hard enough to become a member of the lazy class. So long as you continue to value profit over people, you will never reimagine a world in which people are paid a living wage in order to perform labor that brings them joy.” Ford, despite his name, was an anti-capitalist.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Ford,” Henry groaned, putting his head in his hands. “They want RB-67 to be the miracle cure for burn out, but walloping people over the head with a massive amount of dopamine doesn’t make them actually care about stuff they don’t care about. It just makes them look like they care.”

When Henry Siddik said “They”, he meant the United States Government and all the corporations that paid politicians to do what they wanted. RB-67 was the first major drug funded by the innovative Federal Amazon Insurance Commission (FAIC), a collaboration between the United States Government and Amazon Pharmaceuticals.  Amazon Pharmaceuticals paid for the research, and the U.S. Government subsidized the prescription of RB-67 to all qualified workers.

The algorithm to determine qualified workers calculated a productivity score for Government employees and the employees of any corporation with enough money to suggest to the Government that their employees should be qualified. AI might not be very good at creating meaningful human content, but it was very good at processing data. The AI boom had given the Government Data Centers beneath the White House the capacity to process the data of every American living on the grid. The algorithm that ran the Centers could process how frequently you used specific AI programs (and for what). It could process your average daily active computer time based on keystrokes and mouse movement. It could analyze your phone usage during your scheduled work day and your performance reviews and the relevance of your Google searches. Sometimes it made sense to Henry why people preferred to doomscroll rather than think about such anxiety-inducing facts.

Of course, qualified workers didn’t have to take RB-67. But why wouldn’t they? It was a free drug with glowing reviews and Government-approved advertising, and your boss was telling you that employees who were taking RB-67 were far more likely to receive promotions and pay raises. They didn’t know that the main side effect was that you turned into a walking zombie. A happy walking zombie who didn’t doomscroll, but a walking zombie nonetheless.

Henry Siddik thought about blowing the whistle, but that would mean ruining his chance to live on a yacht in the South Pacific, and he hadn’t worked so hard to create RB-67 just to give up on his dream.

“What do you think, Ford? How long will we make it before all those econ majors realize RB-67 didn’t solve the productivity crisis?”

“Woof,” Ford replied, which meant: “I live in the here and now, not the anxiety of an unknown future. Let’s go for a walk.“